I read somewhere that some crazy high percentage (over 20%?) of americans were functionally illiterate. I’m in korea where the literacy rate is something like 99%. It’s unheard of that an adult who does not have a serious mental disability does not know how to read and write. Why are so many americans iliterate?? Is it related to obesity?
Comments
I don’t know any
That number comes from the fact that a lot of people speak Spanish as their first language. They are just bad at English, they aren’t illiterate.
I can’t read Spanish
Functional illiteracy isn’t the same as not being able to read at all. The vast majority of adults I know can read in the sense that if you ask them to read something like a newspaper or a medical consent form aloud they’re perfectly able to do so. I’ve only ever personally met one person who really couldn’t and there was some serious history of childhood educational neglect there.
I do know quite a few people, particularly with less well resourced educational backgrounds who have concerning levels of difficulty getting complex information from texts — to the extent they’d probably benefit from somebody explaining written information about important financial or medical life events applied to them specifically to be sure they got it. But they can still read.
There is a difference between illiterate and functionally illiterate.
It has absolutely nothing to do with obesity where did you even get that? Thags so far and unrelated.
The statistic isnr just people who cant read it also includes the people who didn’t need to learn to read stuff outside if whats needed for their lives an occupations like farm workers and people who do manual labor
They can read, irs just mainly stuff that they beed to beable to do their jobs. They’re not going to be able to properly understand a novel but they can read a receipt and contracts
Edit: to answer your question, i don’t know anyone who is illiterate
How did you connect illiteracy and obesity? Is it simply because these are two rare things in Korea?
That 20% includes people who are not native English Speakers. For native speakers, it is only 9%, which is still pretty high in my opinion. Part of the problem is that there are very few standards for education nationally, rather, there are hundreds of district school regulations. And on top of that, parents can take their kids out of school and teach them at home, which they sometimes don’t really do. No, obesity doesn’t have anything to do with that lol. And by the way, South Korea actually has an obesity rate pretty close to the US.