Over half of American adults can't read at 6th Grade Levels

Ironically the National Literacy Institute is making me feel illiterate trying to parse their stats.

>On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.

>21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.

>54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level). [1]

the 54% doesn't include the 21% does it? otherwise no-duh 20% are below 5th grade, 21% in fact. Which would make it 54% of the 79% who are literate? I come up with ~43% there plus 21% illiterate would be 64% of all US adults with some literacy deficiency?

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

> Nearly half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in 2025, with the habit falling roughly 40% over the past decade

I don't think this is a great metric of literacy. For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us.

I used to read a lot of books when I was in school but these days I rarely do, however I probably consume more written word than ever. News, blogs, documentation, various and sundry articles. I read a lot, just not books anymore.

With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set.

What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.

I think this helps a lot to explain our current political situation.

Really feels like the bottom ~70% of America is about to become a permanent underclass.

What's even worse is those who can read at about 6th Grade Level - but are college graduates and media professionals

Did a two year stint in education (9th through 12th grade) ~27k students, working in LMS software (Moodle).

The state of affairs is... desperate. They allow unlimited retries on English assignments. 20% of kids are blatantly using ChatGPT and don't bother learning basic concepts.

Florida as an example has a pretty strict requirement that you must pass 11th grade English to graduate. There about 10% of students in a limbo where they are now in 12th grade about to graduate, and they are forced to take out of school education to try and pass the 11th grade final exam. It's become an entire business model of some smaller education providers.

"English 3" as its called is pretty foundational, arguments, research, speeches, MLA and sourcing material. It's not just Shakespeare, it's critical thinking (oh god I sound like ChatGPT).

Unfortunately the "service class" will swell to an unfathomable size, with people who will lack any and all ability to learn. How are even the blue collar jobs supposed to be staffed if you can't read the HVAC manual.

Surprised more student activists aren't strongly protesting administrators who let teachers pass them without knowing what they need.

> Educators often describe reading as a predictor of long-term success, both academically and professionally. A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires, reading ranked as the top habit elite achievers had in common, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey

This article is not off to a great start when right away it

- mentions Barack Obama in a survey of billionaires (he isn't)

- conflates academic and professional success with becoming a billionaire which is an outlier outcome

- links to a Yahoo News article (reporting the same story as the OP) when claiming to refer to a Fortune Magazine article (not linked; but I found it and the OP sems copypasted from it) as their source for a JP Morgan survey.

This won't be a problem in the future. They won't have to read, AI will read a document and tell them what the preparer of that specific LLM wants them to think about it.

can they think critically?