How can the United States solve the illiteracy problem.?

Question

Education is the key to preventing proverty, crime, and the homeless. How can we structure the United States education system so that our children donot become criminals and homeless people.

Answer 1

A great first step would be to get rid of the No Child Left Behind Act, which dumbs down education to the extent that children spend their time studying for standardized tests instead of actually being encouraged to learn and explore the world around them. We should also strongly encourage more parental involvement in the education of our children. As it is right now, the government has almost taken that element of responsibility away from American adults.

It's interesting to note that nowhere in the Constitution is it stated that it is the federal government's responsibility to provide public education (unless you stretch the "provide for the general welfare" part, which I'm not inclined to do). Leave education up to state and local governments. I think we'd see a lot better results than what we're getting on a national level.

Answer 2

1. Reading has to begin at home with parents reading to their children when they are very small.
2. If the parents can't or won't then get a neighborhood group together to try to work out a time and place and work at gathering the little ones together to be read to.
3. Teach reading through phonetics in the schools. Study the Scottish school system for this. They produce good readers fast.
4. Stop making the stories for young ones so politically correct and complicated. Let them hear the funny stories, the imaginative stories, the classic fairy tales, and stuff like that. They need to learn to read, not bother their heads with the agendas of politically correct political types.
5. Make reading a priority at the elementary school age, and with it, make writing a priority. Teach the kids to work at beautiful writing along with their reading.
6. Quit making school schedules so complicated. Young children like routine. Give them the same routine every day and allow enough time for the subjects taught.
7. Cut the "No Child Left Behind" program. All these kinds of programs do is put every child behind.

Have a nice day.

Answer 3

Stop the Democrats and teachers' unions from preventing the installation of an actual education system. Teachers should be highly paid, but only in exchange for strict requirements and excellent training. We let just about any fool "teach" our children. We should only allow the best to teach our children, and they should be paid handsomely for doing so. When a subpar teacher is discovered, they should be removed.

Unfortunately, the Democrats and teachers' unions refuse to accept any sort of accountability for the quality of teachers. It's sad, and our children are paying the price. This is why, by the way, private schools do so well. They are not under the thumb of the teachers' unions.

Answer 4

When I was 3-6 years old, my parents read to me religiously..I had a library card at the age of 5 as a birthday gift and I went to bed with no less than 25 books...I slept on them daily for years..I almost didn't know what it was like to have a bed without books on them..they were small 15-50 page books..but I read them like they were candy and by the time I was 6-7 I was reading the whole stack prior to sleeping..so then I got to bigger books and smaller stacks until I finally could understand scriptures..I figured the Bible was more than enough...I was 8 by the time that I read the OT and NT completely..


OverDoZ_21.. DON'T YOU CUT A FRICKIN RED CENT FROM THE MILITARY THAT SAVES YOUR BUTT......your military barely gets paid enough to make ends meet..a sargaent with 5 years in the military DOESN'T EVEN make 30,000 dollars...maybe that flies in the midwest...but in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Miami..those sargaents are SUFFERING..they get checks of roughly 1243 per paycheck and 200 dollars of each paycheck are gas...that doesn't count any other expenses..

Answer 5

i am a firm believer in education, but until we have every american to the point that they can afford to take the time for an education, we will have an illiteracy problem. i work in a long term care facility, and 8 out of 10 residents at the home cannot read or write good enough to sign their name or read the events calendar. their explanation is "i had to quit school to help mama after daddy died" or "we had to work the farm if we were gonna' eat". it's the same thing today--different circumstances--"i don't have time to go to school, i've got to make a living so that i can afford the health insurance that my family needs" or "my kids are hungry today--i don't have 2-6 years to take for an education".

Answer 6

The easiest way is to get the government out of the schools. Do we really need so many administrators in the public schools while the private schools usually out perform the public with less resources. It is not only the educational system, the parents have to be involved also. One way to help this is to limit children's tv time and gaming time.

Answer 7

The teaching of reading is in the throes of two competing educational theories. They are "whole language" which seeks to teach children to read by sight-word recognition with early love of literature via parent or practice reading, and phonics, which seeks to teach children the rules of spelling that can be used to decode words via "sounding out". Neither approach works for every child. In addition, some children have learning quirks, such as dyslexia or phonetic discrimination disorder, that make both methods ineffective.

In addition, many schools are shifting responsibility for teaching reading to the parents as a 'parental responsibility' issue.

Until education "experts" and school boards recognize that many approaches are needed to teach ALL children to read, we will have people who never learned to read, with their ensuing drop-out result. Once a child has dropped out of school, they leave the statistical tracking that would bring attention to the problem.

There are programs to teach adults to read, and to bring the reading skills of children who are having trouble forward. The Scottish Rites Masons have a good program, but it, like others, is an intensive one-on-one approach, and therefore expensive to implement. Government adult literacy programs tend to suffer from the same 'experts' that the schools follow, with the same mixed results.

It is difficult to apply a scientific approach to education - to test for results. Most education theory is based on "studies" with their flaw of interpreted findings, and short term performance measuring. This is the root of the problem. Because there are no true short term performance measures, there can be no improvement.

Answer 8

When I first started coming to this site I was really surprised that we have so many people without the skills to ask a simple question. I'm not a good speller myself but I do at least click on the "check spelling" tab. I think too many people are too lazy to even try to use the English language properly.

Answer 9

By forcing all parents to take an interest in the child's education? You know that isn't possible. We need parental involvement in education to reduce the problem but how do we get parents involved? I don't know. The pressure can't come from the government. It must come from the society.

Answer 10

Start with the parents. If they are reading, the kids will see that the parents think that is important.

Read a book to your young kids before bedtime.

Give them a library card.

COnsider booksa as presents rather than toys.