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Functional Illiteracy: A Major Problem That No One Seems To Care About

Functional illiteracy is the reading and writing skills that are inadequate to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level. Functional illiteracy is a problem and plays a significant role in today’s society. It appears in every aspect of daily life from reading books to using public transport to understanding medical instructions and it could actually affect your chances to a successful life. The level of illiteracy differs from culture to culture; a person living in a rural environment doesn’t need a high level of literacy to complete daily tasks, instead vs. someone living in an urban environment must have a high level of literacy to complete simple tasks.

Literacy is broken down into three parameters: prose, document, and quantitative literacy. Each parameter has four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. For prose literacy, for example, a below basic level of literacy means that a person can look at a short piece of text to get a small piece of uncomplicated information, while a person who is below basic in quantitative literacy would be able to do simple addition. The UK government’s Department for Education reported in 2006 that 47% of school children left school at age 16 without having achieved a basic level in functional mathematics, and 42% fail to achieve a basic level of functional English. Every year, 100,000 pupils leave school functionally illiterate in the UK.

According to this statistic in the U.S.:

  • 33% of the high school graduates won’t read a book after high school
  • 56% of the youth claim they can’t read more than 10 books in a year.
  • 46% of adults can’t read the labels on their prescription
  • 70 million low literacy directly costs the healthcare industry over $70 million every year
  • 1 in 4 children in America don’t know how to read
  • 50% of U.S. adults can’t read an 8th-grade book
  • 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by 4th grade will end up in jail or in welfare
  • 30 million of the adults read at a below basic level

The level of illiteracy differs from culture to culture; a person living in a rural environment doesn’t need a high level of literacy to complete daily tasks, instead vs. someone living in an urban environment must have a high level of literacy to complete simple tasks.

Statistics of literacy worldwide

 

 

Literacy rates among youth are lowest in West and Central Africa and in South Asia:

 

The gender gap in youth literacy is widest in West and Central Africa and in South Asia:

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