Sir, - May I add two footnotes to your Editorial (December 5th) on the OECD report on literacy levels among Irish 15-year-olds?
One is that there may not be a contradiction between the new finding that only 3 per cent have serious literacy problems and the old finding that 25 per cent of adults suffer from functional illiteracy.
Aside from the point that adults include people who had little schooling, there is also the fact that literacy ability at 15 does not guarantee it at 25 or later. It depends on a lifelong readiness to update one's vocabulary.
Functional illiteracy is due largely to vocabulary shortcomings. A lawyer, for example, who qualified even 10 years ago may suffer from functional illiteracy in law matters due to not keeping abreast with EU or computer terminology. All of us are functionally illiterate, to some degree, outside our own specialities.
The other footnote concerns the finding that 40 per cent of our 15-year-olds are helped by outside-school tuition which may contribute much - we cannot know precisely how much - to overall results.
It may be, for example, that this is how students got good results this year even though schools were sometimes closed by teacher disputes.
There is much to suggest that most parents now accept that they should not rely totally on what happens during school hours. That is a healthy development. No matter how good schoolteachers are, time alone sets severe limits on what they can achieve.
Of these two footnotes, I suggest that the first is the more important. Good readers at 15 may not be so at university. - Yours, etc.,
Joe Foyle, Sandford Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.