Of all developed countries, the United States is the one losing the most money because of illiteracy, and more than half of its adults read at or below a 12-year-old’s level, a new study shows.
Low literacy skills likely cause mistakes that cost the United States about $300 billion every year, according to a report released in September by the World Literacy Foundation (WLF). Overall, the developed world loses about $803 billion to illiteracy every year, according to the study.
A separate study by Gallup conducted in 2020 for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy suggests illiteracy can cost Americans $2.2 trillion in lost annual income. The amount represents estimated income opportunities lost when people can’t read well enough to get better-paying jobs.
The same study found about 54 percent of Americans read at a sixth-grade level or below, and of that group, 21 percent are illiterate.
“A lot of people in the community have very basic literacy skills, and some people are completely illiterate,” Andrew Kay, CEO of the World Literacy Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
“That means often they can go through their whole adult life hiding that from family and friends and trying to navigate through work and life with the ability to read sometimes just a word at most.”
Books written for the sixth-grade reading level include “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” by Jeff Kinney, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum, “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeline L'Engle, and “Matilda” by Roald Dahl.
Consequences of Illiteracy
The effect of having most Americans living with the reading ability of a child inflicts a quiet kind of economic damage, according to Mr. Kay. The effects pile up with every misread sign, every misunderstood instruction, and every mistakenly written check, he said.“People who are illiterate will go to a hospital, can’t read the forms, and just basically say yes to everything with that embarrassment of not acknowledging they can’t read and understand,” Mr. Kay said. “That [sometimes] leads to a mistake in a medical intervention.”
Over time and multiplied across millions of people, mistakes like these can have catastrophic consequences, he said.
“[For] a person who struggles to read, the evidence says that they earn anywhere between 35 to 45 percent less than someone who can read,” Mr. Kay said.
The WLF report suggests many different sorts of costly or even dangerous mistakes the illiterate might make.
The “functionally illiterate,” who can read and write but can’t apply these skills to gain understanding, often can’t read a medicine label, balance a checkbook, read a bank statement, compare the cost of two items to find out which is cheaper, or work out the correct change at a store, WLF researchers wrote.
Those with “poor literacy” may have limited ability to engage in activities that demand critical thinking, researchers indicated. These activities include voting, banking online, understanding financial investment, reading the news, avoiding scams, graduating college, and helping children with homework.
The WLF report describes the isolation experienced by an illiterate person in a developed country.
“Imagine coming home with the wrong food items because you can’t understand the labels,” the report reads. “Or not being able to read the newspaper. Or not being able to travel far because road signs are gobbledygook to you. Or not realizing you’ve agreed to a hysterectomy because you can’t read the medical form you just signed. Or being demoted at work when your employer realizes you are illiterate.”
Literate people tend to earn more than illiterate or less literate people, the Gallup study confirms. It measured illiteracy’s impact on the economy by calculating lost opportunities rather than illiteracy’s impact by mistakes.
And the illiterate die younger and live poorer, according to Mr Kay.
A Neighborhood Epidemic
Often, illiteracy thrives in bubbles, according to Mr. Kay. Pockets of America have extremely low literacy levels, he said.In some neighborhoods, almost everyone can read. In others, few can, he said.
Education and culture are to blame, Mr. Kay said.
“We’ve come from a culture where, in schooling, really we were told there was only one way to learn to read, and I guess if one child didn’t fit into that way, often that was the child that fell through the cracks,” he said.
Most American families, especially lower-income ones, don’t encourage reading, according to Mr. Kay. And family is the most important place for reading, he said.
Brain development peaks at age 3, he said. If children get exposed to reading from birth until this crucial period, it can affect them positively for the rest of their lives, he said. Children learn that reading is important if their parents tell them it is, he said.
“Having a home where children are read to and exposed to reading from birth is very important in getting that message through,” he said.
Reading has massive effects on children’s development and ability to reason, Mr. Kay said.
Brain development, critical thinking, intellect, curiosity, imagination, and other skills develop with reading, he said. Books also offer people new ideas that can often prove life-changing.
Living in an increasingly digital world also encourages people just to read headlines and not get the whole story, according to Mr. Kay.
Teaching the Importance of Reading
Governors in Georgia and Tennessee have worked to address literacy, according to Mr. Kay. These leaders have launched public campaigns to encourage people to read, he said.But to fix America’s reading comprehension problem will require both community investment and government intervention, he said.
The government and parents will have to teach children that reading is important, Mr. Kay said. In 2023, the Department of Education received more than $270 billion from Congress, according to the federal spending website.
Statistics show that the COVID-19 pandemic has been disastrous for children’s education. But it has been surprisingly good for reading, he said.
Amazon saw book sales increase by 37 percent, according to government statistics.
“Through that pandemic period of a couple of years, actually, reading spiked both with children and adults,” Mr. Kay said.
Despite this pandemic boost, the Gallup study found that Americans read fewer books than in the past.
The average American read 15.6 books in 2016, Gallup researchers found. Book reading declined to an average of 12.6 books per year in 2021, the study shows.
Americans have increasingly chosen video games and the internet over books, according to Mr. Kay.
About 41 percent of parents of teen boys report that their sons play video games daily, according to a poll by the Mott Children’s Hospital. Parents of teen girls report that 20 percent of their children play video games daily, poll results show.
Half of teenagers who engaged with video games played for at least three hours daily, researchers found.
Another study by the University of Michigan found that kids who play video games spend 30 percent less time reading and 34 percent less time doing homework.
Mr. Kay blames the decline in reading on “the growth of digital.”
But the future of reading may also go through digital media, such as e-readers, which allow books to be stored and read on a handheld device, he said. Reading also may get a boost from reading-assistive technology, such as audiobooks, which can be played aloud.
A technology that could spur children to read is “gamification,” according to Mr. Kay. It uses a video-game-style presentation of material digitally to be read. And for reading, “players” experience rewards as they progress through levels, as they would in other video games.
“In the last five years, there’s been some incredible developments in technology” that can lead to more reading, he said.
