[corrral]

Innumeracy gets a lot of play on here but I've met an awful lot of college graduates—even those with higher degrees—who aren't technically illiterate but are fairly incompetent readers. I'm not convinced the situation with mathematics is unique—poor readers seem to be a solid majority, even among the college educated. I do think attitudes about the two are different, which may be why the situations look different. People will readily tell you that they're bad at math. To figure out that they're awful readers requires observation, and it's a lot less polite to talk about.

[Cupertino95014]

If you see the subjects a child in Ancient Greece or Rome studied, "rhetoric" was usually one of them. The ability to speak well and convince your fellow citizens was considered fundamental in any sort of democracy (however imperfect).

[corrral]

Yeah, I know rhetoric isn't about reading, exactly—I'm looking at the cheerful green spine of a Loeb edition of Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric on my shelf right this moment—but there seems to be a general deficiency in the ability to even follow, let alone construct, arguments or lines of reasoning. Often, bare comprehension of meaning is severely lacking, before we even get to interpreting and evaluating a text.

I mean simply that reading well is a distressingly uncommon skill; that one may hardly hope to write well without that foundation; and that there's a great deal of overlap between reading comprehension, and evaluating oral argument or presentation. I agree that instruction in rhetoric is lacking, but universities, and certainly high schools, aren't even doing a great job of ensuring graduates are skilled at more fundamental aspects of communication. However, perhaps that's backwards, and more robust rhetorical instruction would fill in some of the gaps in reading ability. I wouldn't mind seeing it attempted, since the current approach doesn't seem to be very effective.