Imagine not being able to do the easy stuff. Read food nutrition facts to see if those cookies will set off your peanut allergy. Read the instructions on your medicine – do you take one? Or two? What happens if you take more than you’re supposed to? Read the “High Voltage” sign before you climb that electrified fence.

You might be surprised to know that 14 percent of adults in this country are “functionally illiterate,” according to the National Assessment of Adult Illiteracy’s last survey in 2003.

That means that they can’t do any of the things above that most of us consider as fundamental as showering or shaving our respective legs.

One of these people is Alfred Williams, a 70-year-old grandfather who has joined a first-grade classroom. He’s learning to read and write – something he’s never been able to do.

Williams says that means he can go to the grocery store and buy the right things. He used to waste a lot of money on cans of food he didn’t want to eat. And simply because he couldn’t read that the label said “creamed corn” instead of just “corn.”

That’s very uplifting. But why are there so many adults who cannot read, even on a basic level?

Surely some are immigrants. But some were born in the United States and even got diplomas, according to The New York Times.

Williams and people like him are dismissed as “casualties of New York’s public school system,” as Joseph Berger of the New York Times puts it. But there are people who go to school in New York who can read. And, there are adults all over the country who cannot read. How does that happen?

When Miss South Carolina blew it last fall, babbling on about maps and the Iraq, she was ridiculed (still is in some circles) for her lack of knowledge.

But at least she can read.

People bemoan the educational state of our country, how our students are falling behind others overseas. A 2005 UNICEF study showed the US was 18th of 24 countries, based on the “effectiveness of its educational system,” according to Elaine Wu of the Kapi’o Newspress.

I don’t know if it’s that bad, but it could be. And it does turn out that a too-large chunk of our adults aren’t smarter than a first-grader, let alone a fifth-grader.

But what’s the reason these people got through school when it would be obvious to an attentive teacher that they couldn’t read?

Teacher couldn’t have been so attentive.

Maybe he works with kids who couldn’t care less about school.

Maybe she got good grades in college, but doesn’t know how to deal with her students’ different learning styles.

Maybe he has a few students with learning disorders and feels he can’t help them.

Maybe she’s so busy teaching to a test that she misses the struggling reader in the back row.

I don’t really have a definitive answer.

At Iowa State, we require education majors to have a B- average to get into the teacher education program. That’s a good start. Teachers who know their material.

Teachers also have to continue their education every year, learn new techniques, refresh their methods of teaching.

But somehow some students, like Williams, never learn to read. He obviously has the ability. Why didn’t someone help him before? If we can find the answer to that, we may find the answer to why no one has been able to say they’re smarter than a fifth-grader on Jeff Foxworthy’s show. And it may be the key to pulling ahead in world education rankings.

– Bailey Lewis is a sophomore in English from Indianola.