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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Important note - literacy isn’t simply about being able to recognize and pronounce letters and words. A person can sound out every word in English, and understand what each word says, and still be illiterate if they cannot comprehend the message the words express together.
That’s where this illiteracy arises - it’s a failure of reading comprehension. In this light, I imagine many of us have attempted conversation online with somebody functionally illiterate.
Literacy is also about English (at least as commonly reported in the US). About 1/3 of functionally illiterate adults in the US are foreign born. I have never seen literacy stats that measure "literate in any language".
That’s still really bad. If 2/3 of illiterate people were born in America, that really highlights how inconsistent education is in America.
When I was a kid, I lived in a regular suburban neighborhood but the middle school and high schools that I was zoned for were so awful that my parents enrolled me into a charter school. (The elementary school was fine) Since then, some of the crappy schools in my city are now magnet schools and so my parents’ house appears to be zoned to different schools. There appears to be less public schools now. That’s probably not a good thing.