E-mail a friendJohn Corcoran
airdate December 18, 2008
John Corcoran finished college, taught high school and worked in real estate development—all while successfully hiding the fact that he could only read at second-grade level. Eventually, he resolved to learn how to read. Now a national literacy advocate, Corcoran created a foundation, which helps tutor students, and has served on numerous advisory commissions, including the National Institute for Literacy. He's also written two books. In The Bridge to Literacy, he addresses the crisis state of illiteracy in America.
Author tells the story of surviving high school and college with a 2nd-grade reading level. (1:37)
Full interview. (10:34)
John Corcoran
Tavis: John Corcoran was a success in everything he tried, including a high school teacher, despite the fact that he couldn't read. But at age 48 he overcame his illiteracy, which led to the inspirational bestseller, "The Teacher Who Couldn't Read." In addition to the reissue of that book, he's out with a new one called "The Bridge to Literacy: No Child or Adult Left Behind." John Corcoran, an honor to have you on the program.
John Corcoran: Thank you very much for having me.
Tavis: This conversation can only start in one place, and you know where that is: How does one achieve the age of 48 without knowing how to read, having been a teacher, no less.
Corcoran: Yes. About 25 percent of the population learns to read like birds learn to fly - they just walk by the library and they seem to get it. And on the opposite end of that spectrum, 25 percent of the population have difficulty processing language - learning how to read, write, and spell. And the key to teaching little boys and little girls like me how to read, write, and spell is proper instruction, and I didn't get my proper instruction until I was 48 years old.
That's a piece of it, and the headlines is "The Teacher Who Couldn't Read," but there's also a story that I have to tell you about a little boy who couldn't read, and he was innocent and he went to school like millions of little boys and little girls go to school every year; enthusiastic and ready to learn to read, and they have difficulties learning how to read.
For me, I ended up in the dumb row in the second grade and that's where they put little boys and little girls that struggled with it. And then in middle school I was the teenager who couldn't read, and when I was a teenager, like millions of kids, I call that sub-personality, that little boy, the native alien, because he was the outsider who didn't have a reading problem anymore; he had a behavior problem and acted out.
In America today, there is no way - no way anyone, no matter how clever or smart they are, can be successful in school or in the workplace without the basic skills of reading and writing. You go to school for the first three years of your life; you go there to learn. And then the rest of your academic career, you go to school to read to learn.
And life is full of reading to learn, and there is no equal opportunity in America for people that can't read, write, and spell. We have a crisis in America, we're failing to teach our children how to read, write, and spell. So my story is an old story but it's a new story, and the same issue - we fail to teach people how to read, write, and spell.
Tavis: How did you, for lack of a better word, survive all of those years? How did you survive, how did you cover it up, how did you keep from being embarrassed, how did you end up becoming a teacher? And if that isn't an indictment, one could argue, on our system of education, that a teacher doesn't know how to read - how did this happen?
Corcoran: And being a teacher that couldn't read, there's a greater moral dilemma for me to tell that story. I have to take the responsibility for that. That was wrong for me. As a little boy I went to school with high hopes, and it's the adults that have the responsibility of imparting the skills and values, and reading is one of them.
And I was just passed along - social promotion has been here for a long time, so it's not hard to be sympathetic or empathetic for a little boy or a little girl that's passed along; it's the adults that have the responsibility. When I was a teenager, when my parents went to school to find out how I was doing in school, they weren't talking about the fact that I couldn't read or write; they were talking about the fights I was in, the disruption.
I made teachers cry; they made me cry. I was suspended from school; I was expelled from school. And so that was a pretty hostile environment for me, and to save my own soul I consciously didn't know how to articulate, like I'm articulating right now, what happened during that time.
I had some athletic skills; I had social skills. By the time I got to high school, I decided it's in my best interests to take this problem underground, because I gave up on myself in terms of learning to read, write, and spell, and I gave up on teachers teaching me.
And in America today, adults, if you talk to an adult, for the most part, we've given up on ourselves. Somewhere, we got that message.
Tavis: How did you get through his? Somebody was doing your work for you?
Corcoran: Oh, yeah. I dated the valedictorian. (Laughter)
Tavis: That always helps. If I had done that, maybe -
Corcoran: The reality is if - and it's true today as it was many years ago when I was in school - if you behaved yourself in high school, you would still - there's still the social promotion. And I had other people turn my papers in for me, wrote the essays and cheated on tests. I always cheated - I couldn't write a sentence.
I ended up with an athletic scholarship, and people say, "Oh, that's how you got through college." But that's not how I got through college; that's how I got to college. I had some athletic skills. I mad math skills; I had social skills. I went underground, I ran around and I learned the oral language and tried to have 25-cent words that people would have.
I masqueraded as a literate person. Some time in this conversation I will talk about us like I'm still an illiterate. I've been reading for 20 years, and in reality I'm a literate person, but I spent 48 years in this subculture - the subculture of the oral language in America, which is a second-class citizenry, and we're second-class citizens and we're invisible.
And we cannot - we cannot succeed and we cannot get to that written word without the help of literate people.
Tavis: What do you recall about your eyes opening, literally or figuratively, when at 48 you learned how to read?
Corcoran: I went to a public library one afternoon, kind of out of desperation. I had seen some advertisement in, of all places, in television. They say adults are learning to read. I thought I was the only adult in the world that had this issue, and this is one of the things that happens with this. We're in isolation; we hide, we cover up, and we think we're alone; it's unique.
When I went there, I didn't really believe it. Most adults do not believe they can learn to read. I went to the learning table, I'm going to try it again and try it again, and I was probably going to fail again. I got a 65-year-old volunteer tutor that in retrospect I call her the ambulance driver. I spent 13 months with her. She got me to about the sixth grade level; I couldn't write anything.
And I wanted to write, I wanted to move on, and I thought I died and went to heaven is the answer to your question. This was something that I never really imagined.
Tavis: At a sixth grade level, you thought -
Corcoran: At a sixth grade level.
Tavis: - that you'd gone to heaven.
Corcoran: Yeah, and I could read the newspaper. I really - we aren't dumb, you know? We really want an education. So when I went to a reading clinic, and we have science now - I had some diagnostic tests and they identified the problem and I had some intensive remediation done. These tests can tell you, they can prescribe what you need.
And that's the good news about this problem of illiteracy - this is one social education issue that we can solve in America. We have the science, we know how, we know how to teach even people like me. I went up to the clinic and my teacher there said, "I can teach a rock to read," and the science is truly there.
Tavis: How do we, beyond what you've just said, which is taking the issue more seriously, to the centerpiece of your book, the epicenter of your book, how do we build this bridge to literacy?
Corcoran: One of the things that I think we have to do is right now, we've done the research, we know. Twenty years ago, we didn't know if we could teach everybody to read. We now know 95 to 97 percent of the kids that are in our schools can be taught to read with proper instruction. The key is proper instruction. I want to hit the ball back.
Do I have a learning disability? No, I had a lot of teachers with teaching disabilities. And I don't mean that - I mean that analytically, for our conversation here. I'm not bashing anybody or blaming anybody. All I want is a solution, all I want is my brothers and sisters that have difficulty to learn to read. That's all I'm asking for. And it's never too late, and we can.
I want to go back to your question, and that is our universities are the greatest universities in the world. People from all over the world are coming here to our universities, and our universities are failing to teach our teachers how to teach children how to read, write, and spell.
So I want to see the universities take a bigger responsibility in terms of teacher training. How can you blame a teacher, a third grade teacher, how can you hold them responsible if they weren't properly prepared for it? So that's one of the things, and I think it's closing the gap right now, closing the gap between what we know and what we do, and yes, we can. Yes, we can. We can actually do this. We can break this cycle.
And who's going to - this is such a noble and righteous cause, who's going to argue it? Who's going to debate it?
Tavis: Not me.
Corcoran: No, no.
Tavis: I'm not going to argue and I'm not going to debate it. He has a remarkable story and we've really just been able to scratch the surface in this conversation. Thankfully, he has two books out. This is a reissue: "The Teacher Who Couldn't Read: One Man's Triumph Over Literacy" is his memoir, and in his new book, "The Bridge to Literacy: No Child or Adult Left Behind." His name, John Corcoran. John, nice to have you on the program. Thanks for coming on and talking to us.
Corcoran: Thank you very much; it's an honor.
Tavis: Appreciate your sharing - oh, pleasure's mine.
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