The FT ponders the possibility of post-literacy, and asks an expert:
“Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
With apologies to my USian friends, it is not at all hard to imagine that a third of USians are illiterate. Truth be told, I can’t think of a simple statistic with greater or broader explanatory power.
(Indeed, the National Literacy Institute says that over half can only read to the level of an 8th-grade student, which is to say an eleven-year-old.)
It should go without saying that I do not hold the illiterate responsible for their illiteracy—and, as the article suggests, it’s far from being a structural problem exclusive to the US, though it does appear to be particularly acute there.
Grim as it may seem, it may also be worth thinking of this as a reversion to the mean. Historically speaking, widespread literacy is a pretty recent phenomenon; it’s something of a hand-wave, but I feel pretty confident in saying that the peak came in the C20th, and specifically in the latter half thereof.
I find it quite telling that Our World In Data seems poorly supplied with recent figures on literacy in the US, though a chart halfway down this page suggests that something close to full literacy was achieved around 1980 by means of driving down the racial disparity in reading ability.
The question of what might have happened around or not long after 1980 to produce the downward trend is left as an exercise for the reader.
(There’s a very obvious sociopolitical answer, and there’s also a very obvious technological answer; the truth of the matter is almost certainly a complex melange, but I suspect that both of those answers are obvious precisely due to the extent of their actual implication.)
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