Everything published at or below 6th grade reading level
Americans consume this content almost exclusively
The median reader consumes at or below the 6th grade level
even ivy league students don’t read books anymore.
College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different.
I love Vibes Based Reporting.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
As someone who was in college twenty years ago, I’ve got to say there’s no way in hell I could make it through an entire novel in a week while balancing the rest of my course load. Either I’m reading the Cliff’s Notes or I’m not getting it done. I also ran a 15-hour course study in hopes of landing a triple major in four years (bad idea, kids!), but even with a more conservative 12-hour load, imagine this plus 3 other classes making the same demands on your time.
This isn’t a new problem. It is, perhaps, a problem that the current generation of students no longer has the cheat-codes to navigate. But doggedly insisting people were housing a 400-page book in a week and retaining it for meaningful discussion? Get fucked, dude. Nobody was actually doing that ever.
If you could come to the table talking about these novels, its because you already read them in High School, not because you consumed them in a week in your hectic freshman year.
I was in college 20 years ago too. I read multiple books per week for fun, often on top of my regular coursework. It wasn’t hard, it was just a matter of priorities. My priority was to learn. I probably read 500 pages a week on average.
Your presumption is wild. You basically think because you didn’t do the work, nobody could, or should do it. You are part of the problem here. Reading a 400 page novel is not that time consuming dude, esp in college. In my AP English class we read one every 2-3 weeks.
Rather than rise to the challenge of learning, you want to pretend that it’s an onerous requirement that nobody could possible attain. What, so you can party more, or dick around on the internet? Are you the type who goes to book clubs and doesn’t read the book and then thinks anyone who did is a stupid nerd? I’ve definitely encountered plenty of those people in my book clubs, which is precisely why I don’t do them anymore.
I probably read 500 pages a week on average.
Pride and Prejudice alone is 400 pages. Crime and Punishment is another 600 pages. If you have two Lit classes in the same semester, you’re going to have to double that rate or fall behind schedule. Nevermind retention.
I remember sitting in a library surrounded by books, struggling to solve the 15 problems a class Engineering Physics assigned. Just a fist full of brain-teasers day in and day out. Three of us working together managed to clear the load in a couple of hours. Then on to the next assignment, which was another two or three hours. Five classes a day, you’re lucky when you have enough time to sleep.
I’ll admit, I did a few summers at a community college and that workload was much smaller, the tests were far easier, and the graders significantly more forgiving. Crazy how little work it takes to ace an exam in High School Plus relative to a University weed-out program.
I fail to see the point of any of what you are talking about.
You weren’t taking English classes, what do you care about the workload in them?
You weren’t taking English classes
Wasn’t I? Could have sworn my transcript says otherwise.
So what are you mad about? that you had to read books in English class?
Why were you taking english class if you don’t want to read books?
Are you angry you had to do engineering problems in engineering class too? Sounds like it.
$20 bucks says this guys “regular coursework” was liberal arts BS lol
Some of us studied actually challenging stuff, mate
Literary and technical literacy are orthogonal. All you’re achieving here is to denigrate yourself.
Nah, but when someone is acting like a prat, I’ll give it right back to’em. I maintained a 4.0 GPA through medical school, and have read so many god damn books. Doesn’t make me smarter or better.
right, anyone who reads books that aren’t engineering is an idiot, right?
So what makes me stupider, my minor in mathematics, or my minor in music? because both are ‘useless’ fields.
I didn’t say you were stupid, but YOU said
I read multiple books per week for fun, often on top of my regular coursework. It wasn’t hard, it was just a matter of priorities. My priority was to learn.
So because I didn’t read extra books on the side, my priority wasn’t to learn? pretty insulting.
You are part of the problem here. Reading a 400 page novel is not that time consuming dude
Even more insults!
Rather than rise to the challenge of learning, you want to pretend that it’s an onerous requirement that nobody could possible attain. What, so you can party more, or dick around on the internet? Are you the type who goes to book clubs and doesn’t read the book and then thinks anyone who did is a stupid nerd?
Yeah, your whole comment and subsequent attempts has you coming off like an arrogant prick. The books the original poster mentioned? I read those in middle school mate, so I guess that makes me even smarter than your pretentious ass. And that’s why I wrote a snotty comment.
I used to teach. My lazy students told me I was an arrogant prick too. They usually got Cs and would leave me angry reviews about how stupid my course was and how dare I make them try hard because what is the point I was going to give them a bad grad because i didn’t like them personally.
My students who did the readings, showed up to class, wrote good papers, to enjoy my class and usually got As.
Weird how that works. It’s OK if you don’t like to read man, but don’t go around generalizing that your lack of drive and interest in the topic necessitates that it’s a waste of time for everyone else.
I would guess you don’t run marathons either. Are people who run marathons wasting their time too? Or should they just take blood dope?
Not to rain on the anti-US sentiment here, but this isn’t far off from most other western/developed/colonial/whatever (aka members of OECD) countries. I don’t know what study they’re talking about in the article, since they never cite their source, but here’s the results from a similar survey from 2013 (PIAAC study).
In terms of literacy, only 6/24 countries are reading at Level 3 (roughly equivalent to what other studies describe as “above a 6th grade level”, it does not track 1:1 since again I don’t know which study they’re using initially) and the remainder are reading at Level 2 (I feel comfortable describing it as “at or below a 6th grade reading level” based off the criteria used in other studies).
The US for sure has an education problem, but it’s not as dire as this article makes it sound. In the above PIAAC study, the difference in literacy is only ~20% between the top score of 296.2 (Japan) and the bottom of 250.5 (Italy), and at 269.8 (USA) is only ~10% behind Japan in terms of mean score. We should absolutely be doing better, we’re among the worst for non-starters and < Level 1 (illiterate and partially illiterate respectively), but when looking at the values in context we’re not really doing all that egregiously compared to other OECD countries.
(edit: spelling)
A nerdy side note:
I question the relevancy of the < Level 1 statistics, as the controls for partial literacy do not appear to have been robust for non-native speakers of the survey languages. This may have been by design, but given the high rate of invalidation due to language incompatibilities seen in other studies, I am hesitant to draw conclusions from that value without a clearer understanding of the methodology. Partial literacy due to language incompatibility is extremely easy to mask for basic questions, but imho should differentiated better from partial literacy among native speakers.
I just can’t imagine how hard life would be to be illiterate. And me knowing me, id take it upon myself to learn to read if the educational system and my parents had failed me – I truly believe that. Is illiterate/partially illiterate a result of low IQ in every instance, or whats going on there?
Human meat brains are lazy. They want to do the minimum amount of work to meet their biological needs. Getting them to want to do more involves rewiring their reward structure to associate fulfillment, either internal or external, with doing more. We can talk about the myriad ways that someone can miss the developmental milestones to encourage that, but that’s what’s going on.
No, it’s absolutely not just due to low IQ - PIAAC did not control for cognative or linguistic difficulties with completing the survey beyond the strict inability to complete the background information (“Name” “Date” style of questions), which even true illiterate people are generally able to recognize through exposure. The study does not make conclusions about it, but it seems reasonable to confirm that the population of non-starters and <Level 1 participants (who made up approx 1/50 of the total US population at the time) would consist of people with very low IQs and all other potential difficulties with completing the survey, such as learning disabilities, dyslexia, language barriers, etc. both of a severity that they could not engage at all and less severe, meaning they could engage very minimally but enough to still be included as a participant.
(The rates at which that was the case are outside the scope of the study though they do propose several reasons for people being unable to participate, but could be looked into country-by-country if you’re curious)
when you don’t know things, the things you don’t know don’t exist.
it’s cognitively easier to be dumb than it is to be smart.
just like it’s easier to sit on a couch all day watching TV eating processed foods, than it is to run a marathon and cook healthy food.
It’s not a matter of IQ, it’s a matter of money. Marathon runners are 80% college educated, and make 130K per year, and come from families that are college-educated and wealthy.
Marathon runners don’t come from working-class poor rural families.
I’ve wrote user instructions and setup guides for my last job to copy paste in for common issues. A ton of people struggle to follow the instructions even with screenshots and big red arrows for each step. I’ve run a few though analyzers and find targeting a 3rd grade reading level is the max you can do before you get questions about the instructions.
Best bet is screenshot for each tiny step(cropped with the big red arrows) with nothing more complicated than “click here” as text. Just assume the end user can’t or won’t read.Same. You can’t write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.
They refuse to read anything that’s in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don’t you dare make it a compound sentence.
A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads… they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are ‘too many words’.
A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I’m overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can’t just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.
That was the goal of the Republicans. When US was in the middle of the cold war, schools were pushing STEM because military and industry needed STEM graduates, but the side effect of education is left leaning voters. So since the 60s, the US education system has degraded to the point that college sports scholarship grads can be illiterate.
So the gap in tech was filled in with H1b Visa people trained at proper universities.
in 2025, Harvard students don’t even attend lectures. They still get As because they paid for As.
The system was degraded because of the local tax revolts in the 1970s, which were perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. The citizenry decided they no longer wanted to pay property taxes and education funding collapsed in many states. It was also a consequence of white flight, and other social changes in the 1970s in response to the civil rights victories.
Republicans capitalized on it in the 1980s and made it a national issue and the voters loved it. People loved Reagan, he was incredibly popular and crushed Mondale winning every state expect for MN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election
Could we get an archive link? That article is pay walled.
Thanks! 🙏
Going to be in for a surprise when they go looking for skilled workers for all of our high tech (including defense) industries.
That’s a lot of numbers without any citations. I mean, it feels right. But please take the minute to add your sources.
I’m European and already figured this out the moment I got on the internet 🤣
The rest of the world isn’t much better to be honest. 6th grade reading level isn’t even that bad. The amount of people who can’t read at all is more worrying
It’s not our fault we’re stupid. It’s the fault of capitalism.
Capitalism or not, books exist… Read one
Now who benefits from a poorly educated populace?
Follow the fuckin money.
They also think below 6th grade levels. People in this country are dumb as shit.
That’s why it is called reading comprehension. That last word is usually glossed over but is the important part of the two. Almost anyone beyond second grade can read the words in a text; comprehension and manipulation though…
Hence the pivot to video.
I was really expecting this to be a video too
I dont know if its because I’m getting older (Nearly 39 now) and I don’t read outside of using a computer but I feel like my overall vocabulary, spellying and grammar get worse and worse by the day. Feel like I need brain training.
Yes, like GreenKnight said, read more books, it helps with concentration, reading comprehension and just calming down.
It’s great thing for not only your brain but your overall well-being.
agreed.
you should read more physical books and less online commentary.
you have two vocabularies, active and passive. passive vocabulary is trained on daily interactions. active vocabulary comprises of long-term language you have learned over your lifetime. usually activated while you are reading.
if you read social commentary daily and it’s written by people who have a 6th grade vocabulary, you’re atrophying not just your passive but active vocabularies.
give it a shot for a month, you’ll see an improvement.
where are those terms from? i am not familiar with the idea of passive vs activity vocabulary, sounds interesting.
it’s a concept I learned from an old teacher from a long time ago. it made sense to me at the time and just kind of stuck with me.
I did evolve the concept a bit for use with the internet, but the original concept centered around speaking vocabulary and the importance of speaking proper English vs lazy English (slang).
I’m unfortunately out of practice with proper speaking etiquette and so my vocabulary has suffered from it.
Feel like I need brain training.
That’s just called “practice”. And I’ll say its easier to find when its already part of your day to day job activities. If you’re reading and writing with other collegiate professionals at a collegiate level, you’ll maintain your skills. Otherwise, you tend to sink to the common denominator.
I don’t even think that’s bad per say, either. I wouldn’t expect a college athlete to maintain the skills of a 25 year old who trains 4 hours a day if they took up a desk job for ten years. The fixation on having Genius Level Skills at everything overlooks the cost-benefit of maintaining those skills when you have nothing to apply them to.
The idea that the US population would somehow be better off if everyone read at a 12th grade level really begs the question “What are you doing with 12th grade reading/writing skills that would improve your life?” And none of these articles seem to have an answer to that question. It’s just intrinsically better because 12 > 6.
Would your life be better if you could bench press 400 lbs rather than 200 lbs? Would it be better if you could do trigonometry in your head? Recite the Hamlet soliloquy by heart in the original Ye Olde English? I guess, maybe on the margins. But Idk how much of my life I can spare to achieve any one of these. And I don’t know if what I’d give up to achieve them would be better on balance.
the underlying assumption you are missing here, is a political one.
That better reading skills would create a better public voter base would who would vote democratic or more progressively.
That’s a projection based on the current stat, which show that generally, democratic voters are higher educated than republican voters and/or the assumption that a literate public is a good thing.
And TBF the USA founders based a lot of the constitution on the presumption of a educated well-informed public as a foundation for it’s architecture.
So in the liberal sphere, an uneducated, less literate public is a political threat both towards conservatism, and an eroding on the American political project.
And a lot of praise of the USA model in the 18th and 19 centuries was precisely because we were one the first nations to have a public education system and were were such a highly literate nation.
There are also economic concerns here. A more literate/educated public is generally more economically productive.
And a lot of our ‘educational slide’ has been a product of the last 30-40 years.
Anyone who has read a Free Press article or Ross Douthat column or subscribed to The Economist knows this isn’t true.
Conservative Intellectuals are a dime a dozen. The Ivy League is full of them. The courts are packed with them. Legions of Ben Shapiro wanna-bes goose step across Twitter and Facebook daily.
Reading skills won’t make you progressive if all you’re reading is Rand and Heinlein. Intellectuals wrote The Bell Curve and justified the invasion of Iraq. Education is not ideologically neutral and being “smart” does to turn your vote Blue.
The Causation on this is backwards. Progressives venerate academia. Academics don’t venerate progressivism.
It can take a bit of motivation to get started, but reading books can be so fun and worthwhile (with the right books for you). I read a lot of books until I had a kid, then I didn’t have the time or energy to keep it up. Just recently I suffered a back injury that keeps me in bed a lot of the time, which forced downtime on me, and so I started reading again.
I wouldn’t recommend the back injury, but I’ve so much enjoyed embracing books once more. Like you, I’m 38 and felt like my literacy was declining. Now I feel like a lot of it’s coming back! If you can, you should try to resume reading.
spellying
Q.E.D.
I know an illiterate who is very clever and knows the score. All this heading means is that 54% of americans have trouble understanding or making out what the propaganda thrown at them means.
Goes a bit farther than that. I have a family friend who struggles to read the menus at restaurants. But she’s also desperately poor, a high school drop out, and regularly between jobs in a service sector that’s totally unforgiving to people in her position.
I do think there’s a reinforcing cycle of “Everything is written at the 6th grade level” -> “Everyone communicates at the 6th grade level”. But I also don’t think these articles do a good job of defining the difference between a 4th grade, 8th grade, 12th grade, collegiate level. So when you see this statistic, its not entirely clear what the problem is, per say. Like, what isn’t being communicated beyond 6th grade literacy levels that people need?
Per the article:
Here’s the ugly truth nobody wants to admit: a barely literate population is a controllable population.
Can’t read complex policy documents? Perfect. You’ll vote based on slogans and fear. Can’t analyze contradictory news sources? Excellent. You’ll believe whatever authority figure shouts loudest. Can’t understand financial fine print? Outstanding. You’ll sign predatory loans and carry crippling debt forever.
…
Mental health outcomes are catastrophic. Depression rates have skyrocketed. Anxiety disorders are endemic. Suicide rates have surged, particularly among young people who inherit this deteriorating nightmare and see no viable future.
…
The economic cost of illiteracy alone is staggering — research shows that raising every American adult to sixth-grade reading level would generate an additional $2.2 trillion annually.
Few citations, lots of big claims and speculative statements, the tendency to catastrophize (and inject implicit nostalgia) as though 6th grade literacy trends are a shocking new development rather than the historical baseline.
None of it really translates into actionable policy. All it seems to do is feed the prevailing Everyone is Stupid Except Me self-aggrandizing outlook. I tend to see these articles paired with the inevitable reactionary “We should impose literacy tests on voting” and “Would have this problem if not for all the damned rednecks / illegals / minorities / <insert reviled social group here>” outlooks.
Can’t read complex policy documents? Perfect. You’ll vote based on slogans and fear. Can’t analyze contradictory news sources? Excellent. You’ll believe whatever authority figure shouts loudest. Can’t understand financial fine print? Outstanding. You’ll sign predatory loans and carry crippling debt forever.
I mean. I worked in public policy for a few years. Most of the policy makers, the politicians, and their staff… can’t do any of that either. Despite the fact most of them have multiple degrees.
But they sure as shit can shout about how stupid it all is and now their gut feelings about taxation are more important than the policy paper a taxation economist writes about it after years of doing research on it. When our highly educated professional politicians can’t pass that standards, I’m not really going to fault the broader public who have a high school diploma at best, for not being able to do so.
There are a lot of brilliant people in our government… but nobody is listening to them. The majority of my highl educated highly literate peers here in Boston… also don’t listen to them. They just ‘know’ that all taxes are bad. mmkay?
Just enough to win elections
It is unfortunante that this was propably planned in order to result in a workforce that doesn’t question things.
I wonder what the numbers are for other countries. I think a lot of people tend to get dumber after school’s over. Atrophy of the brain.
Adult literacy rate of my country is 99.8% which beats most of the world. But it still feels like there are a LOT of idiots with no critical thinking skills, no functional reading ability, etc.
I think a lot of people tend to get dumber after school’s over. Atrophy of the brain.
You move from an environment that’s constantly challenging and stressing your brain muscles to an environment that asks you to do the same repetitive tasks as quickly as possible. I think the most glaring example of this is the recent tendency towards “Vibes Coding”.
How AI Vibe Coding Is Erasing Developers’ Skills
One developer on Hacker News mentioned this perfectly: “For a while, I barely bothered to check what Claude was doing because the code it generated tended to work on the first try. But now I realize I’ve stopped understanding my own codebase.”
This is the trap. The AI works so well initially that you stop paying attention. You stop learning. You stop thinking. And by the time you realize what’s happened, your skills have already degraded significantly.
And since most of the US syndicated news publications and entertainment fiction deliberately publish at a 6th grade level… that’s the level people tend to operate at for the rest of their adult lives.
Adult literacy rate of my country is 99.8% which beats most of the world.
I mean, 6th grade reading is literate. It’s not as though 6th graders can’t read. They just don’t have the advanced language skills you’d need to survive a college course on Proust or whatever.
I remember reaching high school and MANY students reading out loud at the level I’d expect an early grade schooler to. Struggling with uncomplicated words. It was honestly pretty cringy.
Can’t say I didn’t see this coming.
Suddenly a felon rapist pedophile insurrectionist being our leader makes a lot of sense.
