[Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Literacy at Harvard 35 Years Ago

[David Olson]

Dear Tom and all:

A lovely retrospect!  What you should have also mentioned was that the
project leading to the book "Towards a literate society" initiated, so far
as I know, the practice, by academics, of endorsing the adopting of
unachieveable political goals.  That book set out the attempt by the
Academy to take seriously the political mandate of the Right to Read
program of "ensuring that every person arriving at adulthood will be able
to read and understand the whole spectgrum of printed materials that one
is likely to encounter in daily life" within an limited time frame, as I
recall 2000.  Since then every initiative, including the notorious No
Child Left Behind, has adopted completely unrealistic goals as official
policy and then punish educators for failure to achieve them.  Academics
should just have learned to say "No" rather than be coopted by the offer
of additional research funds.  As I wrote in my review of that book for
the National Academy of Education, in 1975: 

	"Political campaigns can attract sufficient support and funding to pursue
any reasonable social goal only by making promises to do the
impossible.... [The Academy was] in a bind: Take the money and offer the
impossible, or tell the truth [that the goal was unachievable] and not get
the money.  They may just as well have told the truth since they didn't
get the money anyway!" (Olson, 1975, Review of "Toward a literate
society". Proceedings  of the National Academy of Education, 2, 109-178.

Meanwhile, keep up the good work.

Best regards,

David Olson


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