[msg3]

Kids enter school at 5 or 6 with a range of reading abilities - some can recognise simple words, but very few are fully literate. The UK currently has a literacy rate of 99% -- something is going right.

Learning to write and perform basic maths doesn't seem that hard to us, but for most of human history was the reserve of a select few. Perhaps the fact that it seems so easy is actually because school can be quite effective at times?

[LudwigNagasena]

No fundamental changes to learning are required when you push literacy rates from 10% to 99%, it is simply a matter of including more people into the learning process of a few years that existed for several millenia. If kids had a retention rate of at least 10% after 11 years of schooling and “are you smarter than a 5th grader” couldn’t be a thing, now that would be impressive.