Are Adults Forgetting How To Read? (economist.com) 101
One in five adults in developed nations demonstrate primary school-level literacy and numeracy skills, according to an OECD study of 160,000 people across 31 countries released December 10. The decennial Survey of Adult Skills reveals declining literacy rates over the past decade despite rising secondary education completion.
Finland topped rankings across all tested areas -- numeracy, literacy, and problem-solving -- while Japan, Norway and the Netherlands performed above average. The United States showed declining scores, with Chile, Italy, Poland and Portugal reporting high proportions of below-average performers. The study found widening skill gaps between top and bottom performers, with declining scores concentrated among lower-performing adults.
Finland topped rankings across all tested areas -- numeracy, literacy, and problem-solving -- while Japan, Norway and the Netherlands performed above average. The United States showed declining scores, with Chile, Italy, Poland and Portugal reporting high proportions of below-average performers. The study found widening skill gaps between top and bottom performers, with declining scores concentrated among lower-performing adults.
Re:Literacy stats are always questionable (Score:5, Insightful)
The OECD is run out of France, though.
And we're not looking at absolute numbers, we're looking at changes over time.
I'm all for viewing numbers a government puts out about its own success with suspicion, but this objection makes no sense in context.
Re:Literacy stats are always questionable (Score:5, Insightful)
The OECD is run out of France, though.
And we're not looking at absolute numbers, we're looking at changes over time.
I'm all for viewing numbers a government puts out about its own success with suspicion, but this objection makes no sense in context.
I feel like someone should point out that even if you're measuring changes over time, the methodology of measuring can change, as well, making old numbers not comparable to new numbers.
This happened with obesity in the US in 1993, when they changed the definitions of various categories and, with the stroke of a pen, created millions of new fat people. Ostensibly, to align the definitions used in the US with international standards, and purely by coincidence, also created millions of new customers for weight loss drugs.
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They had just taken the only effective weight-loss drug at the time off the market in 1993.
Your conspiracy theories need work.
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Which drug was that? I was thinking Dexatrim, but that was earlier than '93, no?
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I'm not sure if I did something to miscommunicate here.
"Had just" is pluperfect tense. It was already done as of 1993 was the very idea I wanted to communicate. Was there some way to phrase it that communicates the idea better?
Re: Literacy stats are always questionable (Score:2)
"had recently"
Or
"Had previously"
Depending.
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The weight loss industry has been worth tens of billions of dollars for decades. Removing one drug from the market had zero effect on that.
Strictly speaking, it really doesn't matter if a drug is effective or not, people buy it because they saw it advertised (after being told they were suddenly fat, despite their weight not changing), not because it's effective (which most people are incapable of determining).
Your insults need work.
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New data suggest that a shockingly large portion of adults in the rich world might not be. Roughly one-fifth of people aged 16 to 65 perform no better in tests of maths and reading than would be expected of a pupil coming to the end of their time at primary school
Put another way, 80% of adults, aged between 16 to 65 read better than primary school graduates.
Their loose language makes it hard to know if 20% are bad at maths AND reading or maths OR reading..
As long as texting is a common means of communicating among "kids" I don't fear for them becoming illiterate, and the math a child learns in Primary school is likely sufficient for most people in non-technical fields, being a little weak on long division isn't really a handicap in the modern world...
Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
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From what I have observed the majority of millennials and younger donâ(TM)t recreationally read.
From what we have observed with regards to speak-it-to-me technology, I’m wondering what constitutes “reading” these days. At any age.
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Hmm. I have noticed that Amazon increasingly offers me audio-books for normal ones I just bought. As I have bought zero audio-books in 25 years or so of being an Amazon customer, it cannot be anything I am doing.
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I dislike audio books because I can read far faster than the audio book reads it to me :|
Drives me crazy.
Re: Not surprising (Score:2)
You can crank up the speed on most platforms.
I'm with you, though. I'd rather just read at my own potentially variable pace. Maybe I think more about some parts than others for example. And I am a speed reader so if I increase the rate to match my reading rate it's going to sound like an auction.
The books that I prefer to hear are autobiographies or similar read by the author, when the author is an engaging reader. Stephen King's book on writing was great that way.
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I dislike audiobooks because of mispronunciation by the reader. This seems like something that should be caught by the production staff and corrected.
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Funny)
From what I have observed in decades of retail work, the majority of people of any age don't read anything, ever, even if their life literally depends on it.
"Where does it say that? You should have a sign!"
"You mean, like the one you're literally leaning on?"
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Well, anecdotally, I am an older person and I've read about 60 books in the year since I retired.
More seriously, most people regardless of age do not read or write much, but those that grew up with Facebook, X-Twitter, Tik-Tok, etc. seem less capable of paying attention when trying to read long passages, not that I'm much better.
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Older people read, though?
Sure we do, we read slashdot. And by read, I mean we misread the first two words and get angry about it. Also fuck you I'm not old.
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Some don't watch TV at all ( it's a waste of time considering what is considered entertainment these days )
Given the option, I would throw the TV into the trash and replace it with a giant aquarium. However, others
in the home do still watch it so it remains.
I have no idea how many books I've read thus far this year alone.
I get them via Kindle now because my bookshelf is completely out of room for new books :|
Paywalled (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is paywalled, so it's really hard to discern what this data means. The "forgetting how to read" sounds sketchy. Is there a specific segment of adult population whose reading skills have declined from some previous study? IE is the current 30-40 year old range performing worse now than they did 10 years ago when they were the 20-30 year old group?
The part of the article I can read says "people aged 16 to 65", so are those in the younger range, like 16-20, the ones bringing down the average because they are now included in the study? That's an entirely different thing that people "forgetting how to read".
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News is a business, and it's not the business of selling news. It's the business of selling ads. There's nothing but click-bait, and there hasn't been for decades.
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Yup, comprehension issues. Who cares whether the Economist summary is paywalled? Original is here: https://www.oecd.org/en/public... [oecd.org]
Report: https://www.oecd.org/content/d... [oecd.org]
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The Executive Summary starts on Pg.22. Prior to that the document is predominantly about the nature of skew, ie, sampling that does not reflect a proper population distribution due to lack of participation.
Reading between the lines in the Executive Summary, how an adolescent responds to education before reaching adulthood seems to have a lot to do with subsequent reading comprehension and problem solving skills in adulthood, if adolescents don't engage in education and learn to like it then they're setting
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These kinds of studies are always suspect. To the extent that the data itself is even accurate, usually it can be explained by demographic factors. For example, more homogeneous societies do better. Why? Because the bad homogeneous societies, like say Botswanaland, do badly, but the good ones like Finland or Japan, do well. Heterogeneous societies, like the US, which are a mixture of Botswanaland, Japan, and Mexico, do somewhere in the middle, and exactly where in the middle is determined by the coeffic
It blows my mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
It blows my mind how many people where I live (Canada) don't have library cards. When I was a kid, our trips to the library were a highlight. I loved browsing and picking books and then reading them at home for pleasure.
The library is a huge treasure-trove of reading material, and it's free. I still go to the library every couple of weeks and pick out 5-6 books. I can't imagine not reading for pleasure.
The decline of educational standards, especially in North America, is going to have an economic effect. We won't be able to compete if we don't have educated people who value learning.
Library cards (Score:3)
"It blows my mind how many people where I live (Canada) don't have library cards."
The equivalent of a library card today is a Kindle Unlimited subscription.
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A Kindle Unlimited subscription is not free.
Re: Library cards (Score:2)
Free from driving. Free from having to interact with other people.
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it's depressing to me how people think those two things are equivalent.
the *actual* equivalent is the ability to use your library card to borrow ebooks - a service most libraries in the modern world offer - seeing as you've paid for your local library system to purchase books. it seems rather silly to me to think "the same thing" as a library card is to give Amazon *additional* money for something you're already paying for.
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Lots of people pay for convenience. If you get depressed over that you're going to be depressed a lot.
Borrowing books, electronic or otherwise, from libraries is great. However, if you want to read something popular you're probably going to have to wait. If you want to read something the library doesn't have, you're probably going to have to wait, and often visit the library in person to request an inter-library loan.
And some people just like to own their books.
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Might want to check that. My library lets me place holds on books - ebooks, physical books, audiobooks if they're already checked out. They even tell me how long the queue is. I can do it right
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And this helps you read them right away how?
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Likewise, people have stopped subscribing to their local newspaper. Not to be rude, but the Internet has rendered the local library and newspaper mostly obsolete.
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Likewise, people have stopped subscribing to their local newspaper. Not to be rude, but the Internet has rendered the local library and newspaper mostly obsolete.
Facebook and TikTok replacing the local newspaper is
part of the problem.
Of course, if local newspapers can be replaced by those, that's another part of the problem.
Re: It blows my mind... (Score:2)
One cannot replace the other, but the former costs money, the latter is free, and the latter *seems* to replace to former. The similarity of gossip to news is close enough that many people miss the distinction. That has shown up in many surveys newspapers conduct to try to figure out how to stay relevant. It is a hard problem to solve: only the wealthy will have access to news IF this trend continues.
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On the contrary, newspaper corporations themselves have rendered the local newspaper mostly content free. They've abandoned local reporters and local printing which guarantees it arrives just as slowly as national newspapers. They repeat entire pages of local events as filler day after day, only changing when the date of the event passes and call that news. And they load up wire stories for news. Even local sports is minimal although that was never an interest of mine. I gave up the local paper last year af
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Yea, but which came first, the decline in newspaper revenues (partly due to free crap on the web) or the the decline in newspaper content. Based on my observations over the last 20 years, I'm going with the decline in content as only following the loss of money to pay reporters, printing facilities, etc.
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"Education standards" is misframing the problem.
We have so many fucking standards: standards for teaching practices, standards for student performance, standards for school structure, standards for testing. And they're standards we're not meeting because of declines in effective teacher pay, increases in punitive bureaucracy, socio-economic distress eroding the typically-educated middle class, and a fuck-ton of vague damage caused by the internet.
There are pockets within the failing countries where perform
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I love to read as well. Although, I've intentionally cut back from the book a day I did in 2023 (253 so far this year that I bothered to rate).
But driving to the library and walking around stacks of books? Bah. My Kindle has its own 6,000+ library of books that I've downloaded when they were free on Amazon. I'm gradually plowing through them. And occasionally I find my tastes have changed and I expunge some that are still waiting to be read. That's all my Amazon Prime subscription is good for in my opinion
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I walk to my library; I don't drive. It's 1.2km away. And browsing the stacks of books is part of the pleasure. For me, it makes the act more intentional and visceral than browsing the Internet for books.
Re: It blows my mind... (Score:2)
The library is where the homeless people all go to watch porn.
I think I'll stick with buying books.
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The library is where the homeless people all go to watch porn.
Well, you must live in a pretty terrible place. My local library is a great place; not only does it have books, but it has meeting rooms, presentations and community activities. You can also borrow musical instruments and use the 3D printers in the library's maker space. It's a real community hub.
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As to libraries, same here, although I switched to buying when I discovered that non-translated books are so much better.
As to educational standards in North America, they have never been good. What has, so far, propped up the situation is importing academics. But that is bound to get harder and harder at least for the US with everything there slowly (or probably faster from January 2025 on) going to shit.
Do I lack reading skills? (Score:2)
OK, so 1 in 5 adults read on first grade level.... but how many are better than that and how many are worse than that?
Or do I lack reading skills?
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You do lack reading skills. Primary school goes beyond first grade.
They wrong (Score:3)
I ARE READ GOOD
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kno.
Re:They wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Me fail English? That's unpossible.
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I bet you do other stuff good too!
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FTFY
Real World Wizardry (Score:3)
I told my young Nephew if he wants real world superpowers in this day and age, just get good at reading, as it brings good reading comprehension.
As an IT professional, nearly 90% of the calls I get in a day stem from a lack of comprehension of the prompt. (mostly because of immigration, and English as a second language syndrome but we wont go so far as to be racist here).
Lawyers are modern wizards who take language to new heights, and are paid well.
Prompting Ai is all about relations to words.
Even in traditionally physical work like tradesman, knowing how to reference material guides, specs and digest words will put you ahead of your contemporaries.
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just get good at reading
just become good at reading
Fixed that for your nephew.
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Lol no he's a gamer and a millennial, "get good" is PROPER English my dood.
Department Of Education (Score:2, Funny)
A former wrestling CEO is going to be leading the department of education. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19... [npr.org]
I'm sure everything will be fine.
Less to do with literacy, than lack of attention (Score:5, Insightful)
In a world where almost all information consumed is digital, I refuse to believe that adults are losing ability to read. Rather, I suspect that if you dive into this, it has more to do with how reading comprehension tests work - you can't pass them just by reading bite-size snippits of text, you need to read long passages and then answer questions on them.
As such, what adults are losing is not "the ability to read" - they are losing the ability to focus enough to consume longer pieces of information. They would have no problem reading text messages or short news stories and tweets, but they would never be able to comprehend a multi-page magazine article, let alone a book.
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A distinction without a difference.
Short attention spans are from so much literacy! (Score:2)
A distinction without a difference.
I disagree. People are impatient, but I wager more people read more words today than they did 30 years ago. If anything, it's our constant reading that has made us lose patience with bad writing. So yeah, they may not be able to comprehend as well some New Yorker Magazine circle jerk or pretentious NYT weekender piece about the art world 50 years ago...but that's just impatience with shitty writing.
An analogy could be made with food. Give me yummy food and I'll eat yummy food. If I had all the Chip
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"digital" info sharing is more in the from of listening to podcasts or watching videos... Little reading necessary for either.
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Not really. The vast majority of social media is still text based.
Even on Instagram, the main purpose of the photo is to get people to read the post, and everyone does so.
And half the people who watch a TikTok are doing it on silent mode and reading the captions.
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I'd go a bit further and say the ability to express clearly and concisely through the written word has declined dramatically through the decades, well before literacy rates started to plummet (with the usual suspects of post-modernism and overly involved testing regimes leading the charge)
I mean it is fine and good to single out reading comprehension, but as anyone who has had to read through any instruction manual written in the past few years, the ability to organize complex ideas into a coherent whole is
Assistant fundamental fail (Score:2)
It is not just reading. Writing skills have degraded also. I don't think this is necessarily due to the individual though. The environment of today promotes this.
As an example, look at handwriting skills. Everything today is typed - keyboards on computers, touchscreens on phones. People learn how to type efficiently but if you hand them a pencil and paper and ask them to handwrite something you get Homer Simpson chicken scratch out.
Another seemingly benign one is spell and grammar checkers. When th
Flip (Score:2)
I see what you guys are trying to do here (Score:3)
You want us to start reading the articles, no?
This isn't my first rodeo, nosirreebob. Nice try, though.
GUIs, videos and pod casts are easier (Score:2)
And cause a dumbing down of learning and content
Keep in mind, Xerox PARC, when they introduced pointing devices and GUIs, was attempting to make computing to developmentally challenged children.
Their widespread use has turned the world into exactly that.
Wanna know why we have dumb voters? Now ya know.
Which brings up the question (Score:2)
Reading recreationally is a choice and reflects (in some small part) education and emotional/intellectual development. Did you grow up eager to learn new things?
I wonder what the level of recreational reading is (relative to the general population) with the slashdot community... We tend to be educated and intellectually 'busy'.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I always have a stack of books waiting for me to read. I even installed a wall-light to make reading in bed easier.
Data point and opinion (Score:2)
"Forgetting how to read" in this context means reading at or below a 6th grade level. If you've read "A wrinkle in time", that's a 6th grade level book (256 pages, no pictures).
The authors of this study choose to use the word "illiterate" to describe anyone at or below this reading level. I strongly object to this redefinition. The authors of a paper on literacy, presumably including at least one English major, should understand that words have meanings.
Imagine my surprise (Score:2)
I have always considered reading to be the gateway drug to critical thinking. And if a news item is ONLY available as video of a talking head chatting about a problem with no associated text it becomes easy to skip. Typical news folks are 60 to 80 words per minute -- a fraction of reading rates. And no way to double back if a later statement conflicts with a former. And it is sad how much of the daily news feed is talking heads.
Here is the OECD article (Score:2)
Non paywalled and all. With commentary and the data.
https://www.oecd.org/en/about/... [oecd.org]
I thank my adorable parents for reading to me in bed, buying me comics then buying me gamebooks to make me graduate from comics then vanilla books. I also thank my primary school teachers for paying attention to their pupils and knowing their tastes and being able to advise us books we would enjoy in our compulsory reading sessions. I am also thankful for these children books for kids 7-10 which while being for kids had som
Who would take this test? (Score:2)
If I got a phone call about taking such a test, I'd hang up the moment that I realized it was not a real business or personal call, which is typically the moment they ask for me by name. Who then is the type of person who would take this test? Not the smartest, that's for damn sure. It's some meth head who got promised 20 bucks for their time.
Die, clowns (Score:1)
Too Long, Did Not Read (Score:2)
Needs to shorter
Misleading. (Score:2)
It's the bottom dropping out (Score:2)
The biggest issue is the "achievement gap" between top and bottom scorers. Just as the wealth gap is widening between the "haves" and "have nots" so too is the education gap. The difference between struggling public schools and the very best ones in countries like the U.S. staggering. It's not uncommon for a top high school to have average entering students that are 4-5 years ahead of those from an underperforming one. My spouse did teach for America at a school where entering 9th graders needed instruction
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People are increasingly getting their news from questionable video sources and don't seem to be able to research or read anything to counter completely fabricated stuff.
Re: Decline in general intelligence (Score:2)
From what I can tell they mostly aren't trying. They just reshare anything that agrees with their prejudices and refuse to read counter citations. We'll never know if they could read them or not.
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There is evidence for that. At the very least reading comprehension has been replaced with wishful thinking by a lot of supposedly adult people. Well, one of the more reliable indicators for an empire in decline. Might be a good time to emigrate.
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The responses to parent comment illustrate exactly what I've seen from my friends on both sides the past few elections. My lefty friends did it in 2024, and my righty friends did it in 2016: Call the people who voted for the candidate they didn't like stupid.
They are so consumed by hatred for the opposing team's candidate, they cannot conceive of a world where smart, informed voters deliberately chose to vote for that person. So they rationalize their side's loss by saying that all those other voters are to
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Either it wasn't rigged, and he won fair and square, or it was - by the people in charge at the time - and they still lost.
What part of that is hard to understand?
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^^ At least we have this poster here, singlehandedly raising the average... Keep up the good work, the nation depends on you.
/s
Re: Decline in general intelligence (Score:2)
There it is guys, the whole democratic political ideology in a nutshell. 200,IQ stuff.
Re: Decline in general intelligence (Score:2)
Yes, and tap water is paint thinner too.
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Tap water is paint thinner for water-based paints.
No idea what your point was.
Re: Decline in general intelligence (Score:2)
No idea what "horse dewormer" is supposed to mean either. Horses drink water too, I don't see anyone calling water "horse thirst quencher".
So is it clear now or do I break out the finger paints?
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I cannot, nor will I attempt, to decipher your incoherent ramblings. You completely failed by attempting sarcasm with a true statement in your first statement, now it seems you do not understand basic language concepts, and how words work eludes you. I cannot fathom what irrational, random pathways your thoughts take, and have zero desire to try.
Also, finger paints use tap water as paint thinner, so you have shown that despite knowing they exist, your first statement was not even consistent with your own kn
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Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug, was believed by some, mostly on the right, to prevent or cure COVID due to misinformation being shown to them. Mom experienced issues with that one of the drugs identified was one of her arthritis drugs.
However, human packaged ivermectin is hard to get if you aren't a doctor and don't have a doctor who also buys into the rumor. Plus, even with that, human ivermectin got into very short supply during that time. I actually got the stuff as a kid for a parasite infection,