Put down toys, pick up books

In the last year, nearly 20 percent of the students at South Carolina's Criminal Justice Academy could not read at a 10th-grade level.

These are people who aspire to be police officers and dispatchers -- you know, the ones who are supposed to keep everyone else safe. They are people who must be able to interpret the law and fill out a report correctly, or else some thug might get out of jail on a technicality.

And the academy's director told Post and Courier reporter Glenn Smith that many of them are "functionally illiterate."

Illiteracy is a big problem across the state and the Lowcountry. This newspaper has reported that nearly 20 percent of Berkeley County and Charleston County eighth-graders read at a fourth-grade level, and that in Dorchester County it is only slightly better. And those numbers reflect a recent improvement.

Read a book

It would be easy to blame the state's illiteracy rate -- which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 percent -- on schools, but that would be wrong. As is often the case, government is not the solution.

A lot of kids just flat-out aren't ready to read when they are dropped at the curb.

Many kids come from homes where there is not a single book on a shelf. Their parents don't take them to the library. But they have every electronic gizmo known to man.

"One thing I would tell every parent is that your child needs to see you read," says Pam Cadden, children services coordinator at the Charleston Public Library. "Kids need to see that, and pick up the habit."

But instead of reading to their kids, some people sit around watching idiots scream lies on TV. They treat reading like geometry -- something they had to learn but which has no application in the real world.

Luckily, not everyone feels that way. At the public library, where they offer reading programs to kids from birth to 5-years-old, there has been an increase in traffic in the past couple of years.

"I think parents are recognizing the value of literacy skills," Cadden says. "We are now getting groups in from day cares and pre-schools."

These programs emphasize the skills children need to learn to read.

As Cadden says, children who have no reading skills when they start school are already behind.

Read additional columns by Brian Hicks

Illiterate = unemployed

Basically, kids need to drop the X-Box and pick up the X-Men -- anything that requires a little thought, a little reading.

The over-reliance on technology is a good way to end up like a congressman -- you know, those guys who don't have time to read important legislation before they vote on it yet sit through a presidential address fiddling with their BlackBerries.

A lot of school boards and parents seem to be taking this more seriously for now, and everyone in South Carolina should welcome that.

Maybe someone has finally realized the state's unemployment rate has a little something to do with education levels.

Reach Brian Hicks at 937-5561 or bhicks@postandcourier.com.