Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills: 26.5 million at level 1 and 8.4 million below level 1, while 8.2 million could not participate in PIAAC’s background survey either because of a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability to be interviewed. These adults who were unable to participate are categorized as having low English literacy skills, as is done in international reports (OECD 2013), although no direct assessment of their skills is available.
So it's around 20% and that's a conservative estimate since the people not able to participate in the study are automatically counted as being illiterate.
This is true, but immigrants (the only Americans who haven't necesarilly been exposed to English from a young age) represent only a third of poorly literate Americans. Per this table, poorly-literate Americans can be divided up as follows...
So, the actual illiteracy rate of native-born Americans is 66% of 20% (or ~14%). Man, this number sure gets small when you subtract OP's bullshit from the equation.
I'd be curious to see the ratio of urban to rural-dwelling Americans and how that impacts literacy. America is a big country, and I don't think I'm leaning into any biases to say that literacy probably goes down as you get out into the country.
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u/Eliteguard999 Jan 02 '25
“Five years olds can read” but the age 50+ customers at my grocery store I manage can’t read a sign to save their fucking lives.