When I think of the cost of illiteracy, I often think of the cost of illiterate adults—the lost wages, the welfare, the crime. But the cost of illiteracy goes far beyond the cost of illiterate adults. The true cost of illiteracy is the cost of illiterate children—the lost wages, the welfare, the crime that would never have happened if education had been a reality for their parents. The true cost of illiteracy is the cost of illiterate communities—the lost productivity, the lost business, the lost opportunities.
We are going to have a series of blog posts where we discuss the true cost that each of us pays for illiteracy. It is the root cause of so many social problems and as we teach adults we are going to need to teach children as well. This saves society money and time.
The work of volunteer literacy programs is not cheap. But it has a great and unappreciated return on investment, as we will see in the next blog post.
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