Question above is pretty blunt but was doing a study for a college course and came across that stat. How is that possible? My high school sucked but I was well equipped even with that sub standard level of education for college. Obviously income is a thing but to think 1 out of 5 American adults is categorized as illiterate is…astounding. Now poor media literacy I get, but not this. Edit: this was from a department of education report from 2022. Just incase people are curious where that comes from. It does also specify as literate in English so maybe not as grim as I thought.
This disaster did not come about by accident. The whole country has allowed our public schools to decline, but the conservatives have been actively working to destroy them since the 80’s. They have been leveraging racism, fundamentalism, and other prejudice-based fears to undermine the curriculum. Meanwhile, they have cut school funding, made teaching a terrible job, and downplayed the value of formal education. Educated people are much harder to manipulate. A minority trying to hold onto power needs a public that is poorly educated and without critical thinking skills.
If you don’t understand, start walking further away from the cities.
If you still don’t understand, you’re not done walking.
So I am a researcher by trade in this field, got a PhD, and develop these kinds of stats (at a more local level). I also have taught basic adult literacy for about 15 years. I think the poster was likely referring to an NCES stat.
We tend to think of adults with low English literacy as people who dropped out of school or never went. We also tend to think “illiterate” is binary, you can read or you can’t. But the definition is based around grade-level reading (what can you identify and synthesize from standardized text in English in a given time frame) and inclusive of a broader population. We’re talking about people who can’t pick up a copy of USA today and tell you the main idea of a front-page article. They can drive, they can work, etc. So they get along and this issue get ignored.
For example, some stats on illiteracy will count “non-participants” among those who can’t read/write, but this includes people in the study with cognitive disabilities or language barriers to the point that they can’t take the reading test. The share of U.S. adults who are functionally illiterate in English includes some non-native English speaking adults and also a couple generations of folks with reading diasbilities who passed through school, AND people who didn’t read for myriad other reasons.
I have tutored older adults learning to read/write for many years and have met a lot of people who ran businesses or raised families or worked full careers before learning to read. Adaptable and clever bunch. And even many U.S.-born native English speakers who got shuffled through high school despite serious disadvantage and/or disabilities.
Very interesting read! I’m from Germany and taught myself English. I’m currently at a C1/B2 level (it’s a European standard I think?) and consider myself good enough to move through English speaking countries independently just fine.
I’m basically studying English every day by reading and watching YouTube exclusively in English. Love it!
It’s a shame that many people don’t bother honing their language skills.
the definition is based around grade-level reading (what can you identify and synthesize from standardized text in English in a given time frame) and inclusive of a broader population. We’re talking about people who can’t pick up a copy of USA today and tell you the main idea of a front-page article.
Purely anecdotal, but I know someone who is a tenured professor at a university that will flat out refuse to answer any question that has too much supporting detail around it. As in, if you say “for this part of the assignment, I’m doing…” and proceed to describe your attempt at problem solving over four or five sentences, asking if what you’ve done is correct or close to it, and he will simply respond with “there’s too much here to unpack, sorry,” and refuse to answer the question. But if you do it in person, like verbally read out the same paragraph you wrote, he can understand and answer it. There’s other things, too. He can type out simple sentences, but has a very poor grasp of spelling, frequently getting very simple words wrong (think different versions of there, their, and they’re). It’s genuinely baffling how he got to that point, but he also hasn’t ever really published material and it kinda makes sense why. Dude has a doctorate in a STEM field and I think the reason for that is that he can understand mathematics, but literally can’t understand complex writing. Any idea that takes more than a single sentence to explicate just evaporates out of his head.
I’ve never seen anything as extreme as you describe, but when I took the GRE I met a guy kind of like this. After you finish the exam it gives you an estimate of your score, but your real scores are sent to you weeks later. On the way out some guy asked me how I did (fairly well but not 97% plus on anything). He was like “oh damn if you don’t get above 95% on math then you can’t go to grad school in STEM lol”. I asked him what he got in the reading and writing and he said <33% “but that isn’t important for grad school” lmao
One small part of the problem I only learned about recently is the Whole Language approach to teaching reading. Basically teaching kids to guess what words make sense instead of actually teaching them how to read. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s but continued to be used in some parts of the US into the 2010s. An entire chunk of the US population (and a few other countries as well) was literally not taught phonics/sounding it out because their teachers or schools followed this ineffective alternative method.
Of course that’s far from the only factor, but it’s one many aren’t aware of.
