Comment by etiennebausson
8 hours ago
>150 million functionally illiterate people in Europe
1/3 of the population functionally illiterate in Europe seems beyond wild to me.
Are you talking about technical illiteracy? security illiteracy?
Or do you mean they can't read english, which is a very different thing.
Functionally illiterate means that they can read in their own language, but they cannot understand the meaning, a part from very simple things.
And we're heading to giving better quality feedback loops to AI models than people. Put this together with ignorance being the mother of evil and...
How good this can become?
50% of the population are below average intelligence.
"functionally illiterate" means that while you can read your native language, you will not correctly understand what you have just read.
Rates seem to vary state by state, from as low as 8% (denmark) to 43% (romania).
It's also not a clearly defined target, since it would be better to have rates based on the reading comprehension of the average school at year X or something similar.
I'm curious about this definition, just because it's not something I've ever considered before and googling seems to muddy the water even more.
Is it "functionally illiterate" if you can read the language aloud and not understand it, if you also wouldn't have understood the same thing spoken to you? That seems like it's about comprehension ability, not literacy.
Although one thing that just occurred to me is that if your reading level is low, you might be using all your cognition on reading so that you don't have spare capacity to understand as well - that's frequently the case for me with e.g. Chinese where I can read an entire passage out and then the teacher asks what the passage was about and I'm just thinking "I dunno, I wasn't thinking about that but I think I understood everything".
And that's definitely a different problem to being able to sound out the words, but just having no idea what those words mean, whether you read them or heard them.
And does it have to be your native language, or in any language? Not trying to nitpick, it just feels like the phrase can be usefully applied to a foreign language too.
posters upthread are talking about comprehension and value systems, not literacy.
"functionally illiterate" is the brush that one paints with when describing people of opposing political viewpoint or lower socioeconomic status, for example.
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Dunno what the OP meant, but in the UK
https://www.southtyneside.gov.uk/article/16247/Public-Health...
> Guidance tells us the average reading age in the North East is lower than the national average at between 9 to 11 years. To put that into context The Guardian Newspaper has a reading age of 14 and the Sun Newspaper has a reading age of 8.
Health literacy specifically is a major problem in healthcare
https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-lite...
> 1 in 4 (26.7% / 931,000 people) adults in Scotland experience challenges due to their lack of literacy skills.
I find that page somewhat ironic as they claim 18% is one in six, but 17.4% is one in five. Seems numeracy is as big a challenge.
The US is no better according to wikipedia
> In 2023, 28% of adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above
> Adults scoring below Level 1 can comprehend simple sentences and short paragraphs with minimal structure but will struggle with multi-step instructions or complex sentences
> Adults scoring at Level 3 or above are considered "proficient at working with information and ideas in texts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States