English as she should be taught

Abstract

Recently the BBC launched a campaign to help the two million adults in this country who are unable to read. Everyone of good will wishes the BBC great success, but one must wonder how so many people who, we are told, are of normal intelligence came to fail so lamentably in a basic skill like simple reading. The excuses are legend — large classes, sickness, absence from school for one reason or another; but the stark fact remains that two million of our fellow citizens cannot read at all. How many more are inadequate readers is, perhaps fortunately, not known; but if the performance of people observed in trains, buses and public libraries is anything to judge by, the total could be in excess of eighty per cent of the adult population. The slow, inefficient, laborious way in which ordinary men and women spell their way through the popular newspapers has to be seen to be believed. Most take at least five or six times as long to read the simple prose of our newspapers as a skilled reader, and probably retain much less.