Apparently 95 per cent of school graduates in the US fail in simple comprehension and third graders spend only six per cent of the time on science and social studies!
So it seems Americans are not good readers and many are blaming the ubiquity of digital media.
They blame time spent on Snapchat reading and internet skimming, which they say has made us incapable of reading serious prose.
Finland, on the other hand seems to be the world’s most literate nation, according to new research, with the UK coming in 17th.
Home to a widely praised education system, Finland topped a table of world literacy in a new study conducted by John Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.
The research looked at literacy achievement tests and also at what it called “literate behaviour characteristics” – everything from numbers of libraries and newspapers to years of schooling and computer availability in the countries.
Rather than measuring a country’s ability to read, the World’s Most Literate Nations says it ranks nations on ‘literate behaviours and their supporting resources.’
It set out to look at data from 200 countries, drawing from sources ranging from Unesco to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), but only 61 made the final cut, ‘due to lack of relevant statistics.’
Population was also considered, to give per capita ratios.
“The power and value of being literate in a literate society is played out every day around the world,” say researchers.
“Many individuals and even whole societies, make considerable sacrifices to become literate just as others take it for granted. Societies that do not practice literate behaviour are often squalid, undernourished in mind and body, repressive of human rights and dignity, brutal and harsh.”
The study discovered that if it only ranked nations on their reading assessment results, the final tables would have been very different. When this is the only factor considered, Singapore comes in top, with South Korea, Japan and China in second, fourth and fifth places respectively.
Finland is the only non-Pacific Rim country to make the top five, in joint second place. The UK is 26th.
Adding in the numbers of academic, public and school libraries and the numbers of books in libraries – Estonia, Latvia and Norway top this list – as well as statistics on years of schooling, computer penetration and newspapers, changes the results significantly.
“When factors other than test scores are included, there is not a single Pacific Rim country among the top 25,” says the report.
Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden took the five top slots in the study, it seems, because ‘their monolithic culture values reading.’