Hilarious mistakeful anon aside, I was just digging through this topic last week, and let me lead off:
The National Literacy Institute is selling professional development courses, it is in their financial interest to tell you scary numbers, and they are not transparent about the sources of most of their claims. I'm not accusing them of lying about any of it, because I can't prove it, but let's find better sources just to be safe.
I went directly to the OECD, who have done international studies into what they call adult competencies―reading, maths, and interfacing with technology, considered the skills someone needs "to be fully functional in one's society." These data are especially important because they've been repeated; we know what the world looks and has looked like, in snapshots a decade apart.
You're encouraged to dive into the bar graphs yourself if you're curious, but I'm gonna distill a couple of really scary figures for you that are relevant to the OP. You might want to sit down for these.
Only 44% of Americans and 51% of Canadians have the reading skills necessary to fully function in their society―being able to engage with art, recognize bias in their news sources, and understand the political platforms that they're voting on. Ten years earlier, these were 50% of Americans and 52% of Canadians.
Here's the gut punch, though: 28% of Americans (up from 18%) and 19% of Canadians (up from 16%) cannot read anything more complex than bullet-point lists or short, single-clause sentences.
We tend to think "illiterate" means, like, "doesn't know what the alphabet is," but you can't tell me it doesn't also apply to someone who can't remember the beginning of a sentence by the time they get to the end of it. This is not a learning disability! Broadly speaking, the people reflected in that statistic do not have measurable developmental or physical disabilities; they simply were improperly taught, never learned, and now cannot read the written word.
Tumblr pissing on the poor. Booktokers who "only read the dialogue." Everyone you know who only reads the headlines and never the articles. The odds are good that most of these people are literally, functionally, illiterate. Sorry if this scares you.
I made a deliberate point not to throw audiobook listeners under the bus in this post, because I've been a longtime and staunch believer that the technology doesn't prevent a person from engaging with storytelling―a poem does not stop being a poem when it is spoken, and a novel does not stop having chapters and a plot when it is read aloud―but if we're going to look the literacy crisis in the face we need to reckon with the likelihood that we've let some people fly under the radar, here, too.
