HOW YOU CAN BUY ILLITERACY FOR ONLY $160,000

Suede Blushue is a very successful advertising man handling accounts which bill almost $100 million. He constantly buzzes between his clients' offices and both coasts, where he supervises commercial production, making sure the creative folks don't go off the reservation with last minute "ideas."

The reason he works so hard is fear... fear of the rapidly increasing costs of a college education. Suede is confronting a mathematical mountain: college costs of $40,000 per year, multiplied by four years, times four children, equal $640,000 -- and it's rising eight to ten percent a year.

What Suede doesn't realize is that his hard-earned money iss going to produce two kids with good literacy skills and two kids who'll graduate with three major literacy disabilities:

1. Two will be unable to analyze news stories and other forms of prose like editorial arguments. (Poetry's too difficult to be included in the equation.)
2. Two won't understand the meaning of documents like loan applications or simple tables relating to the relationship between calories and weight.
3. Two will lack the everyday math skills to deal with checkbooks, babysitter costs or 15 percent restaurant tips.

Suede might have anticipated the problem if he had read a major literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which employed the same test the National Assessment of Adult Literacy uses. The test was given to 1,827 students drawn from public and private schools who were nearing graduation.

When the government released its adult findings in December 2005, Washington claimed that only five percent of Americans were illiterate in English. But, like everything else it does, Washington tends to exaggerate the success of its educational policies and programs.

How else can we explain all those "literate" folks in Florida who could not follow simple ballot instructions in 2000? When Democrat lawyers argued that ballots ought to be counted on the basis of "intent," Justice Sandra Day O'Conner shut them down with, "My goodness, how difficult can it be to follow these simple instructions?" Apparently, very difficult for the half that graduated from college.

How else can we explain that 20 percent of the college graduates tested could not read their car's gas gauge or compute how much fuel was required to get to the gas station? The next time you get stalled behind a car which has run out of gas, shout out the window, "Yaahhh! ya dumb college kid!"

Of the two-year college graduates, about 30 percent didn't even have basic math skills. Which means they weren't even employable behind a traditional cash register. Which is why National Cash Register's products now do all the sums, take-aways and tax charges needed to get customers out of Chico's in an accurate and timely fashion.

While economists believe that the huge run-up in no-interest mortgages was caused by money-challenged home buyers, I suggest another hypothesis: Half the borrowers didn't know how to compute mortgage interest costs, so they opted to skip the whole complex thing.

Of course college costs for Suede will be much higher than the $40,000-a-year figure used by private colleges. Just wait 'til Suede puts credit cards in the hands of his college-bound kids. Kids who haven't the vaguest comprehension of the meaning of 18 percent carrying charges.

Perhaps Suede hasn't noticed that the expression "maxing out" is far more popular among the young than "paying up."

With high school and colleges failing the nation in teaching the kinds of literacy young graduates will need, perhaps it is time to revisit the home schooling concept, at least in part.

Send your kid off to high school for the book learning, but cancel all those dumb soccer matches and play dates. Get the kid back into the house after school and teach him about interest rates, balancing checkbooks, reading and analyzing editorials, and reading the gas gauge. He will need these skills and he sure isn't getting them at school.

At the high school level, you are faced with a nasty "70/70" proposition. Over 70 percent of your property taxes go to the local school system which is churning out students, 70 percent of whom are fundamentally illiterate in basic life skills.

And $160,000 in college costs is a lot to spend to produce a graduating class of 50 percent illiterates.