On the other hand, if someone is nearly illiterate and therefore unlikely to vote, and they care enough to vote anyway, they probably deserve to.

Gee, Wally, social engineering is *hard*!

Beyond that, such picayune quibbling seems to sidestep the point – illiteracy in the U.S. is far beyond what most of us imagine.

Writing (and therefore reading) is not *that* old as a technology — it’s younger than agriculture, and not everyone in the world practices that (tho the numbers living in non-ag societies are pretty small). Since it takes time to adopt new tech, shouldn’t we just consider non-readers as the late adopters?

Of course in the computer age those who read and write well have a major advantage over those who don’t.

Another point… Having a tool makes it hard to imagine living without it. I just couldn’t imagine living without a car. And I just couldn’t imagine living without words and books, either, but millions of people do.

I’m pretty sure that the more education you have, the more likely you are to vote. Which means that 50% of the population are functionally illiterate, *and* effectively unrepresented in the political process. No wonder poverty and homelessness are so rampant.

BTW, half of the children in California live in families where the income is less than 200% of the poverty line ($25K a year for a family of five). see http://www.census.gov/hhes/hlthins/lowinckid.html

Xenex’s comments are right on. Using “one quarter” and “25 percent” in the same sentence is goofy.

The article does state, in its own way, that the lower quartile of the sample population reads at 5th grade level or worse. Err, excuse me… “nearly” one quarter. Assuming “nearly” means less than 25%, we can infer that lower quartile point is actually slightly above the _5th-grade_ level.

After that, we have a ballpark statement about a _different_ 25% subset of the sample group who read at “about an eighth-grade level”. What’s the uncertainty here? Plus or minus one grade level, two? Can I assume that this second 25% subset is the set between the first quartile and the median? No! There is no way to know based what the article says.

My informal survey of San Francisco Chronicle editors concludes that 1 editor writes about statistics at an unsatisfactory level. ;-)

I love how, in an article about illiteracy, they’ve used two different ways to state the same value. It’s almost as if they were trying to make the article difficult to read…

I mean, totally!

and check this out – some OECD numbers on international literacy rates:

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/knowledge/summary/a.htm

The US doesn’t stack up all that badly. It has more people at the extremes (both high and low reading level) than other countries. It’s 10th overall (out of 20) among OECD members. Finland is #1. Internationally around 75% of people are in the middle reading levels. Don’t forget just by having a 4-year college degree you’re in the top 10%!

My wife was a elementary school teacher (2nd grade) over here in North Carolina (motto: #1 in pork production, #48 in education!). After about three years she quit because (among other things) the pricipal refused to let her hold back students. She was told, “holding them back would cause too much harm to their self esteem.” I don’t think there was a single student that was ever held back in the entire school while this principal was in office.

I’d like to see all these students this principal “helped” show up at her front door in about 8 more years when they’ve graduated from high school and the only job they are qualified for is night cook at the local fast food stand.