They decided for their purposes to describe as illiterate anybody who could not, at the time of their investigation, read as well as an average child of 7 in the year 1938. It is to be noted that the committee were dealing with only one aspect of illiteracy and that the results of their investigations are expressed in statistical terms. Their findings are reported in an appendix to this pamphlet. Two years ago a small committee of experts set out, at my request, to discover how far children's ability to read had been affected by the war. IS ILLITERACY increasing in this country? The question in this general form is not easy to answer because illiteracy is not an exact term and reading ability has not in past years been measured by any standard scale. © Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.
London: His Majesty's Stationery Office 1950 The text of Reading Ability was prepared by Derek Gillard and uploaded on 2 April 2022. VI Remedial measures with older pupils (21)Īppendix An investigation into post-war reading ability (31) I The problem of illiteracy and its setting (page 7) You can scroll through it or use the following links to go to the various sections. The complete document is shown in this single web page. This pamphlet was a response to concerns that reading standards had fallen as a result of the second world war.
