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Inequality: Americans May Know How to Count, But They Don’t Know How to Read
Literacy is a class war.
Literacy means comprehending the laws that we support or protest. Literacy means being able to read the news and infer meaning within the context of our own lives. Literacy means knowing how to file an insurance claim and appeal it when it’s rejected.
The global analytics firm Gallup, released a report in 2020 stating that approximately 130 million adults in the U.S. have poor literacy skills. Gallup’s report also states that more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
That means most of us can’t read the dense print in a contract to understand it. Most Americans can’t apply the laws as written (in legalese) to their own behavior. And more than half of Americans can’t perform a job that requires more than a 6th-grade understanding of the manuals of America’s workplaces.
That means inequality. That also means a class struggle between the literate and the illiterate.
There was something else I noticed about that Gallup report. Funding, or at least a lack thereof. I don’t know if it’s Republicans or Democrats that are cutting funding for literacy, but funding for literacy is hard to come by. It’s not even a talking point in any campaign that I’ve ever seen.
I have never seen a candidate for president, Congress, or the statehouse, make literacy the #1 plank in their campaign platform. This is despite the fact that the most recent data we have shows that 54% of Americans read at or below a 6th-grade level. Are you smarter than a 6th grader?
That same report also advises that if we fix the literacy gap, we could grow the economy by $2.2 trillion. When people are literate, they become more proficient at making things. They become more productive. They make more money. But there is something else.
When people become literate, they become more proficient at living. If they want to know how to do something better, they can read a book or an article on the subject of interest.
I’m a parent with two kids. By some stroke of luck, I learned about Upstart, a reading program funded in Utah by the…
