A deadly shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration officer comes weeks after a bombshell report on President Donald Trump's desperate drive to rush 10,000 deportation officers onto the payroll by the end of 2025.The explosive Daily Mail report found that the administration's $50,...
you miss my point. it’s not 21% illiteracy. it’s 21% english illiteracy. the last time i read the statistics on it (iirc it was the 2022 numbers but i don’t really care to find them again) 21% were illiterate in english. 2% were not literate in any language. somewhere between 12% and 18% had something between a 6th and 9th grade literacy level in some written language. I’m not arguing whether it is easier to be literate and/or fluent in the lingua franca. i’m just saying you are taking a shortsighted view if you only look at the english language.
No disrespect, but I believe you have missed my point - I understood that you’re pointing out that only looking at English literacy is shortsighted. I’m suggesting that English literacy is by far the only significant metric when it comes to someone’s ability to function, especially with poltical wisdom, in the United States. It doesn’t really matter if half the population is fluent in Vietnamese when all the political debates are in English. This forces them to rely on third-party (questionable) commentary and interpretation for all their news and understanding of the political environment.
If we were talking about a country like Switzerland, where signage, documents, and official material is easily accessible in multiple languages, and where political discussion widely occurs im multiple languages, then I would agree that measuring only German literacy is misleading and not meaningful. But the United States is not that type of country, so it is specifically English literacy that matters, especially when we’re talking about being politically informed.
TLDR; if I speak fluent Latin, but no other languages, and I live in Kentucky, it is pretty fair to describe me as illiterate. The literacy I do possess functionally does not exist.