History of Adult Literacy Movements and Developments

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History of Adult Literacy Movements and Developments

        The mainstream American experience and American principles should become the foundations on which any case pertaining to adult literacy and education, and for any logically deducible reason that would answer an individual’s question as to why the states, ordinary citizens and the federal government should care about it. If one individual is to reflect upon his own collective experience as an American and the American principles, he could easily deduce that the adult literacy and education should have been and should become a high priority situation on the national agenda for the upcoming mysteries of the future of the United States of America (Chisman).

        One of the most simplest and easiest ways to understand the dogma pertaining to the adult literacy and education in the aforementioned terms, is to evaluate the first American literacy movement which took place on a national scale, so that we can deduce what an individual or moreover, the American government should do, to combat off illiteracy that exist amongst the American adults. As it has done in many other cases, history has provided us with clarity of appearance that no type of research or no amount of social science can even remotely offer. It has shown us the variables & constants of the solutions to the problems, as well as the aftermath of ways adapted or in many cases, not even considered (Sticht).

        The education of the African American in the former slave states after the Civil War was the first remarkable national effort which was the first attempt to fight illiteracy and terminate it. The provocation of the problem that this problem manifested has been known to be perceived imperfectly. Much of the mythology which exists amongst the American society about the education of slaves is deemed wrong, as it was not illegal to educate a slave in Southern America for most of the 1700s and as well as the 1900s. At various times, the state laws were made to prohibit the education of slaves. But this only happened when the white community of America felt threatened. But most of these laws expired or fell into disuse in various States of America. Ample evidence is available in which African American, who resided in the slave states, was getting a hold of the logic of the whites which withheld education from them. And they hated the fact that they knew. They loathed it because of the humiliation they would have to endure for the rest of their miserable lives if they do not buy their freedom, and the only two ways of doing it was to risk your life and steal enough funds or educate yourselves and then buy your freedom (Gubb).         

        The impetus for the first national literacy movement was the fact that most slaves were always denied to acquire education and knowledge. After the slave states had been brought down, there was an enormous population of African Americans who had all of a sudden acquired, nominally of course, full civic, economic and legal rights. In several states, African Americans were the majority of the total population. But the irony is, all most all these new found citizens were illiterate on every level of illiteracy there exist. The socially conscious elites residing in the north engulfed their imaginations with respect to concern for the future of these new freemen. Before the dust of war had even settled organizations were being set up by both black and white community, to name a few there was the Society of Friends, African Methodist Episcopal Church and the American Missionary Association. The movement of these organizations soon took form of a tornado which swept through every state of America. They were giving essential awareness that the common individual needed to know about the education system of his beloved country. The cause was a gigantic success and common people joined the cause overnight in large volumes. Soon after, thousands of teachers, most of them belonging to upper class families, arrived in hundreds of schools which were established back in the day (Knowles).