Here’s another example of what I mean. At the press conference introducing the Rep. Thomas Sawyer’s new literacy bill, the head of a reading program described illiterate persons. She said that many have poor health; cannot buy generic products at the grocery store; have transportation, family and child care problems; move frequently; and – I have quote directly here – “their phones get disconnected.”

Have you ever had a utility cut off? How many places have you ever had problems with your child care? How’s your health?

At that same event, Harold W. McGraw, Jr., president of the Business Council for Effective Literacy, said, in a now standard characterization, “Often illiteracy is the root cause” of such problems as homelessness and crime.

Indeed, people with poor educations are over proportionately represented in housing shelters and prisons; so are member of minority groups. Would you say that your ability to read is a “root cause” of your behaviour and your property wealth? More or less so than your skin colour?

Mr. McGraw was followed by Rep. David Price, who stated that illiterates are “a brake on our economic development” and “incapable.” He said “Their nonproductiveness ripples through our whole economy.”

That statement begs a lot of questions. Have you ever been unemployed? Underemployed? Has your daddy ever gotten you a job? Have you ever been promoted because you had a credential? Have you ever had training or education paid for by your employer? What factors affect your productivity?

We have to stop talking about illiterate people as if they are different from us. Many people who have difficulty reading have other difficulties that are attributable to their reading ability – and their reading ability is a function that can be improved given funds and opportunity. That’s all – except they also may or may not have difficulties attributable to the changing job market, racism, sexism, the cost of housing, child rearing, credentials, connections and genetics. They deal with their difficulties using the same strategies that we use to deal with our particular difficulties. They are, as a lot, neither more ingenious nor stupid than we are. They deserve empathy, not sympathy or spite.

Sometimes it seems we paint a picture of heroic pathos around illiteracy because it’s a more dramatic way to solicit volunteers and funding. I think also that such a flexible stereotype as timid/lazy/clever/bumbling/victimized lets us conveniently pigeonhole the illiterate person as it suits our need.

But I think we would do better if we left off the stereotypes. People like helping their own. When an illiterate person comes to be seen as “one of us,” our personal and our public response is likely to be more logical and longer-term.