Robert Wedgeworth: A new and growing area of research has to do with the behaviors of consumers with low literacy skills. Since our consuming public has substantially driven our economy in recent years, this is of great significance. For example, some of this research shows that adults with low literacy skills, even those with small children in the home, tend not to buy as many fruits and vegetables as they should, for simple reasons: It's very difficult to make the abstract connection between these strange looking objects and the names that are listed above them, and then calculate how much it will cost to buy a half pound or a pound of this or that vegetable or this or that fruit.

What happens is that consumers with low literacy skills are not driven in their shopping behavior by what they want, they're driven by being able to avoid any embarrassment at the checkout counter. And therefore, they tend to buy apples if the apples are bagged and priced, and they can afford it. They will buy tomatoes if the tomatoes are packaged and priced so they know exactly what they're getting and whether they can afford it. They'll buy head lettuce, but not loose lettuce or romaine or other types of lettuce, because the head lettuce is packaged and it has a price right on it.

So, these are very significant pieces of information for -- and that's just in the grocery store. Think about the kinds of calculations that they have to make when they're shopping for clothes or shoes or for household products. How do you make efficient consumers from them, and how do you make them use their dollars effectively? This is a benefit to both the consumer and to the industry.

David Boulton: Obviously, yes, it would have to be.

Robert Wedgeworth: It's not just about their inability to calculate or understand many of the aspects of a transaction that goes on with a consumer, but it's because they overlay all of it with a risk aversion strategy that's to avoid being embarrassed. (More "shame stories")

David Boulton: Yes. Powerful.

Robert Wedgeworth: So that the most important thing is not that you get what you need when you get though that checkout counter. The most important thing is that you avoid being embarrassed by having more than you can afford to buy or appearing not to know what you're doing..  

David Boulton: Yes. I went through school trying to avoid being in the front of the class. I understand the shame avoidance, the attempt to be invisible...

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton: So as to not trigger this shame which we're so afraid of.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes. And, we tend to focus on the adults' lack of skills in calculating unit prices and things like that. But the most important thing is that they're avoiding embarrassment.

David Boulton: Totally. That's why the ground of the reading challenges, for us, is the relationship between this unnatural ambiguity overwhelm at the cognitive processing level, and this almost preconscious, affective response, which can quickly snowball into shame aversion.

Robert Wedgeworth: Right.

David Boulton: That's at the core.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yeah. Basically what I'm feeding back to you is reinforcement of the theory that you have been discussing based on our on-the-ground experience with adults who are reflecting those same behaviors.

David Boulton: That’s excellent. Related to this, I noticed in the larger report that you put out last March, a section on how many people are hiding their reading difficulties, and not even talking to their spouse or kids...

Robert Wedgeworth: They blame themselves. It's the cause of so much shame in their lives. They have elaborate strategies for hiding this from family members, from coworkers and others. You'd be amazed at how clever these adult learners are in disguising their problems with reading. Yet we try to get them to understand and shed their shame and realize that they can learn as well as other people as long as we address the specific problems that they have in learning how to read.

David Boulton: That's a total alignment with how our theory plays out with respect to the relationship between affect, shame avoidance, and this unnatural processing.

David Boulton: Let me take a couple minutes and step back up to give a bit more of a frame of reference for what we're doing, and then we can see further where we might dialogue. I want to start by saying I totally agree with you, if we don't help the adults -- I mean, helping the adults that are in trouble here can provide us both a lens into a better understanding of the problem, the social economic implications, and perhaps most importantly, helping them provides high leverage, as I think I heard you say towards creating the environment that children need to have in order to have any chance of success at this...

Robert Wedgeworth: Right.  And unlike the children, any investment that we make in the adult has almost immediate payback, rather than waiting ten, fifteen years to see how the child develops.

David Boulton: Right. And while I have total respect for that, it is tactical for me -- my heart is with stewarding the health of the children's learning.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes, right. I understand. Agreed. But I'm just saying, for people who are looking at the practical side...

David Boulton: Right. Where's the return on investment (ROI)?

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton: The ROI is quicker to perceive on the adult side.

Robert Wedgeworth: Immediately, immediately.

David Boulton: Yes. We're tracking. Good.

Robert Wedgeworth: We see that most conclusively in our international programs, where people make even modest gains in their ability to read, and that translates into being able to get a job, being able to help and guide their children, and being able to be more active in their communities.

Robert Wedgeworth: Exactly.

David Boulton: So learning this code involves this incredibly ambiguous confusing relationship.  Yes, once you have twenty years of experience using the code and a doctorate in pattern recognition or computer science you could argue: "Oh, it all makes sense." But that's a heck of a thing to say about what the experience of this is to the children and adults that are struggling with it. To them it's incredibly confusing.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton:  We are wanting to say that our children’s lives are at great risk because at this young, tender, immature emotional, still developing age, they're trying to interface with an archaic invention that we haven't  paid enough attention to in terms of the ecology of its processing, in terms of how learnable it is for our children. It's at that level that their lives are being almost fated, more significantly than anything else they're at risk for. Even if you cut all the numbers in half, this is costing more than the war in Iraq and the war on crime and the war on drugs and everything combined.

Robert Wedgeworth: So where do you take that?

David Boulton: Well, first of all, it is a technology, so let's get technological. Let's understand it as a technology. Let's understand the humans' natural organic learning process as it's trying to grow into and through this radically unnaturally ambiguous technological process. Let's start there together. And we've got to bring in the emotions as far as the affect of interest, because without sufficient interest and relevancy there's insufficient emotional-attention energy to go through this incredible challenge. We've got to reframe the context that it's happening to reduce the propensity to go to shame. There's two things here. There's the unnatural ambiguity overwhelm, and then there's their response to the shame feeling for being confused. Those two things, as far as we can see, are at the very center of how this problem is perpetuating.

Robert Wedgeworth: Okay.

David Boulton: All right. So relative to the confusion, as you know, people learn to name things relatively easy -- this is a shoe, this is a dog, this is a cat, this is Mom, this is Dad. They have an image, they can name it. Most can easily name the letters. But between learning letter sounds and being able to read is an ocean of confusion.

So we are interested in two things. First of all, telling the story of this code. We are the children of the code. I mean, it's the most significant technological invention in the history of humankind. It's had more effect on the social, economic, scientific, political and mental  infrastructure than any other technology ever.

Robert Wedgeworth: So is the ultimate objective of what you're trying to accomplish simply understanding? And I don't -- when I say, "simply," I don't mean that it is simple.

David Boulton: I understand. Thank you.

Robert Wedgeworth: I'm just focusing on the ultimate purpose.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton: To our responsibility to the next generation. Yet, as we were mentioning a few moments ago, our social tendency is to focus on the children, ‘the fresh batch’, and try to correct for the problem with kids rather than help the people that didn't get it, and that are going on from there.

Robert Wedgeworth: Well, we've traditionally been an adult literacy agency. There are many organizations around the world, including the public schools and private schools that focus their efforts on teaching children to read. There are not very many who focus on teaching adults to read. Yet we know from our experience that many children go through the school system and never quite get it. We forget from time to time that reading is a difficult skill to acquire, but it's even more difficult to maintain and improve.

David Boulton: One of the things that we're doing is looking at the top reasons or challenges that impede or make it difficult for people to learn to read. Clearly, the kind of home language environment they grow up in is a major, if not the biggest, factor. When you talk about helping children, ultimately, if you run through all of the list of things that made it difficult for them or add to the burden of the implicit challenge of learning to read the code, it's the environment they're coming out of and whether the environment has sufficiently rich oral language, and whether or not the people in it are reading sufficiently to have the vocabulary that comes with reading, and to expose children to reading behaviors. So, your work with adults is a direct line to helping the children, too.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes. We frequently are asked why do we focus on adults. We think adults are the key to literacy as a whole, not only as a whole, not only for themselves but for children as well. Children learn much of what they know from the adults in their lives. Clearly, learning how to read comprised of two basic parts. First you have to learn how to decode. In many cases, children have difficulty with that first step of trying to put together unique sounds with the combination of letters that make those sounds on the printed page. Many adults find when they are having trouble with their reading that this was a step that they didn't quite master when they were children. They just can't quite grasp the relationship between o-u, or t-h, and the sound that they're supposed to make when they read that on the page.

But that's only half of it. We know that good readers only become good readers by constant practice. So, it's not enough just to teach someone to decode, because many of our adult learners learn how to read at one time or another, but either were not encouraged to read or didn't pick up the reading habit, and therefore they never continued to improve building their vocabulary.

We know from extensive testing some of the research on children that shows us today that a child of even average ability, if they learn how to read, and they continue to develop this practice, enlarging the vocabulary that helps them understand and explain the world around them, can function almost as well as children with superior intellectual abilities. So it is really a key.

But above and beyond that, we also know that children who come from homes where the parents have low literacy skills have about a fifty-percent chance of being low literate adults themselves. So certainly that environment at home -- it's not necessarily the parents, it could be whoever is the principal caregiver, aunts, uncles, grandparents, who contribute to the learning of that child.

That's the reason we see that focusing on adults gives you multiple beneficiaries. Our adults in our program are very good at encouraging their children to learn how to read and to stay in school. They stay in school far longer than the children of adult learners who are not enrolled in some kind of adult education program. So, our focus on adults has multiple beneficiaries, and we think it's the key to any total literacy program. There is no literacy program we're aware of that can have the kind of success that we would like without a parental component to it, or an adult component to it.

Our current program in the U.S. says "Leave no child behind."  We would say, "Leave no adult behind, and that will help us leave no child behind."

David Boulton: Let's leave no one behind.

Robert Wedgeworth: So, in effect, we're leaving no one behind. There's a common tendency for societies to write off a current generation with respect to a given problem and focus their attention on the next generation. Unfortunately, we have adults who have low literacy skills in virtually every generation, for various reasons. Partly because of learning disabilities, partly because of not learning how to decode, partly because they never gained the reading habit, didn't have to use it as much as they might have in other kinds of occupations. So, we know that in every generation people fall out. Our effort is to try to see that we don't leave anyone behind.

I think the most important point that we would make is that adult learners don't come to us just with difficulties in reading and writing. Our learners represent some of the poorest people in our society. They have multiple issues in their lives. Many of them have long term illnesses that have prevented them from holding even the most menial job, if it involves physical labor. Many of them have other kinds of problems, they are ex-offenders or they've had problems with substance abuse. These are issues that they bring with them to their adult learning. And here again, as in our international program, they're using our literacy programs to help them change the circumstances of our life.

The reason that I mention this is because everyone's heartstrings are tugged by a child learning how to read. And in many cases, their hearts are hardened by the circumstances of the lives of adult learners. But they don't understand that every adult learner has a relationship with a child. It may not be their own child, it may be a niece or a nephew. To the extent that they can contribute to encouraging that child to stay in school, to learn to read and write, that they can contribute that from their own learning, then we're well ahead of the game. Even the child of the worst offender deserves to learn how to read and write and make their own way in our society.

David Boulton: Yes, and I think that cuts both ways, in that not only do we want it to be a positive example, we explicitly and intentionally don't want low literate adults to be negative examples, where children are latching onto -- use it as mechanism for defining themselves and avoiding the shame -- "Well, reading is not that important,” "I'm stupid" -- they're finding reference examples in the world to identify with so that they can avoid the shame.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton: So it works both ways.

Robert Wedgeworth: Well, I used to make visits to high school classes, years ago. This was in the very early days of television and the students were telling me, "Well, reading will not be as important in the future as it is now." And I would say, "But name me a television program that doesn't begin with a script."

I've also had a close relationship with children's librarians all over the world. I've found them fascinating. I love children's books. The work that they do is so important because apart from what children learn in school, it's that additional reading and exploring of the world that becomes so important to them as they grow up.

Robert Wedgeworth: One of the things that we know is that too many parents are willing to park their children in front of the TV. They said, "Well, there are lots of things on television that are educational." And that is true, but what they don't know is that the average prime time television program has a vocabulary content less than that of the average children's book. That's where the difference is. It's that growth of vocabulary that improves their ability to understand what goes on around them. If they're exposed to media that doesn't improve their vocabulary, then they're staying in the same spot.

David Boulton: Excellent. Yes, there's a lot of corroboration on that point, and you said it very well.

Robert Wedgeworth: I once asked the director of one of the major TV networks what was the objective for his children's programming, and he told me, "To entertain and not be harmful." Later he asked me about the question and I said, "Well, I couldn't imagine asking Charles Scribner, Jr. what was the objective of his children's book division and getting an answer like that."

David Boulton: Yes. The implicit goal of that response would be to sell advertisers.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton: Because that's where everything in television comes from.

Robert Wedgeworth: Exactly.

David Boulton: Do as little harm as we can while making money.

Robert Wedgeworth: Exactly, exactly.

David Boulton: Yes, it's pretty tragic.

Robert Wedgeworth: Let me walk you through one more thing.

We consider it normal in American life for families to pick up and move from time to time because parents change their occupations. But we don't consider what impact that has on the lives of children. If you recall the movie, Stanley & Iris, with Robert DeNiro and Jane Fonda, it's the story of a mechanic who has low literacy skills, and Jane Fonda's character takes on the task of teaching him how to read. She asks, "What happened to you?" He said, "Well, my dad was a traveling salesman, and I never stayed in school more than a few months at a time."

I recently went to visit the office of a member of Congress with a young man from Long Island. He said that his family moved seventeen times within the same community during the time that he was in school, and he finally dropped out of school at the tenth grade. So school mobility has more of a debilitating effect on children than we've been previously aware of. We need to make parents aware of it. We do understand the need to change locations, but we also need for them to be well aware of the impact on children and the extra measures that will need to be taken to insure that they continue to read and write and learn on grade level. Apart from the psychological impact on the child, having to leave friends and teachers who know them to move into change circumstances, they just lose a lot in those changes.

Mobility is another factor that we use in supporting our contention that the statistics are likely to get worse before they get better.

David Boulton: Yes and you're seeing all of these different roads leading to the center of this problem showing that in many respects, the pressures, the social components that have led to literacy problems in the past are getting worse.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

Robert Wedgeworth: Immigration is not the problem. It's just that we give promise of a better life to immigrants who move to the U.S., and we don't live up to that promise. Immigrants have contributed enormously to the growth and development of the U.S. We are a nation of immigrants. But we need to do a better job of insuring that immigrants can make the kind of contribution they're capable of making to our society.

David Boulton: Excellent, yes. Immigrants could have literacy training as a first step.

Robert Wedgeworth: They come frequently with good literacy skills in their native language, but having to adjust to dealing with the English language can be very difficult. English language itself is quite difficult. For example, if you take a language like Russian or Italian, there are only about thirty or so unique sounds that you can make with all the letters in their alphabet. In English, there are many more, over 100 unique sounds that you have to learn. This makes learning that language very difficult, especially for persons who are learning it as a second language. That's one of the fastest growing areas.

Robert Wedgeworth: No, it's more than that. The number of unique sounds that can be made in English compared to languages like Italian and Russian that have very low numbers of unique sounds related to their alphabet -- it's more than double for English.

David Boulton: Okay. I'd like to follow up on your source for that, because that's particularly interesting to me.

Robert Wedgeworth: Okay.

David Boulton: In fact, one of the things that's always interested me is: How is it that a particular language has evolved to have more distinct sounds? And how it's got to be this melting pot of differentiation of oral language systems. That's a different question, I realize. But that's particularly interesting, the lack of phonetic correspondence, the ambiguity between letters and sounds, and how many different sounds people have to juggle, and so forth.

Robert Wedgeworth: The major challenge that adult literacy programs have had traditionally is, first of all, identifying those persons who can benefit from our services. Since adult learners go to such a great extent to hide their embarrassment about having low literacy skills, it is really difficult to reach them. This is one of the areas in which we are having to put more funds into research, put more funds into determining what kinds of messages we can get out to society that can release the kinds of embarrassment that our people show.

Because when they get to our program, that's easy, because adults, no matter how poor their literacy skills are, have a story. Every adult has a story. We always encourage them to tell us their story, to get them to relax and understand they're in a place where they can be helped. The challenge, as I said before, though, is how to identify them and encourage them to come to us in the first place.  I must admit that we haven't really found an effective way to deal with this, but we're working on it.

David Boulton: It's one of our intentions as well. I think we've got to reframe the general society's perception of this reading challenge in order to detox the shame.

Like we were talking about in your experience with the adults and the research that you're tracking, that the adult goes into the store, and they're looking to avoid the things that feel confusing and that bring up the shame that they have about literacy, and so they're kind of navigating around the things that are causing them to feel embarrassed or ashamed.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton: That's happening at an unconsciously high frequency processing level.

Robert Wedgeworth: Yes.

David Boulton: So that when we talk about learning disabilities – like in the conversation with James Wendorf at the National Center for Learning Disabilities -- it seems to me that we are creating an environment in which people are experiencing confusion, a kind of confusion that their natural biological organism has never dealt with before, and that they are developing a feeling about that confusion they don't want to have. So they're becoming averse to the feel of confusion, which just decapitates learning.

Robert Wedgeworth: Well, we've dealt with major kinds of difficulties in our society before, where people could accept that it's not shameful to have a certain disease; it's not shameful to have a certain disability. Somehow we have to get this across as it relates to literacy as well.

David Boulton: Excellent. 

Robert Wedgeworth: Well, I hope it will be helpful. I mean, we have an on-the-ground perspective that's separate and distinct from the scholarly and research perspective that you get from many people because we see these people on a regular basis.

David Boulton: That's why we're here and why we're talking. That's why we wanted to talk with you. That's why we want to talk with the adults themselves, with the kids themselves, the teachers themselves, the parents  -- we want all the different dimensions to be revealed, because the thing that's common in all these dimensions is artificial confusion and shame.

Thank you for talking the time to speak with us and for all your work to help people.

Robert Wedgeworth: Well, the only thing that I do is act as an advocate for the people in our network, because the real work is done by the volunteers. Our programs are mostly staffed by volunteers, the tutors. They are the ones who deserve most of the credit. Thank you for having me.