My grandad was born in 1889 and taught himself to read and write. He grew up in a 'holler' in the hills of Tennessee and his family went to town a couple times a year. Grandad said that a traveling preacher taught him his letters and gave him a bible so he would have something to work the words out in. The preacher stayed for one week before moving on. Grandad learned to read using that bible then taught his whole family to read and write including his parents. He got his teaching degree when he was 14 and was a teacher his entire life teaching Sunday school well into his 90's.
Grandad once told me that illiteracy isn't just people who have never been taught to read. Its also people who can't read well enough to learn from what they are reading, or write well enough to write down an idea without transposing information from another source or know enough about sentence structure to hold a intelligent conversation. Without those things a person will never be able function well in society.
How to spell words back when grandad was growing up was optional, everyone spelled phonetically and worked it out as they went along. In the US each state had their own way of spelling and their own spelling books as late as the 1960's so i tend to agree with him, correct spelling is optional. People tend to point out all my miss spelling to me all the time, and i learned to spell those words that way in school.
One of my pet peeves is the extremely bad sentence structure used by the younger generations now days. I attended a hour long play recently and there were less than 6 sentences spoken in the entire hour and no one had used a noun at all. Never did figure out what the play was about. Its like the whole word is talking in sound bites and i am missing the commentator and the print scrolling at the bottom of the screen.
