While it may be bullshit that America is currently falling behind China and India, the fact that the majority of American adults are not functionally literate is a serious problem. Americans can never ever achieve any real scientific literacy at their current reading literacy levels. It's flat out impossible, and the fact that the authors of this article are complaining about scientific literacy out of context shows you that they don't know shit about the causes of the various problems within our schools.

Hell, roughly half of American adults are so illiterate that they can't even read the one sentence instructions on their medications. That's why you have stuff happening all the time like this:

"A two-year-old is diagnosed with an inner ear infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Her mother understands that her daughter should take the pre- scribed medication twice a day. After carefully studying the label on the bottle and deciding that it doesn’t tell how to take the medicine, she fills a teaspoon and pours the antibiotic into her daughter’s painful ear."

To quote the most recent report on health literacy, "90 million adults with limited health literacy cannot fully benefit from much that the health and health-care system have to offer."

Despite all the media jokes about people researching their own diseases, the fact is that only roughly 10% of American adults are even literate enough to read popular articles about medicine, and only ~3% are able to actually understand the academic literature. When they say that 90 million adults can't participate in the medical system, they aren't talking about adults who can't research their own symptoms and medications and help the doctor on collaborating on a diagnosis and treatment; rather, they're talking about people who literally can't even do what their doctors tell them to do. Roughly 25% of all doctors visits result in the patient not doing what the doctor tells them to do, and a large percentage of the time it's because they literally can't understand the simple instructions the doctor is giving. We spend roughly 1.2 trillion per year on the health system, which means that up to (but probably significantly less than) 300B of that is going right out the window due to poor adherence, especially since those with low adherence have good outcomes roughly 26% less of the time than those with high adherence, so they end up costing a lot more money in the longrun. I forget what percentage of low adherence is due to literacy/education, but I know that it is one of the largest factors.

The fucked up thing is that "among those scoring in the lowest level on the prose literacy scale [1st-ish grade level], only 29 percent reported they did not read well and only 34 percent reported they did not write well. The majority of those performing at this level perceive their reading and writing skills to be adequate. Among those in the next highest level [4th-ish grade level] the results were even more surprising, as only 3 percent said they couldn’t read well and 6 percent said they couldn’t write well (Kirsch et al., 1993; see Chapter 2 for more information on the NALS)."

If you ever actually go into a real science classroom you'll see that if the teacher actually tried to teach science it would be a complete waste of time. Virtually none of the kids would actually be able to understand any of the lessons, let alone transfer them to real life situations. And while it's true science textbooks and the way science is taught is terrible, the vast majority of students aren't going to become scientifically literate no matter how you try to teach it.

Just curious, do you have a citation for this? It seems very surprising to me, and I suspect that whoever cooked up this statistic may have set a very high bar for "functionally literate".

There are a couple example questions in that, but if you want to understand the full methodology you'd have to read this:

http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11267

Basically the situation is that:

According to the National Adult Assessment of Literacy (NAAL), the largest and most authoritative survey of adult literacy in America, only 13% of adults are able to read English at a 'proficient' level. This means that 87% of American adults lack the minimum level of literacy skill necessary to complete simple tasks like comparing the viewpoints in two editorials or computing the cost per ounce of food items. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the minimimum amount of education required to participate in the knowledge economy or to contribute anything meaningful to the democratic process. Source: Table 1 on p. 3, Figure 2 on p. 4. Adults unable to read prose at a 'proficient' level, by race/ethnicity: White - 83%, Asian/Pacific Islander - 88%, Hispanic - 96%, Black - 98%.

Adults unable to read prose at a 'proficient' level, by educational attainment: High school graduates - 96%, College graduates - 69%, Graduate studies/degrees - 59%. In other words, the majority of graduate students are incapable of fully understanding a newspaper, let alone an academic journal article. And virtually all high school graduates are functionally illiterate. (And again, being 'proficient' does not mean being able to read academic journal articles, which is sort of the minimum requirement for being an independent thinker in society. In fact at least 2 / 3rds of those who score 'proficient' still do not possess this more advanced measure of literacy.)

John Taylor Gatto also gives his analysis of the situation here based on the 1992 data. (The data I cited was 2003)

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm

Gatto throws in a couple weasel words, and I think sometimes his analysis is a bit reaching, but overall it seems to be generally accurate. Even if you don't fully buy into the idea of an enormous decline over the last 100 years, the current methodology of the National Adult Literacy Survey seems pretty solid. (That's currently the gold standard for literacy estimates in the US.)

But what about the CIA World Factbook, which estimates that the United States has a 97% literacy rate as of 2002? Where do these figures come from? To quote from Jonathan Kozol's book Illiterate in America, "For one hundred years, starting in 1840, the census posed the question of the population's literacy level in its ten-year compilations. The government removed this question from its survey in the 1940 census. The reason, according to a U.S. Census Bureau publication, was a general conviction that 'most people [by this time] could read and write ...'

In 1970, pressured by the military, the Bureau of the Census agreed to reinstate the literacy question. Even then, instead of posing questions about actual skills, the census simply asked adults how many years of school they had attended. More than 5 percent of those the census reached replied that they had had less than a fifth grade education. For no known reason, the government assumed that four fifths of these people probably could read and, on this dangerous assumption, it was publicly announced that 99 percent of all American adults could read and write. These are the figures which the U.S. government passed on to the United Nations for the purposes of worldwide compilations and comparisons." You can read the rest of chapter 5 here, which further explains the methodology and how the CIA figures are propaganda rather than science:

http://eserver.org/courses/spring97/76100o/readings/kozol.ht...

According to this study, a non-proficient person can: consult reference materials to figure out which foods contain a certain vitamin, calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalog, or figure out what they are permitted to eat before a medical test.

In India, we actually have a significant number of people who are functionally illiterate. Most people can't leave a note saying "please make sambhar" note for the cook.

If people can only read well enough to be consumers but not producers then it's only so long before society collapses, regardless of whether or not they're getting their vitamins.

As for society collapsing, I think you grossly underestimate the value low intelligence people can provide when suitably directed. Consider walmart - it's a vast command economy which employs about 1% of the US (mostly taken from the bottom percentiles) and has improved the standard of living for millions.

A bunch of morons couldn't create walmart themselves. But they can still create great value when directed by a small number of intelligent people.

  we'd just bar morons from voting.

This lead not only to a total political gridlock for years, but to actual death and mayhem.

You can't have a semi democracy where the elite decides, who's eligible to vote. It's either all or nothing.

The problem with the term "moron" is that it is too easily applied to mean, "people who I don't think should be allowed to vote, no matter how intelligent they might actually be."

The fact that racists favor a corrupted version of a certain policy does not imply that the policy is bad.

Historically, that's just an oligarchy or plutocracy.

Heck even being governed by a "council of elders" is a semi-democracy if not all elders are approved by the council to join their ranks.

A standardized test would be hard to impose, since how does one measure someone's ability to make good judgments about something?

Then, the next step would be preventing them from having kids...

You know it's a very, very bad idea. Morons are part of the society and deserve to have their voices heard. Any democratically elected government mirrors the society it came from.

I think this indicates a serious problem with the study. While I'm sure there are exceptional cases where someone could graduate from a post-graduate program as functionally illiterate[1], every other non-exceptional case is able to function quite well in our society. You don't need to know every word in the newspaper (you can get those through contextual clues) or if there are 8 ounces in a cup or a pint (I'd Google it) in order to function in our society or to interact with other people writing the same language.

[1] Using the common sense definition found at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_items.asp

They're setting the bar pretty low. Not so low you can't bear to look at it, but still, wow.

OK, immigrants also do a little poorer, especially informal immigrants. And some states are wealthier than others. But this is all stuff that other countries deal with as well.

The US seems to allow large areas of their cities to become extremely poor. Maybe it's a hold-over from the semi-apartheid days before the civil rights act, when there were black areas and white areas; I don't know.

Maybe the solution is for local councils to try and mix up the communities more, encouraging low-income housing to be dispersed throughout the city. Yeah, it sucks to have a few poor families in the neighbourhood, but it's better than having whole neighbourhoods of poor people.

> OK, immigrants also do a little poorer, especially informal immigrants. And some states are wealthier than others. But this is all stuff that other countries deal with as well.

Just stop beating around the bush with PC euphemisms and say what you mean - "blacks and Hispanics are much worse off than whites, to the point that they have their own set of statistics. The states that have lots of them are significantly worse off than ones who don't."

> The US seems to allow large areas of their cities to become extremely poor. Maybe it's a hold-over from the semi-apartheid days before the civil rights act, when there were black areas and white areas; I don't know.

> Maybe the solution is for local councils to try and mix up the communities more, encouraging low-income housing to be dispersed throughout the city. Yeah, it sucks to have a few poor families in the neighbourhood, but it's better than having whole neighbourhoods of poor people.

Yeah, that doesn't work in America. Unlike those "other countries" you mentioned, we have virtually unlimited space, and the minute (poor) blacks or Hispanics move into a neighborhood, you get white flight all over again.

http://www.umich.edu/~rdytolrn/pathwaysconference/presentati...

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2963200

In other words, you want to choose a definition of SES that predicts how the parents interact with the children before age five, as it's not (mostly) income or race that creates the achievement gap. E.g. just separate the parents into welfare, working class, or professional, like Hart & Risley do in Meaningful Differences. I think in order to understand how SES effects the achievement gap, you need to choose a definition of SES that is broad and qualitative rather than quantitative and limited.

And race does correlate with peer SES, as whites (and asians, and most hispanics, and well-off blacks) flee schools once there are too many low-SES blacks.

The question is - how big a problem is "white flight" / segregation. If it is seen as a huge cause of inequality, then there are ways to reduce it.

The problem is that, as the Coleman Report showed us in the mid 60s, while this is in theory the best solution it requires you to have 12-15 high-SES people for every one low-SES person. And U.S. society no longer has anywhere near enough high-SES people left in order to socialize the low-SES people. So a long decline is essentially inevitable at this point due to simple math and demographics.

While there are theoretically other solutions, they are too complicated for the average person to understand, so they have very little chance of being implemented.

Informal immigrants? What does that even mean? Like the kind who wear tie-dye shirts on Fridays?

I'm not defending health illiteracy, but let's look at this rationally. What is the most logical and efficienct solution to half of Americans being unable to read labels on medicine?

A) Try to educate all those people

B) Make the damn labels easier to comprehend so that this problems wouldn't exist in the first place.

When the directions say "must be administered orally," can you really expect their meaning to be fully conveyed to every adult who reads them? Why can't we just change it to "drink it"?

Sure, it doesn't use the technical terms that healthcare professional are taught with. But despite all its scientific underpinnings, in the end, healthcare is about providing a (vital) service to customers. And if they lack the necessary skills to understand something, then the healthcare industry needs to respond to that deficiency, not the other way around.

The solution is threefold: education, simplifying directions/processes, and changing culture. Changing the labels and creating things like extended release pills (so you only need to take one per day) is definitely the most low-hanging fruit in terms of fixing adherence, but it doesn't actually fix our democracy, economy, or culture.

Perhaps medicine should be labeled with a word problem. "Jimmy takes medicine on all prime-numbered days, plus one."

America today is loosing because of totally different reasons. And nobody but America as a nation is to be blamed for that. The way I see America is loosing out jobs that have earnings directly accounted by number of hours worked or volume delivered(In other words manufacturing kind of jobs). And for that every single aspect of the American society is responsible. Don't get me wrong, I'm for capitalism. But there is huge difference between mindless consumerism that goes on in America and what happens in the rest of the world. Coupled with high standards of living. It is, but impossible to provide manufacturing and other process based jobs at rates similar to that in China and India. And given the conditions under which most people are made to work is unthinkable in America.

There is a saying here, that if you don't want to do a particular job somebody is always out there who will do it.And will do it better over time, and during the same time begin to lead that market. This is what has happened, back then when America was not into pointless wars, and the tax system was sane. A lot of Americans didn't to the very same jobs which are today being shipped(And why would they, when you are paid well to do better jobs. And sometimes paid to do nothing at all - read social security benefits).

We have no such social security/medicare benefits alternatives here. Here either we slog and earn or just get wiped out.We don't enjoy/get vacations/trips. Most of us can't eat at restaurants everyday. We can't spend like hell, just to buy a new version of the iPhone.

Here in India, Its all about struggle to livelihood to its bare minimum necessities - Food, Clothing and Shelter.

We have no other option but to beat you. That's what we have to do to survive here.

Nitpick, but widespread public schooling in the U.S. dates back more to the early 1800s; Horace Mann (1796-1859) is one of the education reformers often associated with it. It's true that they became more formalized into school districts in the late 19th century; before then, the "common schools" had been somewhat more ad-hoc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_school).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw (video)

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338 (text)

The American education is far from perfect - it will always be far from perfect. Even for those who fully go through it, you have to question, at least up through basic college, what kind of an education they are really getting for the price they are paying.

Unfortunately, a solid education system in most every part of the world (especially in places like India and China) requires following a rigid architecture with little room for creative thinking. But this, with some exception, by and large creates a population of drones.

Creative thinking is what is required for innovation - and innovation creates new industries and employment. It's one of the reasons we've done so well despite a relatively lackluster basic education system.

I do hope our system improves somewhat - I've felt a better educated population would make better decisions when they are voting, although I'm not as convinced of that anymore - but a good education begins at home, not in the schools, and until people realize this, nothing is going to change.