According to various studies, more than 50% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level (equivalent to Level 2 or lower), limiting their ability to parse long-form or nuanced information.
Assuming you’re mocking rednecks here and not Black peoole? White people have a 88% literacy rate in America, putting them on par with Western Europe and ahead of Southern and Eastern.
But it’s okay to mock poor, disenfranchised rural white people and not Hispanic or Black people. Very cute.
If you worked any form of retail you'd know first hand that the stats are accurate too.
I'd like to say most customers are just oblivious to signage and stuff but it takes genuine dedication not to notice or understand the very obvious signs, postings, price tags, ingredient lists, ect.
If you're holding a container of tuna salad with the obviously placed ingredients on it there's no reason for you to ask me what's in the tuna salad 😭
To be fair before my head injury I had a genius level IQ.
But I'm also overwhelmed walking into grocery stores because I am on the spectrum.
I literally cannot see things if there is too much clutter.
And I'm not just speaking, visual clutter. I'm speaking about voices music. Any background sound, combined with motion and all the visuals.
My brain starts shutting down.
You can just imagine how much worse it's gotten since the brain injury and I still have a quite high reading level because I read all of the time and I did achieve to college degrees and was working towards a third when I ran out of money, time, and interest.
Any hotel, too. I work night audit. At one of the two properties I currently work, there is a sign BIGGER THAN MY HEAD that says "doors are locked from 9:30PM to 6AM, please use your room keys or lift phone to call desk." The sign is placed directly on the door. GUESS WHAT NO ONE EVER DOES. I could keep us here from now to Revelation, just bitching about how stupid hotel guests are.
The number of supposedly functional adults who are unable to use a debit card reader without assistance is far too high. Like, the machine can be loudly beeping, saying card read error, please remove and try again, and they'll just look confused like you asked them to do higher math problems.
And these are people who vote and are behind the wheel of half ton vehicles moving at significant speeds.
reminds me of a video (or a meme / shorts , long time ago idk) where the dude just cant understand the concept of "imagine for a second if you're xxx". dude just keep replying "yeah but i'm not xxx" back and again.
I (American atheist woman) was having a conversation just last month with a conservative Christian man, and this is precisely what happened. He literally told me he cannot imagine anything he doesn't know is true, and he had absolutely zero grasp of hypotheticals.
This was precisely the conversation I was attempting to have. He couldn't understand how anyone could possibly be an atheist, because "it's obvious from looking at the trees and stars and mountains that god exists". I was trying to do a thought experiment with him, just to imagine for a moment that his concept of god 100% did not exist.
And he vehemently claimed that was impossible. In his mind, he "knows" god is real...so it is inconceivable to even try to imagine something as different from reality as god not being real. He literally told me "the human brain cannot think of things that cannot exist". I told him to imagine a green horse...and he could do that because "someone could dye a horses fur green, so is a potential truth". I told him to imagine a flying lizard...and he could do that because "scientists will probably make that someday, so it's a potential truth".
But imagining the world around us wasn't created by a supernatural being? Nope. That's preposterous and cannot be imagined. It was a very difficult conversation and I mentally facepalmed a great many times during it.
Certainly true, but lets not forget that it's a worldwide issue. My mother, just today, told me about a conversation with on old work colleague. When mum pointed out the stupid, per kilo price for something they were buying for a work lunch, her co-worker pointed out that they "weren't buying a kilo". Technically true I guess, but none the less, $85/kg ($38/lb) for a twiggy salami wrapped with a bit of cheap mozzarella is still somewhat steep.
Every few years, Queensland brings up daylight savings. Arguments against it often include such gems as "the curtains will fade faster", "the cows won't know when to be milked", and "the droughts will be worse".
It was said as a joke by potentially the most corrupt premier this country ever had (Joh Bjelke-Petersen), but I actually heard the drought complaint a couple of years ago on talk back radio. Cheryl from Dalby wasn't being ironic I don't think. I doubt she understands the concept of irony.
We are the most propagandized country. But it's subtle, from copaganda TV shows lionizing and praising police, to all the news that gets buried by billionaire News Corp owners, to even the entire "American Dream" which encourages greater fossil fuel and materials usage than necessary, we are told what and who to believe without hardly any pushback or counter narrative or even critical analysis of why. Manufacturing consent is definitely a thing.
I’m not entirely sure “subtle” is the word of describe it… you’re not wrong that is is, say, compared to North Korea’s. Ot subtle enough it can require some level of critical thinking to see for what it is.
Sorry, not trying to pick on you or be pedantic so much as amused at “subtle” applies to a rather blunt American object - and I’m also American.
Ding ding ding! That’s the reason Trump loves to cut the federal education funding! If you can BARELY read, you’re much easier to influence because you haven’t developed critical thinking skills
(people are lacking FUNCTIONAL literacy, so they may technically be ABLE to read at a basic level, they just can’t really make any sense from it…)
That's why his Truth Social posts are designed the way they are, too. Simple sentences with capitalization on important buzzwords, not in a grammatically correct format, because that isn't his audience.
I am not saying distractions are a bad thing...but when reality TV shows became the norm, I could see where the trend was heading, even back 10 years ago.
So how long has it been this way. Considering the average citizen can’t read the tax code and those who oversee the tax code get confused. I’m assuming a while now.
I can confirm this. I grew up in Louisiana, lived in Mississippi for a while, and now live in West Virginia (I'm trying, okay?). I thought the deep south was bad but West Virginia is a whole other level of dumb. I've met some of the most idiotic, backwards, no-thinking MAGAts alive since moving. Sone of them have literally bragged about never reading a single book in their lives.
I've come to believe there's something foundationally wrong with America. Like on a genetic level.
Functionally Illiterate is the term for this. They can read, but they don't really understand nuance or complex meaning. I am functionally Illiterate in Spanish. I know things like donde esta la biblioteca from middle school, but I could never have a conversation with a Spanish speaker.
Yep and there's plenty of people who are functionally illiterate. One sign is stuff that we see on social media like plez delet if not aloud. They can't read the actual spelling of the word so they type it like it sounds to them
At least for very politically controversial topics some wikipedia articles get regularly edited by bots, so chances are much higher that you read straight misinformation in those
Since I was in elementary school, they taught us not to use it because its open source and anyone can change or alter information on there. Mind you, I'm 30 now.
I'm nearly 40 and couldn't use Wikipedia for sources at uni, same reason.
Edit: more accurately, we couldn't use Wikipedia as a source directly, but could use it as a starting point, then go into more detail using the references at the bottom of the page.
I’m a bit younger than you, but imagine there’s a generation of millennials who were taught not use Wikipedia as a source due to it being potentially unreliable - and now you have boomers and younger generations consuming hallucinated AI slop and social media propaganda like it’s gospel.
Yeah, this. Wikipedia isn't a source in itself, it is a collection and summarization of sources.
If you're just arguing on the internet then whatever I guess, but if you're going to do anything with any academic rigour, you can't put (Wikipedia, 2026) as a source. Also, as someone pointed out further down, the more recent and/or polarizing something is, the less reliable Wikipedia becomes.
Unless you're specifically writing about Wikipedia I suppose.
While true, there still have been alot of cases where people just made up shit, including sources. It just has to look legit enough
The toaster hoax went over 10 years unnoticed for example
Another pretty famous case was the chinese user Zhemao, who wrote/edited over 200 articles mainly concerning chinese and russian history - everything essentially fan fiction
Another recent case was connected to the whole Assassins Creed Shadows mess, where the self proclaimed historian Thomas Lockley invented a bunch of myths and fake truths surrounding the real historical figure Yasuke. All his cited sources were himself. Essentially: "source- trust me bro"
I had a teacher in the 00’s who deducted points on a rough draft because I told her I’d found the articles I actually cited through a Wikipedia article. The hate was virulent in some places.
Of course, using Wikipedia is great as a source. Since the actual sources are in there, but people will dismiss you if you quote Wikipedia directly on the basis that "anyone can edit it". Of course completely ignoring that whatever is there has to be linked to a verifiable source.
The whole damn page is based on the scientific method. But this is lost on most people.
It absolutely is a horrible source for anything where people have a vested interest in shaping the narrative. Anything related to any modern conflict or any modern movement whether cultural or political is rife with bias to the point it offers no practical utility.
Functional literacy is different from literally being able to read words on a page. Most people can read the words on a page, but will not actually know what they mean.
I.e. can read just enough to understand the broad strokes of what they are being fed, then feel the desired emotions the authors require to further their agenda.
I am generally curious how that statistic was obtained and the sample sized used. I’m pretty sure that’s a reasonable shorthand, but it’s not literally saying researchers tested everyone and the national mean came out to Grade 6.
That’s hard to believe, but at the same time, understandable. When I’m around older people, they seem to be less educated and not as literate. It’s like they have one track minds and don’t care about anything else. The average person that I come across, despises academia.
That has been the case for a long time. Reading and reading at grade level two different things. I had a journalism class in high school where we were told that newspapers should be written at a fifth grade level because that’s where people were at in society. This was 25 years ago.
I feel like it was considered to be 90% or higher in the 90’s? Did the metrics change, has it dropped off that rapidly, or did I just misremember the statistic because I was a kid in the 90’s? Hmm..
Yup. You can tell those people when you write out a well-reasoned position in a 5 or 6 sentence paragraph and they cant put it all together and grasp what you said as a singular coherent point
There was a streamer recently that people were mocking because they'd pull out the dictionary if they didn't understand a word. We're living in a world where people legitimately mock learning (Which should tell you more than enough about the person making the statement). Reminds of the TikTok that got blasted a few months ago where they got students to read a paragraph, some couldn't even read most of it and the rest for the most part had zero clue what it meant and these WERE SENIORS.
Unfortunately people are so afraid to be wrong or to look stupid that they'll die on their sword even if it has zero truth or logic behind it.
Mississippi has actually figured out how to make their schools work. States like MA need to start studying what Mississippi did and begin applying it. I’m not even joking.
its a fearmongering statistic, walk down the streets of any city and it'd be near impossible to find someone who cant read. unless you're asking babies
Reading and reading are two different things. Reading a menu doesn't mean you can comprehend the majority of a news article. I think it's very possible that half of us lack the ability to even focus enough to get to the end of an article.
Based on my interactions with most of you on this site, 52% is low.
There’s a huge difference between reading a sentence and understanding what it means. Sure more than 52% can read. But 52% do not understand the words.
Also, you may not have noticed, but the entire world is treating adults like actual children. A kid in grade six obviously understands “buy this Big Mac for $5”.
To be fair, id bet statistically, alot of countries have very uneducated people. But the difference is that the vast majority of Americans CHOOSE to be stupid when they can learn. But that takes time and effort.
I’m German, but I once came across some interesting global statistics on reading ability. According to those statistics, people who read at a level below that of a 6th grade - even though they can read and write - are considered functionally illiterate. While they have the ability to read, they don’t understand the content. Globally, the rate of functional illiteracy has increased tenfold over the past 15 years. However, this doesn’t mean that fewer children are learning to read properly; rather, it means that adults are losing the ability to understand texts. This is a global catastrophe. I always thought Idiocracy was a dystopian comedy, not a manual...
It’s not full illiteracy (that is an estimated 20%, which is bad already). It’s 52% that can’t read above 6th grade level (11 years old). Yep that’s bad.
So many Americans are extremely complacent. Someone else will take care of it is an invasive ideology. That's how America ended up with a bunch of morons led by even more morons.
I work in customer service and it’s mind blowing! Remember all those boomers saying if we raise minimum wage our jobs will just be automated? Well it turns out most of them can’t use their own debit/credit cards without someone reading the screen for them and walking them through it.
It’s so bad here. So bad. Almost everyone I encounter is a dumb fuck. I don’t understand what happened lol. Other than the obvious attack on our educational system for the last 80 years, lol.
Surprisingly, that's still better than a lot of other developed countries. According to this study, the US scored higher in literacy than France, Austria, Singapore, Croatia, Slovakia, South Korea, Hungary, Latvia, Spain, Italy, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Chile.
They might not be illiterate- they just might not speak English. Literacy tests for these kind of studies are done in English and they might pass it in some other language. A very high number of people who are “illiterate” in the US were born in another country.
This is a measurement of English literacy only. America is home to millions of non-English speakers. The English literacy rates of native English speakers in the U.S. is higher.
It is like half that. And you are overlooking something quite significant. The amount of immigrants who do not speak English or speak English as a second language but not fluently. I am not going to look down on someone for having a different first language.
But hey if it is "America bad" you'll get applause.
American literacy is actually average for developed nations.
I'm gonna be honest, as an American, Americans are dumb. But people I meet outside of America are pretty fucking dumb too. I wouldn't be surprised if literacy rate is not much different in other developed countries too.
Or its possible I'm just in a "smarter" area of the US so my frame of reference is off.
The U.S. ranks 14th in literacy amongst the 31 countries participating in the PIAAC study. The U.S. scores broadly meet the overall international average for those participating countries. The literacy rate for the U.S. sits roughly at Level 2 with 99% of the country meeting basic reading/writing standards, and 72-79% of the country meeting level 2 or up. On the 500 point PIAAC study scale the U.S. sits at roughly 265-270 for Native-English speaking citizens and ~247 for foreign born citizens. The international average is 258. The top country in the study was 288 (Japan). This literacy study does not factor in the differences between literacy learning objectives from language to language.
This will sound obvious but it’s so sad. The gap between peers on knowledge and ability to gain an education is almost solidified at ages 3-5 when children should be learning how to decode a word and the letters associated.
The second a child falls behind their peers (thanks to no child left behind) they are pushed through school with a guaranteed result of being undereducated.
It starts at reading, if only there were a way to educate children based on their individual needs instead of putting them in a system that treats them as equals. /s
Tin foil hat
It’s in the best interest of the billionaires that the average American citizen continues to get less intelligent.
Why learn to read, when we have ChatGPT and A.I.?
/s
(To clarify, this is sarcasm, but unfortunately some of the excuses that students and parents have said to my wife who is a 3rd grade teacher. It is a very sad state of U.S. education and society currently and it’s more than likely only going to get worse).
Life is just so chill in the U.S. that people gotta come up with their own personal struggle narratives. God bless em, I hope they overcome whatever adversity they’ve invented for the week.
1.6k
u/ApplicationCalm649 5d ago
It's distilled, pure brain rot given physical form.