The lives of illiterate people are often one big excuse. They think up all sorts of things so that their “problem” is not noticed. That ten years of compulsory education protects against illiteracy is still a misconception in Germany. Marianne K. (32) had never read a book, she ignored instructions for use and package inserts. When she had to fill out a form at a government office, she asked the clerks to help her because she had “forgotten” her glasses. She never went on vacation alone and knew no street names other than the neighborhood where she lived. Marianne could not write much more than her name. Single letters or even very short words she could decipher and copy. In her job as a cleaning lady, this was not noticeable at first. Marianne K. is not an isolated case. More than four million people in Germany cannot read and write properly. This is estimated by the Federal Association for Literacy and Basic Education. They all went to school, but their reading and spelling problems were either ignored, not treated properly, or the people affected cleverly hid them.
What is illiteracy?
Those who have never learned to read and write, for example, because they never went to school – as many children in developing countries do – fall into the category of primary illiteracy.
Secondary illiteracy includes people who went to school and forgot how to read and write again.
Finally, functional illiteracy is the inability to use writing in everyday life in a way that is taken for granted. Functional illiterates are people like Marianne who recognize letters and who can write their name and a few words, but who either do not understand the meaning of a text at all or do not understand it effortlessly enough. For Peter Hubertus of the Bundesverband Alphabetisierung e.V., illiteracy is a relative term: “Whether a person is considered illiterate depends not only on his or her individual reading and writing skills. In addition, the degree of literacy expected within the concrete society in which that person lives must be taken into account. If the individual’s knowledge is lower than what is required and taken for granted, functional illiteracy exists.”
Accordingly, individuals in industrialized countries with high literacy requirements must also be considered functionally illiterate if they have limited literacy skills.
