How is it possible that roughly 50% of Americans can’t read above a 6th grade level and how are 21% just flat out illiterate?

armchair_progamer@programming.dev to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 503 points –

From https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/14phpbq/how_is_it_possible_that_roughly_50_of_americans/

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.

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My mom: "because you're always on that damn phone!"

I have coworkers that were in the last few years of high school when covid broke out. They spent all day playing video games or watching Netflix and when it came time to graduate, well.... there wasn't a ceremony or anything. They just got their diploma in the mail.

Not saying covid is the absolute reasoning for it, but it did play a huge part in our youth having a hard time reading and writing

I think the problem might be needing high school to learn reading and writing. Here we teach it 6yo.