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Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
There's a difference between literacy and composition, though.
Also, I've seen plenty of instruction guides that do a piss poor job of telling you exactly what to do.
Idk how many people straight up can't read a menu or a newspaper. But I've seen ample evidence to suggest it less than "a lot"
Yeah I'm talking about people who fail to follow all the steps in a bullet-pointed four step guide, or just completely omit one or two crucial sentences which state how important doing the thing in the sentence is. People who can do it if I just read the paragraph or steps out to them while they follow them.
According to this
And just to confirm that it's a US education problem:
The majority of illiterate adults were educated in the US.
I'm not saying I don't implicitly trust Forbes, HuffPo, and TechCrunch journalists...
But these are the same folks constantly trying to fix education by privatizing it.
"66% of 4th grade children in the U.S. could not read proficiently in 2013."
I just have no scope for this. What is "read proficiently"? Is that high or low for 4th graders? Why did we move from "6th grade reading standards" to "4th grade reading standards" inside two bullet points?
I've spent my whole life being told how schools are failing to teach basic skills, but university enrollment and professional work forces have only grown over that time.
The problems in the education system are well established. But the "nobody can read!" trope is so heavily sensationalized that I'm reluctant to take it seriously on its face.
Literacy isn’t just reading the words and having a basic understanding, literacy also involves how comprehensively you understand what you’re reading and the critical thinking skills to engage with what you’re reading. And it’s the latter two parts that are severely lacking in our education system.
Maybe. But I see quite a bit of naked disinformation in mass media that can't really be refuted unless you abandon the outlets themselves entirely.
Comprehension only gets you so far on third hand info. At some point, when all your media resources say X, you're going to believe X whether or not its true.
That's not "education" per say. It's access to data.
That’s a good point, but it’s not exactly against what I’m saying. With poor literacy it’s very easy to internalize propaganda because you lack the critical thinking skills and broader knowledge base that enhanced literacy provides you. Those tools are what is necessary to dismantle propaganda, and those are the tools that aren’t being effectively learned in school.
Sure. But even advanced literacy won't save you from an abundance of misinformation. Just ask Thomas Aquinas or Emmanuel Kant.
You can have an extremely well researched and erudite debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I'm not sure how related these are, there are plenty of highly literate people are extremely propagandized, and vice versa
definitely a bad thing on the whole though
Here is a more official study (that had a less dire analysis) : https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
However even this shows only 12.9% of American adults are at a level 4/5 literacy. In the footnotes it stated these levels were combined because only 2% reached level 5 across all surveyed countries.
I'm not sure how America defines those levels, but this is how the UK does:
Level 1: Adults can read relatively short digital or print texts to locate a single piece of information that is identical to or synonymous with the information given in the question. Knowledge and skill in recognising basic vocabulary, determining the meaning of sentences, and reading short paragraphs of text is expected.
Level 2: Adults can make matches between the text, either digital or printed, and information. Adults can paraphrase or make low-level inferences.
Level 3: Adults are required to read and navigate dense, lengthy or complex texts.
Level 4: Adults can integrate, interpret or synthesise information from complex or lengthy texts. Adults can identify and understand one or more specific, non-central idea(s) in the text in order to interpret or evaluate subtle evidence-claim or persuasive discourse relationships.
Level 5: Adults can search for, and integrate, information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Adults understand subtle, rhetorical cues and can make high-level inferences or use specialised background knowledge.
Is that abnormally low on a historical/geographic scale?
Lower than average (overall, not just 4/5) in the linked study in the footnotes.
https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-2013/the-supply-of-key-information-processing-skills_9789264204256-6-en#page9
It seems like several of the articles covering this are being a bit doomer about all of this now that I've seen the actual study. It's funny how the articles complaining about literacy also refuse to cite things properly.
I think there was one done by the dept of education in the US too which had worse results, but I'm on my phone and dont have time to find it.
What I'm usually more concerned about is how many adults I've met have terrible media literacy, and get most of their information from TV news, Facebook videos, and YouTube videos and take all of that in uncritically. But that's a different problem. I know very few people who read anything more complicated than a cheap novel though, which isn't great, but that's all anecdotal.
Nobody wins the Nobel for proving the Null hypothesis (which is a shame, in its own way).
That's what is within easy reach.
I'll recommend this or that source to my elderly mom, for instance. But she struggles with the medium of PDFs and is totally beyond podcasts.
Meanwhile, MSNBC is just... right there on the TV. YouTube is consistently in the front page of a Google search. Facebook shoves headlines right into your feed full of grandkid pictures.
Complaining about media literacy is fascille when the "bad" sources are prominently on display while the "good" sources are buried in the weeds. At this point, it isn't a media problem but a technology problem.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it
I think at a base level of "Can read and communicate concepts and ideas" it's true that the USA is literate but in the sense of having strong reading comprehension and the ability to synthesize/critique based off of that comprehension, we absolutely suck.
I see plenty of long winded heavily overanalyzed power posters on Reddit. But when they treat the CIA Factbook as gospel and denounce Seymour Hersh as Fake News...
That's not a comprehension issue. It's a trust issue.
Critical thinking issue too, imo
Garbage in, garbage out. Critical thinking only gets you so far.
I'm saying that learning to distinguish garbage from not garbage is an important facet of critical thinking
Yes. But those same skills, absent reliable information, can be subverted.
What you're describing is ultimately just an understanding of institutions. Having a very well refined understanding of libraries doesn't get you useful data if you're trapped in the fiction section.
Ask Decartes how that works. "What am I able to know is true?" is a very fundamental philosophical question without many bulletproof answers.
Fair enough, thank you for explaining where you're coming from, have a good day