Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

[–] nave@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country%20note%20-%20United%20States.pdf

The chart on page 4 seems to put the US literacy rate at about the same as Germany and the UK.

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you didn't look at this list and ask "Why did they pick these countries and leave out others?" you're not doing critical thinking. The countries with the highest literacy in the world are almost all either socialist or formerly socialist countries.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

It's an OECD report. They're comparing to OECD countries and I'd take the Polish numbers with a grain of salt as they have quite a couple fewer immigrants, modulo Ukrainians (Ukraine has an education system ballpark Greece or Italy).

Public school and universal literacy was literally invented in Germany (Luther was lobbying princes for it so people could read the bible).