Comprehension is a higher bar than "literacy". Global adult literacy rates have been drastically improving since the 1950s (https://ourworldindata.org/literacy). Today, global adult literacy rate is estimated at ~87%.
The concept of literacy itself means more than "able to read." (aka alphabetical literacy meaning word and letter recognition). Literacy is the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.
International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) has five levels. Only 50% of U.S. adults age 16 to 65 are level 3 or above.
Level 3:
>Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy and include continuous, noncontinuous, mixed, or multiple pages of text. Understanding text and rhetorical structures becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially navigating complex digital texts. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information and often require varying levels of inference. Many tasks require the respondent to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. Often, tasks also demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate content to answer accurately. Competing information is often present, but it is not more prominent than the correct information.
I've come to think that a good chunk of the resistance to written-word-heavy remote work, and to the phenomenon of "let's just hop on a quick call" where the alternative was pretty likely to be a much quicker IM exchange, is due to this exact thing—not just that a lot of people can't read at that level-3 proficiency, but that another cohort can, but finds that the absolute limit of their ability and quite taxing, leaving well more than half of the population uncomfortable in a professional reading- and writing-heavy environment, if not wholly incapable of working in it at all.
Literacy is certainly part of it... but several have suckered me into calls [that took an order of magnitude longer] simply by stating they didn't like to type. In the plainest terms: they'd rather waste our collective time to spare their individual effort.
I don't mean in terms of bandwidth. "Real words" can indeed clear things up. I truly mean they didn't want to write one question, read the response, and carry on. Mirroring this mundane exchange to a call makes for laziness I only tolerate because of a paycheck.
My pet theories/reasons include poor vision and passive-aggression. An extremely soft power play, forcing synchronous communication when it's truly unnecessary.
Realistically I know they just want to bond... but I'm here to be paid/keep us profitable. We'll manage with some emotional distance, I promise. Trying to force things often has the opposite effect. I'm more friendly to those who don't appear to have ulterior motives!
This is the classic "this meeting could have been an email" phenomenon. As much as I do actually find doing a quick sync to sometimes be helpful (e.g. if a code review spawns a discussion that requires multiple round-trips and isn't resolved, moving the discussion to somewhere more immediate and then updating the thread with the resolution that was picked "offline" can help unblock things faster in some situations), I wholeheartedly agree that this is extremely frustrating to me. Despite often being super energetic and talkative, I'm someone who fits the definition of "introvert" that some people use where interacting with other people (besides my wife) requires spending mental energy, and I need at least a few hours a day to "recharge" away from even family and friends to not get overwhelmed and exhausted, even if it's just retiring to my room a bit earlier when on a trip to visit family and just hanging out for a bit on my laptop it whatever. Because of this, I can't help but resent when someone else squanders some of my "social interaction quota" for the day even when they probably don't realize that's what they're doing.
I'm incredibly lucky that my wife feels the same way as me, and we're so in tune with each other that we can spend unlimited time together without ever feeling spent in the same way, but it's always a mix of amusing and frustrating to me when her family doesn't seem to understand this the same way that we do. I absolutely adore my wife's mother, and she's been nothing but good to me since I started dating my wife, but she loves to text my wife and say something like "can you call me when you get a chance?", only for the reason she wanted to talk to turn it to be asking something extremely straightforward like "is it okay if we don't have cornbread for Thanksgiving this year?" Fortunately, my wife is a saint compared to me in terms of patience, and we love her mother enough that indulging this sort of thing is far more worthwhile than if it were happening from a coworker even if I'm usually friendly with then.
Sadly there's another reason to switch to verbal communication over the potential accountability of recorded text: discussion of corruption and conspiracy, or gas lighting and misdirection. Seems like a lot of important communications at government and corporate institutions happen over dissapearing encrypted messages. Beware the dark triad!
I think it’s more about having to write all that information down for someone else to read is a lot more difficult than just speaking and having a conversation
To add another angle: in the past I've experienced issues where I'd always butt heads with a co-worker if we used a messenger, but would be fine when we talked over a call. I'm sure a higher reading comprehension from a certain someone could maybe have helped with that, but I suspect much of it just comes down to the fact that a lot of nuance/tone is lost when thoughts are put into writing, which makes it easier to offend people.
At work, arguing with people is the last thing I want to deal with, so calls are sometimes the simplest way to cut through the bullshit.
Writing so people don't misread-between-the-lines is a skill. I don't have it and I've experienced the same problems. But an LLM can fix that. Just write your message your normal way and tell it to rewrite it being thoughtful and respectful. Maybe add brief if it gets too carried away with floweriness.
A friend was told his emails were too curt so he filters them to be socially cheerier and wordy. Completely out of character for him.
Perhaps we should turn this around and every employee is categorized by whatever is most understandable by them. Then every inbound message is run through that filter. Work turns into having my bots talk to your bots.
Sounds good. Most people in workplaces act as their own bots, rewriting their natural style to be compatible with the culture/recipient because we're too diverse to all just get along with random non-friends in our natural way.
From experience, most of the people who think conversation would be better done by text lack the empathy required to craft messages which will be properly understood. It’s extremely difficult to write so that the recipient of your message actually understands exactly what you meant.
I think detecting or even being aware of register in writing is an also lot harder for some folks than the same thing is in speech, which can lead to problems similar and related to misreading tone. I'd classify that, and difficulty dealing with tone per se in writing, as at least in part also a reading comprehension problem, but ultimately it doesn't much matter the cause when your immediate task is to communicate with the person: your options are to write better for your audience of that person, or, yeah, switch medium to speech.
> I think detecting or even being aware of register in writing is an also lot harder for some folks than the same thing is in speech
I think this is a large reason why forums and comment sections can get so out-of-hand. Add to that the growing online habit of using as few characters/words as possible to communicate; then there is emoji only communication--thinking if that's its own comprehension category, teenager/young adults would score much better (better than I would at least).
I have seen more long winded IM exchanges becoming long winded emails exchange where more and more people fail to understand each other that should have been a quick call than the reverse.
A call gives you a lot more contextual clue than text. A lot.
In my limited experience with friends and family, YT is more likely to lead them into extreme and unfounded conspiracies and then lock them into that engagement bubble. They become lazy and magical thinkers, and worse people.
Exceptions like Khan Academy are still out there. But I think they're being drown out.
Meanwhile I settled into text based communities which challenged my beliefs. And that lead me out of religion and all the fallacies I was indoctrinated into. YMMV
It's a broad generalization. Text based communities are not immune to this, or even less susceptible to it. There are very popular Youtubes that make very well made and information dense videos.
And one would argue that comprehension is more essential than ever, since every last thing you do in the modern world and nearly every product you interact with comes with a pages-long terms and conditions document in which you get the funny stuff like the inability to use iTunes to make nuclear weapons, and far more importantly, how a number of large platform services reserve the right to sell your soul to as many devils as they can.
Like, on balance, I'm doing okay in life. I could have more savings put away but ultimately I have a good job in tech, I own a home, and basically have all my essentials handled with a side of a few toys to tinker on. I cannot fathom how I could get my life functioning without strong reading skills. It's... it's literally everything, it's communication in my office since I'm remote, it's filing taxes correctly, it's interacting with my local government, hell writing is a side hobby of mine and has been all my life. I can't fucking imagine what kind of utter hell it must be to even only be literate, let alone illiterate.
This makes me think of how neuralink and Elon keep saying how their tech will revolutionize communication where people without it will seem so slow and utterly disadvantaged.
Literacy and comprehension allows vast amounts of data to be transferred between humans. Anything that increases that even more will be a game changer and really bad for those who won't have it.
Like seriously, I'm being glib, but also, what fucking achievements? He considers PayPal a failure because it never matured into his everything app. Tesla? The Tesla model S, X, and 3 were all blueprinted by Tesla before he bought it from it's actual founders and ratfucked them out of the company. The only vehicle that's seriously got his influence in it's design is the Cybertruck, and it's a complete shitpile. The Tesla semi has been a complete nothingburger since it's announcement, and he paid a TikTok performer to be his robot on stage because their robots suck ass too. Space X does alright, but they also are using tons of upcycled NASA patents and designs, and while their contributions certainly are far from nothing, that's not Musk. That's the engineers Musk hired. The Boring company is a complete fucking con job, end to end. It's only actual product has been a tunnel full of cars from his other stupid company, and flamethrowers. And again, as with Space X, as with Tesla: he didn't do shit. His engineers did. His marketers did. In fact two of these organizations are rumored to have dedicated teams of people who manage Elon's stupid tendencies so they don't sink the company.
And Twitter! Holy fuck where do you START. I fully grant the above are only rumors, but it's rather borne out by the fact that Twitter definitely didn't have an Elon wrangling team, and it shows. He's cratered it to be worth less than 10% of what it was when he bought it. It's gone from being the "worlds front page" stuffed to the gills with ads from prominent brands offering real products to just a higher budget, better engineered Info Wars, complete with the Nazis and the ads for dick supplements every 3 posts as they try desperately to break even in the budget. Meanwhile, "free speech absolutist" Musk bans people for being mean to him and invites folks openly exposed as Russian disinformation discriminators back to what's left of Twitter. And, at a time when the company was already struggling, he got into a pointless fucking pissing match with the city of San Francisco putting up an enormous stupid X on the building which he was eventually made to take down anyway.
So like, you challenge me to say a nice thing about Elon's achievements? Okay, but I need your help, because I don't know about any. Let me know of one, and I'll say something nice about it.
I don't know if you'd call this an achievement, but I will say he has offered everyone watching for it a first-class lesson in how being a billionare makes you medically incapable of relating to anyone and anything who isn't bending over backwards to tell you how amazing you are. He literally cannot handle any criticism, which is a problem because everything he touches turns to shit in one way or another. And the worst part is our system, as setup, is incapable of holding him to account for any of it. If everything he has goes down in flames, Tesla, X, Space X, Boring, the LOT, he will STILL be worth more than me and my friends will earn in our entire lifetimes. And for DOING WHAT? Making WHAT? Achieving WHAT?
If he wasn't the son of an Aparthied emerald mine owner, and didn't have daddy's money to get him started in investing, nobody would know who this fucking weirdo is, and nobody would care. He would be exactly like his fans: socially maladjusted weirdos screaming about white replacement theory on web forums.
So many things wrong here. Musk is a founder and there was no car, not even the roadster that was blueprinted before he was at the company. There was no more than a battery.
It's also very clear he didn't buy the company. Given he still doesn't own it. Stock award or not.
We know where the money is from. There's no billion dollar inheritance or payout being invested. This isn't Thiel or PG we're talking about.
SpaceX is very much ahead of other companies that have access to NASA. A clear sign you're wrong.
He's not the son of an apartheid mine owner and that's not hard to find out.
You need an adjustment of yourself. Stop spreading easily verifiable disinformation. Like the starlink stealing elections and NASA being replaced with SpaceX nonsense I've been hearing recently.
Nothing good or bad, success or failure is the work of any one person there alone. The fact you don't know who the designer of the CyberTruck is is telling.
>Germany had the world’s finest elementary school system, the highest literacy rate and the best universities; by 1913 more books were published annually in Germany than in any country in the world.
Believing that authoritarianism stems from lack of education is a flawed ideology.
IIRC, the lead up to WW2 was incredible poverty, and debt to France and others following WW1. So it was easier to just go to war than pay back the debt.
Sorry, I didn't mean to nitpick. I totally agree with you about the frustration, but I also wanted to highlight how authoritarian governments aren't simply the outcome of general social stupidity or a lack of education. IMO that's somewhat of an elitist or champagne-socialist scapegoat and simplification. A notable point would also be that the USSR had an authoritarian government while also maintaining a near 100% literacy rate and an exceptional regard for education.
Also I think it’s flawed to assume all authoritarian movements are the same. Also I don’t think the literacy measurement in your article is the one we’re talking about here. Also “best universities” isn’t a good indicator for the literacy of the overall populace. Also I don’t think anyone claims Hitler came to power because Germans were dumb.
Target 4.6: By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy
Indicator 4.6.1: Proportion of population in a given age group achieving at least a fixed level of proficiency in functional (a) literacy and (b) numeracy skills, by sex
Do you have opinions on Online school movements like Khan Academy? I know there are schools that provide a cookie cutter curriculum but maybe that is better than nothing that many economically disadvantaged students for all into?
Having gone through public school in Texas and putting my own children through private school, I am warming up to things like https://highschool.utexas.edu/
but no, it isn't new. There's a war between phonetic reading and 'whole word' reading. Whole Word gets you around the 'but phonetics are confusing and there are too many exceptions' problem except that it produces people who cannot comprehend a document.
> but no, it isn't new. There's a war between phonetic reading and 'whole word' reading.
Older than many think.
Search for and read "Why Johnny can't read", and then do the same for "Why Johnny still can't read".
I have an almost-five child who is reading simple books with no pictures.
Reading those two essays above, then buying "Teach your child to read in 100 days" and then simply working for 10m-20m each day since he was almost-three has resulted in a 5yo who reads as well as, or better than, many 8yo kids.
Also, I moved off the DISTAR alphabet after about 6 months - the book is good, but use it as a good start, not as a complete teaching kit.
Once you read those two essays you'll have a much better idea of why most children can't read and, most importantly, what to do about your kid at age 3.5yo - 4yo.
I learned whole word reading, as did my children, and i think my siblings too but, we all learned to read at home.
I think phonics may work better in a class room where you want to minimise the difference between slow and fast learners page, and kids do not get much individual attention. My kids learned to read from playing one to one games with flashcards and reading to/with a parent so whole word worked for us.
I hadn't heard of "whole word" reading or at least not to the point of reading about it, but from that article and the wiki page, my opinion is that it should be combined with phonics, they complement each other. There is no need to compete. Most of the whole word stragity is describing how I coped and masked my hidden dyslexia throughout school (only learned about it as an adult). The whole word stragity of using context clues got me through standardize testing with perfect reading scores.
Multiple times throughout school no one knew what to do with me in reading/English because I scored so highly, read so slowly, and hallucinated words if forced to read out loud (usually a word that meant the same thing but is written absolute nowhere, its the bane of my existence). I can not for the life of me sound out words to figure out the spelling, life would make a lot more sense if we all simply moved to using the phonetic transcription[0] way of spelling.
I mean really, "realise" wrong in the US, correct in UK--but it sounds like guise, so why should "guize" be wrong? Yeah it is confusing, especially for spelling. The 'whole word' way to memorize as many words as possible--I mean you have to do that anyway to know when to use things like "ize" or "ise" in American English. I'm guessing there are more examples and occurs in other languages as well(?). This one in particular caused unnecessary frustration for me in school.
Sounding out words(trying to) helps a little but it's more of a backup tool for me. My written vocabulary is vastly superior to my verbal simply because I can not pronounce all of the words I know. From my understanding, part of dyslexia can include the difficulty separating individual sounds.
I appreciate you pointing that out (and I see what you did there); now I know to double check that word until it becomes consistent. And also spend more time to figure out what MacOS setting or feature got added with v15 to make typing worse for me. Before, it would simply be underlined in red--sometimes still is. Now, when my spelling is so far off it guesses something and changes it--I keep auto-correct off so not sure where it is. I would rather right click and choose an option or be so far off I have to look it up and get a little closer to getting right next time.
In Estonia there are many influential people arguing that although Estonian kids do really well in PISA tests (although the trend is declining there as well), they are also very unhappy kids. So PISA must be flawed. I haven't seen any data really supporting it except usual "mental problems are increasing since about 2010" data.
One of them said that it wasn't good enough because they're optional. He didn't explain the logic behind that any further. Some say it's because the kids speak english all day.
In France, the usual oral vocabulary is now far different from the one used in the last century (1950'). Many words and expressions are used now that older people (like me) do not understand. On the contrary, youngsters have a hard time reading literature from the 19th century. The vocabulary is very different, the orthography is also different, and the length of sentences rebukes them.
It's not a thing only between youngsters, mainstream TV series already use this new vocabulary.
While there have been a few official changes in orthography since 1990, I guess the unstated rule is now that it's OK to use a semi-phonetic orthography.
At the same time, France's PISA results are awful.
Après sai pa mes onions, chui q'un viok completement dèpasser
I don't think this is based on standardized tests because they're not standardized internationally; this would be presented more as a questionnaire or poll than a test, made to assess roughly the same in every country it was given.
There have always been some. I remember kids just randomly filling in bubbles on the standardized tests 40 years ago when I was in school. There was no consequence to them and they just didn't care.
This isn't an answer to their question about whether there's been any change for the worse, it's speculation about the reason for the change, assuming any such change does exist.
Advanced written literacy, as with advanced computer literacy and numeracy is generally far more limited than many people would think. I've been aware of this for some years now by way of both OECD studies on general computer literacy (find-and-replace functions are usable to perhaps 5--10% of the adult population) and US studies on adult literacy.
It's based on "Adult Literacy in the United States" (2019), through the US Department of Education (one of the US federal agencies likely to be on the chopping block):
I'd made a couple of explanatory comments in the earlier discussion about elements of this (and related studies) which I find highly illuminating, including suggestions that at least at the margin (and perhaps far more deeply) overall literacy and lifetime attainment are relatively insensitive to educational opportunities. (Both individuals and countries as a whole show ... counterintuitive ... behaviours.) I tend to suspect both innate and other environmental factors (overall stimulation, pollution and experiential degredation of potential, etc.). I'll hasten to mention that the innate capabilities seem to apply to individuals rather than populations, as high- and low-achievers can be found widely.
TFA's UNESCO study does suggest strong regional variance, however...
My kid is 14 going to secondary school in Ireland right now.
And I'm helping them with their English homework and I notice how much of it is reading stuff and trying to get them to question what they are reading etc.
Far more than when I was a kid their age, in my English class.
'These numbers include all children of middle school age, not just those who attend school.'
I think the low scores are telling you more about the pressure on children in poorer countries to work to support their families, rather than the quality of teaching when they are able to attend school.
True, but numbers are surprisingly bad in the US, Sweden, and in England (lived all three so still follow the local news and seen stories about this in the last two weeks).
>but numbers are surprisingly bad in the US, Sweden, and in England
Kids in rich countries have their brain fried from watching Cocomelon, Youtube Kids and Tiktok. They've been spawn-camped by ad-tech. Gotta get them when they're young.
In developed countries kids who are not going to school are probably still getting an education. it is a legal requirement in the UK (for example) that parents ensure kids get a "suitable and efficient education".
Yeah, it's concerning, but not particularly relevant to those of us in places where children are required to go to school. I want to know what percentage of children, who can read and attend school, can't comprehend what they are reading.
I remember as a teenager having a lot of trouble with this
I think the school make a very poor job in making children curious about book stories, before start ramming you with 100s of pages of literary classics, so deep and powerful, that most teenagers are not gonna care
Especially when they are not incentivised at home. And have other more attractive stories going on in the form of games or movies
Read more in class, teachers know well most students haven't read anything at home. And most children will be afraid to admit to the class, and alone to the teacher, that they haven't read and are not following the story, so they don't get an explanation. Even though the teacher knows very well most students will be completely lost
Even reading the "not allowed" summaries before the quiz was a drag. It was just an exercise in survival and making it up
They should probably focus on shorter books, more captivating stories for children, like Harry Potter? ... tell the parents to read with the child at home and help them understand any difficult part, maybe get some comic books to start, maybe let children choose different themes like sci-fi action magic... Spend more time in the end hammering a 5 line story summary, the more important points that needed interpretation, why they are important...
Can you describe what this looked like in practice? Would you just read things and at the end have no recollection of what you read? How did you finally overcome this and what was the moment like when you finally crossed over?
I was studying for SATs. I mastered the verbal portion’s analogy and sentence completion by memorizing 4300 SAT words. Got all questions in that section right except two, one was skipped and the other was wrong (sacrosanctity is the same as sanctity apparently!).
The reading comprehension was the last bit (too much procrastination!). Used Barrons verbal SAT book, with its three difficulty levels segmented. Went through each level and understood it well enough to understand what I was doing wrong.
Realization: Each phrase has to be split up into its own sentence. Then Each sentence has to be given a context. Then each context has to have connecting pieces with the next context. The reader’s job is to understand each sentence, put it into context, and identify the missing parts and pieces of logic, and come up with a possible explanation of the contexts that are missing.
The possible explanations was a hardest one to get right. It was like I did not understand People and how they thought. (I was autistic and introverted with some adhd.) example: the class is a reflection of the teacher. Does that mean that the class is opposite of the teacher because that is how a reflection works? I had to watch many movies and tv shows to get this one right over the course of many years after I graduated and start earning money to pay for cable tv.
Reading aloud helps with comprehension. I sometimes read aloud myself, I think its good to speak a few thousand extra words everyday...words you might not usually say if you're reading a classic novel. Plus I usually take a long hot bath after workouts to help with recovery. So a good time to read while soaking in bubbles. Can recommend.
I witnessed the most extraordinary use of this in the one year my wife's son lived with us during his pre-med coursework in undergrad.
He would read aloud to himself (in a quiet voice). He explained that it was his way of keeping himself concentrated, because (in his description) he was reading, speaking, and listening all at the same time, and that that combo overloaded his attention and kept him focused.
He went from graduating towards the top here in our middling uni, to being accepted into Johns Hopkins (but choosing to remain local), and then getting his first-choice residency. He is now an accomplished specialist doctor.
Three notes:
1) He never drank alcohol in his life. It was a distinct advantage, especially in undergrad.
2) He said that he would not let himself be a patient to over 85% or 90% of the doctors that graduated with him from med school.
3) He had a grand total of FOUR HOURS of nutrition education in med school. I think that's insane, but the system is really about pills and procedures.
"He said that he would not let himself be a patient to over 85% or 90% of the doctors"
This definitely resonates, for every health condition the final recommendation is always "consult with a doctor", but if you get multiple opinions doctors will usually contradict each other, and most doctors have mixed opinions about their peers. Makes it hard to just do whatever a doctor tells you and feel you are making the right choice.
> He never drank alcohol in his life. It was a distinct advantage, especially in undergrad.
Social death in Blighty.
Our kid spent three years getting rat-arsed in the SU bar (like everyone else) and graduated with a Geoff Hurst in Physics. Just like his mum and dad did.
Do teachers and parents now actively encourage students to read aloud? I'd love to see a study showing this helps.
When I did this in middle school I was repeated told to stop, and that doing so or talking myself through math problems were "signs of mental illness," and I needed to keep it in my head.
For some reason, when I read aloud, I have a hard time concentrating on the content. It’s like reading aloud and comprehension are two different tasks that I need to multi-task.
Those “read a novel” and write about it every chapter really helps. I wonder if that type of exercise would work now kids know about AI, my guess is that parents shouldn’t tell their kids about LLMs too early as they can depend on it and mess them up
With respect. Go to the map of school attendance percentages by nation.
Once there, compare Senegal's school attendance percentage to the attendance percentages in the rest of West Africa.
And the bad news is that percentages in Senegal are likely juiced and then reported given the way the government works in Senegal. Whereas percentages in places like Ghana are likely reported as lower than they actually are due to the way the government works in Ghana.
Reading ability (and reading comprehension) is very correlated with IQ.
An IQ of 100 is not quite enough. Most people with that IQ can read (but not everybody, even discounting the dyslexics) and most people with that IQ can read relatively simple things.
You did (not your fault). Usually a Western country is used, often the UK. That doesn't really matter, though, as long as a sufficiently similar scale is used when comparing. Tests can be (and are) recalibrated sometimes.
Well you would need to know what the test looks like. If the bar is to understand the passage "The dog runs fast", You don't need to be a genius to comprehend it.
“The modern idea of testing a reader’s ‘comprehension,’ as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?”
For much history, most people were illiterate. Do we necessarily have reason to believe that proper reading comprehension is something that is available to everyone by virtue of proper education alone?
At risk of self-fulfilling a joke, I don't know exactly what you mean here.
The level of education UNESCO is talking about is not enormously challenging: "Minimum reading proficiency for the end of lower-secondary education means students can connect main ideas across different text types, understand the author’s intentions, and draw conclusions based on the text."
So yes, I think that is a reasonable objective for 12-15 year olds that should be available to everyone by virtue of proper education alone.
Indeed it is very difficult to give a 12-15 year old a proper education if they cannot do this. It's foundational. So one would almost expect any 12-15 year old who can be taught _anything abstract_ at an appropriate level to be able to do this.
The alarming thing about the data shown here is that it includes children who are not even in education, which would skew it down a lot in, say, "third world" countries, but should not be skewing it so much in western countries, and yet... slightly more than one in five of UK and US 12-15 year olds lack this skill according to that assessment.
Some of this might be fundamental reading challenges (visual impairment, dyslexia, attention and memory), but still, it is not a particularly good sign for the global figure if these rather ordinary western countries are scoring so low. (Singapore and Japan manage more like 85%)
The full explorable graph appears to be here for 2023 data -- I can't find it for 2024.
Belgium isn't exactly a bastion of solid infrastructure, nor is it incredibly well-known for the quality of it's education. Why is that country specifically so surprising for you?
> if they learn to solve real problems in the real world and it helps them
We have less evidence of this than of improvements in literacy rates. At least in the US, no part of the curriculum has anything to do with general life skills other than driver's ed and math, and innumeracy is far more common than illiteracy.
Literacy is essential to living in society without getting scammed or taken advantage of.
There's a scene in Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" that illustrates practical necessity of reading comprehension for the average person, where a grandmother tells a mother to save enough money over time and make sure the granddaughter can read. An excerpt follows:
--
"Will it work, this saving?"
"I swear by the Holy Mother it will."
"Then why haven't you ever saved enough money to buy land?"
"I did. When we first landed, I had a star bank. It took me ten years to save that first fifty dollars. I took the money in my hand and went to a man in the neighborhood of whom it was said that he dealt fairly with people who bought land. He showed me a beautiful piece of earth and told me in my own language; 'This is thine!' He took my money and gave me a paper. I could not read. Later, I saw men building the house of another on my land. I showed them my paper. They laughed at me with pity in their eyes. It was that the land had not been the man's to sell. It was ... how do you say it in the English ... a schwindle."
"Swindle."
"Ai. People like us, known as greenhorns from the old country, were often robbed by men such as he because we could not read. But you have education. First you will read on the paper that the land is yours. Only then will you pay."
--
Yes, you can certainly be relatively more educated than you started by going to school, even if you are not literate by the end. But reading comprehension and literacy is a crucial skill that has practical value for living a better life.
> that illustrates practical necessity of reading comprehension for the average person
Does it? In practice, the average person, even the above average person, hell, even the greatest minds, will typically seek the services of a lawyer when buying land exactly because they lack the comprehension necessary to avoid the tale you tell. And once you are outsourcing comprehension, literacy doesn't really buy you anything.
> will typically seek the services of a lawyer when buying land
I've seen a state where this is required by law, and I've seen a state where it wasn't. Very few people retained a lawyer when buying or selling land, in the latter.
I've bought property in both, and my state-required redistributional tax paid to a lawyer added zero to my confidence level. The extra middleman actually made me a tad more wary.
(I take your broader point, but reject the idea that lawyers are an especially useful element of a normal real estate transaction, for most people, at least in the US—I mean, on some level a lawyer drafted some form-documents and maybe some institution involved had a lawyer quickly glance at something at some point even in the rarely-using-lawyers state, but as a buyer or seller, directly interacting with a lawyer? IDK, maybe if you're involved in a FSBO transaction with no agents involved and also no financing)
> The average person, even the above average person
So, people who are likely to be literate will seek out assistance when they realise they don't understand something? One might wonder if their literacy has anything to do with that...
Those who are illiterate, at least of those who could become literate, realize they don't understand something right from the get-go. It turns out they also typically seek the services of lawyers when buying land for the same reasons.
That’s a pretty rosy view of the world. If that were true, the 2008 housing crisis wouldn’t have been nearly as bad.
People get taken advantage of all the time because they don’t understand what they’re signing—and society’s conditioned us to agree to whatever’s put in front of us, from cell phone contracts to software usage to major investments.
Plus, lawyers aren’t everywhere, and they’re not cheap. Most people can’t afford to just hire one whenever they need help.
> the 2008 housing crisis wouldn’t have been nearly as bad.
I'm not sure I agree. Lawyers aren't rulers, only advisers. They can give you a perfect understanding of the situation, and if you are caught in a fear of missing out state, which was certainly the case for many leading up to that timeframe, it is likely you'll ignore their advice anyway.
In fact, many US states legally require lawyer advisory before completing a real estate transaction. Those states certainly did not avoid the real estate bubble.
> People get taken advantage of all the time because they don’t understand what they’re signing
Absolutely. Being able to comprehend every situation is straight up impossible. Not even the greatest minds of our time are able to do that. Not even lawyers themselves, whose job is to comprehend written text, are able to comprehend every situation. They focus on narrow specialities for good reason.
There is no avoiding that situation. If someone wants to take advantage of you, they'll find a way.
I think the point this report (from UNESCO) is trying to make is that this "proper education alone" is not available for everyone to begin with. That said, clicking further it has a chart that shows more than 80% of countries have "some form of basic education" at least, which is double that of what it was 100 years ago.
But in countries where it is, it's highlighting that there's a way to go yet. It doesn't give all the data (after all, it's a website selling data) but it's pretty telling that a lot of countries that we think of as having good education (like most of Europe) are not in the top five.
I'm sure your point is great and all, but with Europe having about 50 countries, most of them can not be in the top five for a given subject no matter what.
I wonder if the majority of people would have improved comprehension by listening or watching a video. For much of human history, knowledge was transferred orally, so maybe humans are naturally better at that. With the ubiquitous of video, do people really need to be expert readers and writers?
> For much of human history, knowledge was transferred orally, so maybe humans are naturally better at that.
I'm dubious of that inference: For much of human history (we are mostly unchanged from 200k years ago), we lived poorly and made no technological progress.
When all we had was oral knowledge transfer, we spent at least a couple of 100k years making no progress.
When writing was invented, progress came almost immediately.
To me it seems fairly clear that progress was basically non-existent until writing was invented. This makes me think that oral knowledge sharing is the worst form there is.
I don't know where the idea "everyone" will be able to achieve a certain minimum reading comprehension came from and it's trivial to show that wouldn't be true.
As I understand it, the topic is more about the differences between countries in the chart rather than somehow achieving 100%. E.g. how Ireland sits around 87% while Senegal sits at 2%. If Senegal were able to afford the same overall quality of education for their students as Ireland don't you think the would have significantly higher numbers?
Everyone? No. But depending on how reading comprehension is defined / tested I would suspect at least 90% of individuals are capable of full reading comprehension.
How would / do you assess your own reading comprehension level? I mean I'll freely admit I struggle with higher levels / legalese, and frequently struggle to express myself in words, both in my native languages and English.
(I'm aware this is a subtle flex / humblebrag, lol)
Legalese seems to me a different category more akin to technical writing. I wouldn’t classify difficulty understanding a legal document as a general lack of reading comprehension. It requires specific domain knowledge.
I -think- this is the appropiate interactive plot: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-children-reachin...
The controls are annoying, but world level data only goes back to 2000:
* 2000: 38%
* 2005: 41%
* 2010: 45%
* 2015: 47%
* 2019: 48.5% (this is the closest point)