For much history, most people were illiterate. Do we necessarily have reason to believe that proper reading comprehension is something that is available to everyone by virtue of proper education alone?
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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?