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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

This is an 8th grade exam from 1912 from Bullitt County in Kentucky for White students.

It's not representative of the average American during that era - who would not have made it to 8th grade.

Heck, in 1910, Kentucky had a 17% illiteracy rate [0]

The fact that illiteracy using the IMF definition is non-existent in the US automatically means your average 8th grader today is better off than one a century ago.

And if I'm honest, the exam itself doesn't seem that different from content I dealt with in 4th-6th grade and I was attending an urban lower middle class school back then.

[0] - https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1910/Vol1...

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Practically all American adults are "literate" in the sense that they can recognise and write some words, but about 14% can't really read in any useful sense - they can usually understand a warning sign or recognise a brand name, but they couldn't reliably understand a one-paragraph newspaper article or find a program in a TV listing.

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009481.pdf

That’s shockingly high. As somebody that has been literate for decades, I can’t even fathom how you would survive. Or if that’s taken care of, how would you entertain yourself?

I'd imagine it's much easier today, than it was in the past. We have TikTok and other forms of simple to access entertainment, no heavy reliance on cash and writing checks, and worse case you just ask someone else to help you.

Although I assume illiteracy indirectly implies that you can speak the language in some acceptable form, I would imagine it would be similar to living in another country without knowing the language. You go into the McDonald's click on the pictures of the food you want, press the big green button, then use your plastic card.

It's even worse than you think. The standard for "literate" is nothing I would describe that way. Take a look at the data here: https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-...

And note that very few counties in the US have a score above 276, which is the top of the range described as "Respondents can paraphrase or make low-level inferences."

Yeah, that’s not really what comes to mind for me when I hear about “literacy”. The standards they use to measure literacy aren’t just about being able to read words, but being able to reason with the information. I’m curious is they can reason about the information if it comes up in a spoken format, otherwise it sounds more like a general cognitive impairment and not something specific to written words

I'd steer clear from comparing countries based on Functional Illiteracy because the US is the only country that officially uses that definition and consistently collects data about this - which is good, because it is a forcing function for us to worker harder at solving functional illiteracy as well.

That said, Germany's functional illiteracy rate is estimated to be comparable to the US [0]

It's a similar story with PISA as well - most other countries use it as a dick measuring contest by testing at gifted schools, but the NCES tries to randomize PISA testing in order to actually benchmark subnational performance and identify laggards.

[0] - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-31821-001

Americans suffer from the fact that most of them were taught to read using the whole language method, which has no scientific basis and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be ineffective.

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