The Crisis of Literacy and the Courage to Teach

I once heard a private school headmaster observe that urgent things are not necessarily important, important things are not necessarily urgent, and success depends on understanding the difference. Changes in rates of literacy hardly appear urgent. They do not attract the attention of, say, terrorist attacks and natural disasters. After all, literacy is a complex thing, difficult enough to define and measure in individuals, let alone as it changes over time in large populations. The rate of literacy, a contentious aggregate abstraction, is therefore about as likely to appear to be an urgent matter as deferred maintenance on a levee or slowly rising waters. Metaphors are not arguments, but both of these apply in this case. All three are the kinds of things that may not appear urgent, but most would agree they are important. For by the time they