The literacy rate in the US is currently at 86%.
In 1800, it was around 90%, and nearly 100% in cities.
Wait, what? No. Who is illiterate now? Maybe practically illiterate, but functionally illiterate? I don’t believe it. They must be doing something like including recent Hispanic families/immigrants that haven’t learned English. If you exclude those it’s got to be 95+%.
No, like straight up can’t fucking read. Meaning they fail to meet the requirements of “Basic” literacy. Thirty some million people. 14% of our population.
If you go to reading below a 5th grade level, it increases to 20%.
Apparently, like 70% of prison inmates fail to meet the requirements for basic literacy… which is a big part of why they’re where they are.
This to me is an existential crisis - because i literally have never met anyone that can’t read. Who are these people? I’m terrified we’re developing this massive, silent underclass of people that are basically invisible, that don’t contribute to the economy and that if they magically disappeared tomorrow, no one would notice. How can you not read in a world today of phone-based media based on reading? Do these people just stay at home, never go out, get by with below subsistence level government support, and, maybe, get some night-shift janitorial positions or something? Not being able to read means literally being unable to use a computer or a phone.
Ya dude, not being able to read is pretty much crippling.
Obviously, but even around people like construction workers ie, stereotypical people who supposedly don’t need to read, everyone can read, at least as i’ve ever been able to tell.
But then articles say that at 86% literacy the US is the 7th highest literacy rate in the world… and i wonder what in practice “literacy” in this instance actually means. Also 20% of high school students graduate illiterate and again… this seems illiterate by definition rather than in reality, right? 20% of high school students graduated without being able to read? That’s like saying 20% of aquatic athletes can’t actually swim. This… doesn’t make sense. Now maybe 20% can’t swim well, which makes more sense.
Well, like I said, it means they fail to qualify under the definition of “basic” literacy. You can see the definitions here:
https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp
The definition for “Basic” means you can do the following tasks:
- reading and understanding information in short, commonplace prose texts
- reading and understanding information in simple documents
- locating easily identifiable quantitative information and using it to solve simple, one-step problems when the arithmetic operation is specified or easily inferred
So those failing this can still likely read individual words and stuff. They can get the gist of really simple things, like recognizing the “play” button on an interface or something like that.
But they can’t really read full documents and get information out of it. They couldn’t easily read, say, a newspaper article and understand what it was about, although they might understand some basic concepts it talked about.
I worked the 2004 presidential election while living in East Tennessee. I’d wager about 1 in 20 of our our polling station’s attendees couldn’t really sign their name/read at all.
What’s tragic, is that if you can’t read, you are forced to do a ton of extra work just to function. In some of these cases, you have people who are extremely intelligent, and yet have some sort of learning disability like dyslexia. They’re able to be reasonable functional in society, despite no one ever diagnosing their disability while they were growing up, because they’re smart enough to have figured out how to cope.
Wow, that’s shocking.
Probably helpful to remember this is literacy in English we’re talking about, so immigrants who can read just fine in their native language but not English would be included. Lots of immigrants who can read English will petition their parents, who cannot, to move here, and many of them stay that way until the end.
Sorta, but it was pretty far up in the sticks of the Smoky Mountains. Lots of beardy grandpappy types comin down to the foothills to vote the way preacher man said Jesus’d want em to.
Nonetheless, I was not sad to leave Tennessee behind.
I think this is where most people are. They don’t care to read “full documents” or “newspaper articles”. They don’t read for enjoyment or to learn. They can read the things they need to be able to read to survive, for the most part.
Uhh, Scuzz. I’m sure you have a good point in there somewhere, but do you think you could condense that down to under 140 characters? You lost me.
Or maybe just a picture with Hillary looking goofy and some words on the bottom.
I am not understanding how the wacky naturalist left wraps around into conspiratorial anti-Clinton propaganda.
Hannity was having an orgasm over this the other day. Humanity would be so much better off if 99% of the Fox News crew just disappeared.
Seriously, I’ll cover all these companies for like $100k a year by being a consultant for them.
Because I’m pretty sure it’s costing them 100+ times that easily in their own stupidity.
Is this different than the last Nivea thing?