Nearly half of teenagers globally cannot read with comprehension
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
A call gives you a lot more contextual clue than text. A lot.
If that's the case, then maybe the difference is less important these days than it once was?
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
Goal 4: "Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4#targets_and_indicators
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
SDG4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goal_4
SDG4 > Target 4.6: Universal literacy and numeracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goal_4...
The UN Stats 2024 Statistical Annex says there's no data for 4.6.1 since 2020? https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/files/report/2024/E_2024_54_Stat...
SDG e-Handbook re: Target 4.6.1: https://unstats.un.org/wiki/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId...
World Bank data series: SE.ADT.LITR.ZS, https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/millennium-d...
FRED Series > Literacy Rate, Adult Total for the World (SEADTLITRZSWLD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SEADTLITRZSWLD
There is no Literacy Rate data for the United States in World Bank or in FRED according to a quick search.
Literacy in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
The National Literacy Institute > Literacy Statistics 2024 - 2025 : https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
> On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
> 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
> 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
> Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.
But what about comprehension?
Reading comprehension: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_comprehension
"Millions of children learn only very little. How can the world provide a better education to the next generation?" https://ourworldindata.org/better-learning
Our topic page on Global Education: https://ourworldindata.org/global-education
Our wider catalog of education data: https://ourworldindata.org/data?topics=Global+Education
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/
Even when there were consequences, sometimes I still didn't care. I've since grown out of it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The title is quite alarming, but looking at the comments here it seems the number is growing... So it's more like a moment for celebration :)
"This year half of teenagers globally can read with comprehension!"
I've posted the latter to HN a few times, the one time that took traction was about three years ago, on 31 Dec 2021: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146>
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):
<https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp>
The OECD study is here: <https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...>
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...
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.
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.
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.
The US scores are relatively consistent going back over a half-century. TikTok and Cocomelon are not the culprits.
HN blames social media for everything, but this clearly isn’t it.
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...
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.
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.
I hated that it made it easier.
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.
I played but a miniscule role.
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.
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.
but there’s a stigma around that: smart people just “process”.
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.
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.
And the global average is a lot lower than 100...
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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.
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.
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...
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.
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'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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-children-reachin...
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.
Results hint at half of the world being underdeveloped.