Australians spend more money per capita on education than most comparable nations. We should have high levels of literacy – but we don’t.
NAPLAN results indicate one in three primary and secondary students do not meet basic national standards in reading and writing. The picture is likely worse for adults.
The most recent data we have is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2013 survey assessing adult competencies. It found 44% of Australian adults have literacy skills below the “necessary proficiency level for navigating modern work and life”. In other words, they were functionally illiterate.
If we assume 44% Australians adults are still functionally illiterate, this means around 9.4 million people lack the skills needed to meet “the demands of everyday life and work in a complex, advanced society”. This is a national disgrace for such a wealthy country.
This actually, sadly, makes sense to me. I require written communication at times due to my disability and it’s like pulling teeth trying to get it at all, let alone trying to get effective written communication.
This is a concerning issue for all kinds of reasons, one of them being accessibility.
Stop wasting money on private schools and it’ll go down, eventually. Move some of that money to adult literacy education and it’ll go down faster. But most of politics wants it, and there’s no votes there.
There are a couple of issues here I think, assuming one accepts the basic claim…
The cause of the present situation and whether this is necessarily a bad thing for our society.
The cause; in part I suspect the IT revolution, which took off for ordinary people from the early 2000’s. A few years ago, I made the flippant observation that mobile phones and some social networks were producing a generation of illiterates. Today I’m no longer sure that’s completely wrong, at least as part reason.
In recent years, I keep hearing the complaint that today’s young adults can’t read an analogue clock and cannot read or write cursive script. That’s true of some 30 year olds I know.
Is this a bad thing? People learn what they need to learn to function. It seems to be a fallacy that illiterate/functionally illiterate people can’t function in our society. That depends on the tasks they need to do domestically and to earn a living. My observation is that these days [and earlier] people were often trained by their employers.
Perhaps the need for universal literacy began with the Industrial revolution and the emergence of a large middle class. Perhaps the hoi poloi were eventually taught a basic level of literacy because their work required them to be able to read at a basic level. Learning to keep time became essential for even unskilled labour.
So, what happens to the functionally illiterate today? In many Western countries, economies have moved away from secondary industry into service industries.
Now I’m aware these ideas are a bit simplistic. It isn’t my intention to prove a point, but only to question the assumption.
People who are functionally illiterate can be taken advantage of more easily (as if it wasn’t already bad enough for everyone with the amount of scamming that takes place in our society). People who can’t read can still function in society but their choices are limited and their ability to earn a decent income is reduced in general. For some, it might mean not being able to get stable employment at all. I imagine that their independence is also affected because they have to depend on others to read official communications and so on which wouldn’t help their self-esteem. For us to allow young people to leave school without at least basic literacy and numeracy is terrible imo.
1300 6999 0 6🎶
Just ruin the education for the other two thirds.
Then the electorate will be entirely illiterate and the elite can once again rule without question.
I read the article and the cited reports. Analysis of the 2026 study has been finished and will be released later this year.
iow, this article is a nothing burger
Just to know that illiteracy is so high was new to me and pretty alarming. We could make a bet to see if in the 2026 study the situation is better or worse or nothing’s changed. And, Seagoon, why don’t you put up a ‘burger with the lot’ post?
