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Part of this is caused by changing patterns of education. Today the stress on literature and the native language has lessened when compared to the rod and no-supper attitude of the nineteenth century.
Strangely enough, it is the military which often pioneers the increase of literacy in a culture. In World War I, the US Army is said to have found that 70 percent of their recruits could not read or write. Some of their efforts to remedy this survive today in the title of an intelligence test composed mainly of symbols which was called the “Army Alpha.” The Egyptian Army, more recently, found their soldiers could not read nor write and became the spearhead of a campaign for Egyptian literacy. This is a technical age. Weapons and equipment are very technical and to keep them operating, soldiers must be able to read manuals. So an army is not interested so much in the quality of being able to read and write; it is interested in the quantity who can.
One need not stress contemporary school statistics – the protests of irate parents, the lowering of entrance and graduation standards, the decline of value of an education – as these are the continuing subject of headlines. A brave effort was made to increase the numbers of students and wipe out race and class distinctions, but unfortunately this was not paralleled by efforts to improve the quality of literacy.
The primary stumbling block to all these efforts – advertising, the military, general education and others – can actually be summed up as the misunderstood word.
Thousands of hours of research and hundreds of thousands of cases indicate this conclusion. And more than adequate evidence exists today that the developed techniques in Word Clearing handle it fully when properly known and applied.
When one speaks or writes, one has the responsibility of being understood.
On a narrow plane, there are ways to make certain one is understood.
On a broad plane, one also has the responsibility to see that tomorrow’s public understands much better.
The originator of a message, it can be supposed, has some desire for his communication to be understood by those who see, read or hear it. Otherwise it ordinarily would be pointless to speak or write at all.
A century ago this was given more attention than it seems to be given today. Then there were subjects like “diction” and “elocution” which were considered part of the usual school program. Twenty-two hundred years ago, in Greece, these, with allied subjects, dominated the educational programs. Indeed, a person’s reputation was largely evaluated on the basis of his ability to handle words. So it might seem that, regardless of developments, scientific marvels and expenditures, mankind today is paying less attention to the clarity of his originations. Yet those originations are pouring out in floods never before equaled in history.
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