Question above is pretty blunt but was doing a study for a college course and came across that stat. How is that possible? My high school sucked but I was well equipped even with that sub standard level of education for college. Obviously income is a thing but to think 1 out of 5 American adults is categorized as illiterate is…astounding. Now poor media literacy I get, but not this. Edit: this was from a department of education report from 2022. Just incase people are curious where that comes from. It does also specify as literate in English so maybe not as grim as I thought.
One small part of the problem I only learned about recently is the Whole Language approach to teaching reading. Basically teaching kids to guess what words make sense instead of actually teaching them how to read. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s but continued to be used in some parts of the US into the 2010s. An entire chunk of the US population (and a few other countries as well) was literally not taught phonics/sounding it out because their teachers or schools followed this ineffective alternative method.
Of course that’s far from the only factor, but it’s one many aren’t aware of.
This scares the crap out of me. My daughter’s mother and I both went to the same preschool, where phonics was drilled into our heads from age three. Our 4-year-old daughter is now learning how to read, and she is not learning phonics. We are taking upon ourselves to make sure that she is exposed to phonics as much as possible this summer before school tries to hopelessly mangle her reading skills. I’ve already noticed her pointing out text and saying what they say, but it’s obvious she just looked at context clues like a picture to figure it out and didn’t actually read it.