this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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It’s not hyperbole, this is an actual serious issue in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have high enough reading skills to extrapolate and cross reference data from things like text books and journal articles. Something like 40% of American adults can’t read well enough to comprehend multi-step prompts (e.g. they struggle with stuff like bus schedules). About 15-20% of American adults can’t read at a basic level, very simple things like medicine bottles. Depending on the survey these numbers can vary a bit
Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language but the main reason is that we’ve simply eroded education quality for decades. I work with teenagers who are in high school and can barely throw together a coherent email. Statistically, most adults don’t read for pleasure at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Look under “literacy rates” section
Let's not blame the immigrants for this.
First, there is no official language of the US. Literacy tests can be administered in Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, or whatever language the subject predominantly uses.
Second, the US does not have unusually high ratio of immigrant. That's a lie that had been created by right-wing bigots. The US is about 14% immigrant, which is not unusual compared to European countries.
Anecdotally, most of the complete dipshits I know are born in the US. The people that manage to immigrate are the individuala who can read and write well enough to understand immigration documents (with the help of a lawyer), and have a decent chunk of money, or necessary skillset to sustain their finances in the US.
This isn’t a “blaming immigrants” thing. 14% of the population is notable and while much of that population can speak, read, and write English better than native speakers a sizable portion only learn to speak it. This does go back to the official language thing (which actually is not true anymore, trump executive ordered it in his flurry of bullshit EOs). Before that EO they could just get government forms in their native tongue but now that’s probably jeopardized
But these studies generally look at literacy rates of English since, while it wasn’t the official language until very recently, it functionally was. So it’s not blaming immigrants but more explaining that yes, a portion of the data is attributed to people that do not speak English as a first language, rather than the native speakers who were failed by a collapsing public education system