Has anyone been watching this documentary on Channel four which has been showing for a few weeks and concludes tonight?

It follows several adults who for whatever reason have managed to get through the school system in the UK without being able to read or write. Apparantly, there are 5 million adults in the UK who are in this position. How is this possible??

There was one 27 year old man who said he used to turn up to school and was just given a wordsearch to do by his teacher!!

When I was teaching in the States, I ran into the reality of "social promotion". Many school systems in America (each state has its own school system) students could only repeat a grade once.

Statistics were showing that when a young person's age groups moved on, a large percentage would drop out of school rather than remain in classes with kids two or more years younger than themselves.

In high school and middle school, I had to be careful with having students read aloud in the class because of the painful discrepancy in reading levels.

In my high school algebra classes, I had kids who weren't getting the algebra because they could not interpret simple one and two sentence instructions in the book. It was very uneven...they were math capable...when they understood what they were looking for.

The tragedy in Brazil is that 50 60 percent of Brazil's illiterates have been in the country's educational system for 5 to 7 years.

That's quite sad...it seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.

Quite a few people leave schools in england with poor literacy levels, some find it difficult reading from a book coherently.

Growing up with my friends I learnt that the only difference between me and them was the education my parents had afforded me as a child, weird that, regardless of the stress it put on the family at least I learnt the benefits of that one first hand. At one stage I literally couldn't understand why a country would give a certain education to some people and not to others, it baffled me until I was older and understood how the system worked.

So called, ''classism'' is based on education and nothing else.

What is also interesting is how many people know how to use the internet but don't know how to use Ms Word or know how a computer actually works. Some are stuck with their grades as a stigma take it too seriously and think that its an accurate portrayal of their capabilities and don't bother strive to better themselves in anyway.... certain things are just common sense adapted to suit the europeans way of thinking, like accounting, marketing etc.

This does not surprise me at all. At my last workplace, a community college, I taught adult literacy and numeracy. I was one of those specialist teachers who also taught those who were dsylexic as well and it was scary to see how many adults would sign up each term for help.

The governement once did a scheme whereby local colleges could offer local companies the opportunity to have their staff improve their literacy skills (within their work place) and the cost would be covered by regional educational agenies.. It was a good earner for the colleges to. It was estimated then, that at least 23% of population, including graduates, had a literacy issue.

This for me is very scary because I could read and write by the age of three and half and was on to some heavy stuff by time I got to school. These days everything seems to be left up to the schools, who on average, every ten years have a new way of teaching kids how to read and write; this is despite the fact, that research has shown that the 3 R's is still one of the best ways to deal with this issue.

In most industries, the captains have PA's who do all the writing for them, so they can easily hide under them and thus disguise their lack of skills.. but no matter how you look at it, if you can not read, you are effectively missing out on a very large part of life because you can not study ANY SUBJECT without basic communication skills.