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While it may be bullshit that America is currently falling behind China and India, the fact that the majority of American adults are not functionally literate is a serious problem.

Just curious, do you have a citation for this? It seems very surprising to me, and I suspect that whoever cooked up this statistic may have set a very high bar for "functionally literate".

Study here: http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF

There are a couple example questions in that, but if you want to understand the full methodology you'd have to read this:

http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11267

Basically the situation is that:

According to the National Adult Assessment of Literacy (NAAL), the largest and most authoritative survey of adult literacy in America, only 13% of adults are able to read English at a 'proficient' level. This means that 87% of American adults lack the minimum level of literacy skill necessary to complete simple tasks like comparing the viewpoints in two editorials or computing the cost per ounce of food items. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the minimimum amount of education required to participate in the knowledge economy or to contribute anything meaningful to the democratic process. Source: Table 1 on p. 3, Figure 2 on p. 4. Adults unable to read prose at a 'proficient' level, by race/ethnicity: White - 83%, Asian/Pacific Islander - 88%, Hispanic - 96%, Black - 98%.

Adults unable to read prose at a 'proficient' level, by educational attainment: High school graduates - 96%, College graduates - 69%, Graduate studies/degrees - 59%. In other words, the majority of graduate students are incapable of fully understanding a newspaper, let alone an academic journal article. And virtually all high school graduates are functionally illiterate. (And again, being 'proficient' does not mean being able to read academic journal articles, which is sort of the minimum requirement for being an independent thinker in society. In fact at least 2 / 3rds of those who score 'proficient' still do not possess this more advanced measure of literacy.)

John Taylor Gatto also gives his analysis of the situation here based on the 1992 data. (The data I cited was 2003)

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm

Gatto throws in a couple weasel words, and I think sometimes his analysis is a bit reaching, but overall it seems to be generally accurate. Even if you don't fully buy into the idea of an enormous decline over the last 100 years, the current methodology of the National Adult Literacy Survey seems pretty solid. (That's currently the gold standard for literacy estimates in the US.)

But what about the CIA World Factbook, which estimates that the United States has a 97% literacy rate as of 2002? Where do these figures come from? To quote from Jonathan Kozol's book Illiterate in America, "For one hundred years, starting in 1840, the census posed the question of the population's literacy level in its ten-year compilations. The government removed this question from its survey in the 1940 census. The reason, according to a U.S. Census Bureau publication, was a general conviction that 'most people [by this time] could read and write ...'

In 1970, pressured by the military, the Bureau of the Census agreed to reinstate the literacy question. Even then, instead of posing questions about actual skills, the census simply asked adults how many years of school they had attended. More than 5 percent of those the census reached replied that they had had less than a fifth grade education. For no known reason, the government assumed that four fifths of these people probably could read and, on this dangerous assumption, it was publicly announced that 99 percent of all American adults could read and write. These are the figures which the U.S. government passed on to the United Nations for the purposes of worldwide compilations and comparisons." You can read the rest of chapter 5 here, which further explains the methodology and how the CIA figures are propaganda rather than science:

http://eserver.org/courses/spring97/76100o/readings/kozol.ht...

> In other words, the majority of graduate students are incapable of fully understanding a newspaper

I think this indicates a serious problem with the study. While I'm sure there are exceptional cases where someone could graduate from a post-graduate program as functionally illiterate[1], every other non-exceptional case is able to function quite well in our society. You don't need to know every word in the newspaper (you can get those through contextual clues) or if there are 8 ounces in a cup or a pint (I'd Google it) in order to function in our society or to interact with other people writing the same language.

[1] Using the common sense definition found at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

I think you're right on the cup vs. pint type questions. But quantitative literacy is only one of the three types of literacy they are measuring, so it doesn't really change the overall picture much.

As I suspected, they set a rather high bar for "proficient".

According to this study, a non-proficient person can: consult reference materials to figure out which foods contain a certain vitamin, calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalog, or figure out what they are permitted to eat before a medical test.

In India, we actually have a significant number of people who are functionally illiterate. Most people can't leave a note saying "please make sambhar" note for the cook.

Regardless of how exactly you define the word 'proficient', the fact is that these people spend 13 years in government schools at a cost of ~$200,000 and at the end of it they're unable to read at a level that would allow them to vote intelligently or contribute in any meaningful way to the democratic process.

If people can only read well enough to be consumers but not producers then it's only so long before society collapses, regardless of whether or not they're getting their vitamins.

The democratic process is a red herring. As I pointed out elsewhere, if we really cared about improving the democratic signal/noise ratio, we'd just bar morons from voting.

As for society collapsing, I think you grossly underestimate the value low intelligence people can provide when suitably directed. Consider walmart - it's a vast command economy which employs about 1% of the US (mostly taken from the bottom percentiles) and has improved the standard of living for millions.

A bunch of morons couldn't create walmart themselves. But they can still create great value when directed by a small number of intelligent people.

I'm curious as to why the above comment is being downvoted. I'm aware that some people downvote for mere disagreement or dislike but I hope it's not that widespread yet.

I think you have a point with the voting. If only it was that easy in practice - there are so many moral and ethical issues when it comes to drawing a line for "intelligent enough to vote".

A standardized test would be hard to impose, since how does one measure someone's ability to make good judgments about something?

Dictatorship of smart morons. Yay

  we'd just bar morons from voting.

They tried that in Thailand. Replace Morons with Rural citizens and they tried to do exactly that.

This lead not only to a total political gridlock for years, but to actual death and mayhem.

You can't have a semi democracy where the elite decides, who's eligible to vote. It's either all or nothing.

> You can't have a semi democracy where the elite decides, who's eligible to vote.

Historically, that's just an oligarchy or plutocracy.

Heck even being governed by a "council of elders" is a semi-democracy if not all elders are approved by the council to join their ranks.

They also tried it in the American South as part of Jim Crow: "literacy" tests that were hard for anyone to pass, with grandfather clauses so that all of the illiterate whites could keep voting (in fact, that's where the term "grandfather clause" comes from).

The problem with the term "moron" is that it is too easily applied to mean, "people who I don't think should be allowed to vote, no matter how intelligent they might actually be."

Racists were also in favor of socialism, gun control, teaching evolution in school, reduced taxation, labor unions, and freshly baked apple pie.

The fact that racists favor a corrupted version of a certain policy does not imply that the policy is bad.

> we'd just bar morons from voting.

Then, the next step would be preventing them from having kids...

You know it's a very, very bad idea. Morons are part of the society and deserve to have their voices heard. Any democratically elected government mirrors the society it came from.

When the government hires someone, the portion that person pays in tax goes back to the government, so the $200000 cost figure is misleading.

In case anybody wants to know exactly what the NAAL test measures, there are some example questions here:

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_items.asp

They're setting the bar pretty low. Not so low you can't bear to look at it, but still, wow.

The USA is special, when it comes to demographic statistics. I've heard the US is often bimodal - there's one distribution for people who live in reasonable areas, and people who live in places where there is generational poverty, gang violence, drug dealers everywhere, no jobs, and so on.

OK, immigrants also do a little poorer, especially informal immigrants. And some states are wealthier than others. But this is all stuff that other countries deal with as well.

The US seems to allow large areas of their cities to become extremely poor. Maybe it's a hold-over from the semi-apartheid days before the civil rights act, when there were black areas and white areas; I don't know.

Maybe the solution is for local councils to try and mix up the communities more, encouraging low-income housing to be dispersed throughout the city. Yeah, it sucks to have a few poor families in the neighbourhood, but it's better than having whole neighbourhoods of poor people.

"Maybe the solution is for local councils to try and mix up the communities more, encouraging low-income housing to be dispersed throughout the city."

The problem is that, as the Coleman Report showed us in the mid 60s, while this is in theory the best solution it requires you to have 12-15 high-SES people for every one low-SES person. And U.S. society no longer has anywhere near enough high-SES people left in order to socialize the low-SES people. So a long decline is essentially inevitable at this point due to simple math and demographics.

While there are theoretically other solutions, they are too complicated for the average person to understand, so they have very little chance of being implemented.

> The USA is special, when it comes to demographic statistics. I've heard the US is often bimodal - there's one distribution for people who live in reasonable areas, and people who live in places where there is generational poverty, gang violence, drug dealers everywhere, no jobs, and so on.

> OK, immigrants also do a little poorer, especially informal immigrants. And some states are wealthier than others. But this is all stuff that other countries deal with as well.

Just stop beating around the bush with PC euphemisms and say what you mean - "blacks and Hispanics are much worse off than whites, to the point that they have their own set of statistics. The states that have lots of them are significantly worse off than ones who don't."

> The US seems to allow large areas of their cities to become extremely poor. Maybe it's a hold-over from the semi-apartheid days before the civil rights act, when there were black areas and white areas; I don't know.

> Maybe the solution is for local councils to try and mix up the communities more, encouraging low-income housing to be dispersed throughout the city. Yeah, it sucks to have a few poor families in the neighbourhood, but it's better than having whole neighbourhoods of poor people.

Yeah, that doesn't work in America. Unlike those "other countries" you mentioned, we have virtually unlimited space, and the minute (poor) blacks or Hispanics move into a neighborhood, you get white flight all over again.

Race doesn't really correlate much with literacy beyond SES. The reason why it's important is that the children being born in the U.S. today are over half 'minority', so it's important in terms of being able to easily understand the longterm trend.

On the contrary, SES (or at least income, which is easy to measure) explains very little of racial gaps in education.

http://www.umich.edu/~rdytolrn/pathwaysconference/presentati...

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2963200

"Together these research sources demonstrated that although SES exerted statistically significant direct and indirect effects on reading, oral language skills – especially oral language comprehension skills – were a much stronger influence on reading achievement outcomes."

In other words, you want to choose a definition of SES that predicts how the parents interact with the children before age five, as it's not (mostly) income or race that creates the achievement gap. E.g. just separate the parents into welfare, working class, or professional, like Hart & Risley do in Meaningful Differences. I think in order to understand how SES effects the achievement gap, you need to choose a definition of SES that is broad and qualitative rather than quantitative and limited.

It's not just SES. Race correlates with the SES of school peers, as well. If you go to a poor (black) school in a poor (black) neighbourhood, then your own SES isn't your biggest problem.

And race does correlate with peer SES, as whites (and asians, and most hispanics, and well-off blacks) flee schools once there are too many low-SES blacks.

The question is - how big a problem is "white flight" / segregation. If it is seen as a huge cause of inequality, then there are ways to reduce it.

You know, race isn't the only factor... economics plays a big role as well. For example, look at Appalachia. There are many predominantly white areas there that are very poor and as a result also have poor literacy. Race and urban vs. suburbia aren't the only factors here.

>OK, immigrants also do a little poorer, especially informal immigrants.

Informal immigrants? What does that even mean? Like the kind who wear tie-dye shirts on Fridays?

> Hell, roughly half of American adults are so illiterate that they can't even read the one sentence instructions on their medications.

I'm not defending health illiteracy, but let's look at this rationally. What is the most logical and efficienct solution to half of Americans being unable to read labels on medicine?

A) Try to educate all those people

B) Make the damn labels easier to comprehend so that this problems wouldn't exist in the first place.

When the directions say "must be administered orally," can you really expect their meaning to be fully conveyed to every adult who reads them? Why can't we just change it to "drink it"?

Sure, it doesn't use the technical terms that healthcare professional are taught with. But despite all its scientific underpinnings, in the end, healthcare is about providing a (vital) service to customers. And if they lack the necessary skills to understand something, then the healthcare industry needs to respond to that deficiency, not the other way around.

"Make the damn labels easier to comprehend so that this problems wouldn't exist in the first place."

The solution is threefold: education, simplifying directions/processes, and changing culture. Changing the labels and creating things like extended release pills (so you only need to take one per day) is definitely the most low-hanging fruit in terms of fixing adherence, but it doesn't actually fix our democracy, economy, or culture.

Right. Dumbing everything down actually validates the claim "I don't have to learn algebra; I'll never use it in real life".

Perhaps medicine should be labeled with a word problem. "Jimmy takes medicine on all prime-numbered days, plus one."

America won't fall behind Indian and china for the reasons you mentioned. I'm from India and I can tell there is huge problem of illiteracy here has well. And I believe every nation on earth has these problems.

America today is loosing because of totally different reasons. And nobody but America as a nation is to be blamed for that. The way I see America is loosing out jobs that have earnings directly accounted by number of hours worked or volume delivered(In other words manufacturing kind of jobs). And for that every single aspect of the American society is responsible. Don't get me wrong, I'm for capitalism. But there is huge difference between mindless consumerism that goes on in America and what happens in the rest of the world. Coupled with high standards of living. It is, but impossible to provide manufacturing and other process based jobs at rates similar to that in China and India. And given the conditions under which most people are made to work is unthinkable in America.

There is a saying here, that if you don't want to do a particular job somebody is always out there who will do it.And will do it better over time, and during the same time begin to lead that market. This is what has happened, back then when America was not into pointless wars, and the tax system was sane. A lot of Americans didn't to the very same jobs which are today being shipped(And why would they, when you are paid well to do better jobs. And sometimes paid to do nothing at all - read social security benefits).

We have no such social security/medicare benefits alternatives here. Here either we slog and earn or just get wiped out.We don't enjoy/get vacations/trips. Most of us can't eat at restaurants everyday. We can't spend like hell, just to buy a new version of the iPhone.

Here in India, Its all about struggle to livelihood to its bare minimum necessities - Food, Clothing and Shelter.

We have no other option but to beat you. That's what we have to do to survive here.