Mass literacy isn't

What does "functional literacy" mean, and how many of us qualify?

If you believe the official government statistics on literacy, it’s a solved problem in the United States and other western countries. Outside of the severely disabled, every person learns to read and write.

What then are we to make of claims like the one from a college professor that went viral last week, claiming most of his incoming students are functionally illiterate?

The average college student today

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

There’s been some debate over the bar being proposed here. Surely “functionally illiterate” means something more dire than being unable to grasp the subtler themes of The Poisonwood Bible, right?

Maybe so. But we do in fact have hard data on this question, and it isn’t pretty. The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) has been testing adults in the US and other countries on literacy skills for decades now, and assesses literacy on a sliding scale, from zero to five. For example, here’s how they define level 2 on their scale.

At Level 2, adults are able to access and understand information in longer texts with some distracting information. … They can understand by paraphrasing or making inferences, based on single or adjacent pieces of information. Adults at Level 2 can consider more than one criterion or constraint in selecting or generating a response. The texts at this level can include multiple paragraphs distributed over one long or a few short pages, including simple websites.

This is a little abstract, so let’s look at an example. Here is a sample problem testing for literacy level 2.

Here we have a very practical and testable definition of “functional literacy”: can you read some written instructions in bullet list form and understand them? (The answer above is 9:00 am, test subjects being expected to resolve the small ambiguity around breakfast time in locating the correct answer.)

About 1 in 5 US adults can’t answer this kind of question, and the situation appears to be getting worse over time.

Let’s look at another one, this one about how bread and crackers get stale. PIAAC doesn’t specify an exact literacy level for this task, but describes it as “moderate to high difficulty”. So we’ll call it level 3, conservatively.

They define level 3 like this:

Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing. … Adults at this level can compare and evaluate multiple pieces of information from the text(s) based on their relevance or credibility. Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy … Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inferencing.

There you have it, a “dense, lengthy” text: three short paragraphs about why bread and crackers get stale, and three multiple choice questions about it. Unlike at level 2, by level 3 you are expected not just to locate information present in the text verbatim, but make inferences about what you read. So e.g., respondents must infer that both bread and crackers must be wrapped to stay fresh, despite this fact not being spelled out explicitly, and despite the two products having opposite reactions to the air.

Referring again to the data, we find that only about half of US adults can complete a task like this.

This is pretty bleak, but it gets much worse. It isn’t until level 4 that we finally find a definition of literacy that approximates what might be required to read and understand serious literature.

At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents … Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences. Texts and tasks at Level 4 may deal with abstract and unfamiliar situations. They often feature both lengthy contents and a large amount of distracting information, which is sometimes as prominent as the information required to complete the task. At this level, adults are able to reason based on intrinsically complex questions that share only indirect matches with the text contents, and/or require taking into consideration several pieces of information dispersed throughout the materials. Tasks may require evaluating subtle evidence-claims or persuasive discourse relationships. Conditional information is frequently present in tasks at this level and must be taken into consideration by the respondent. Response modes may involve assessing or sorting complex assertions.

To me this pretty precisely captures the task of reading and discussing literature as one might reasonably be expected to do in a college course.

How many US adults score at literacy level 4 or higher? About 12%, or 1 in 8.

Meanwhile, roughly 2/3 of high school graduates enroll in college, and have since the 90s. Therefore, it is mathematically certain that a clear and overwhelming majority of college students are below literacy level 4, which is where literary analysis becomes feasible.

So our fed-up professor is objectively correct when he notices that most of his students are “functionally illiterate.” They lack the level of literacy necessary to succeed in a college environment, which is where they are. (Most of them graduate anyway, but that’s a topic for another essay.)

When the US and other countries tout a 98%+ literacy rate, what they mean is that nearly everyone in these countries learns to read and write. They can read the words on a page back to you, and write sentences on paper or a screen. This is good, and surely worth measuring and being proud of.

But it should be obvious that the purpose of writing is to convey information, and in a rapidly complexifying world the amount of written information normal people are expected to absorb and understand grows every year. Decoding the letters on a page into words and sentences is necessary but not sufficient. Do you understand what the words you read mean? Can you correctly answer questions about what you just read, resolving ambiguity and making inferences as necessary? By this more practical (perhaps we should say “functional”) metric, only abut half of US adults are literate.

And if we dare to raise the bar to reading and engaging with adult literature, we cut our fraction of literate adults down to about 1 in 8.

There’s nothing especially surprising or depressing about this — unless of course you are yourself in the blessed 12% and have consumed a lifetime of propaganda that inflates your expectations for what ordinary people are capable of, in which case you are probably drafting an eloquent letter demanding more money for your local school system as we speak.

But hey, just because it hasn’t worked yet doesn’t mean it never will. Lake Woebegone, where every child is above average, is surely just another couple trillion in spending away.

Or maybe we just need better teachers — you know, the kind that took literature courses in college.