[throw149102]

According to the PIAAC, 54% of Americans are illiterate. That is, they are able to read simple things like menus, but they are not capable of synthesizing new information from multiple texts, or understanding the nuance of an authors argument. If I recall correctly, Americans scored an average of around 275/500, while the best scoring country, Finland, scored an average of 300/500. (This is a statistically significant jump, and causes a huge portion of those in Finland to not be considered illiterate, but they just begs the question of why the literacy cutoff is where it is.)

[barry-cotter]

Functionally illiterate and illiterate are different concepts. If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge.

Eliding the difference between functional illiteracy and illiteracy confuses unnecessarily.

[thaumasiotes]

> If you can read a menu the thing that’s stopping you from reading and understanding a complex text isn’t about letters and sentences; it’s the inability to recurse on abstract thought and build complicated thoughts that depend on a body of knowledge.

I can often do a decent job reading a menu in Chinese. A complex text would take hours per page and be totally opaque in many parts. (And partially opaque in probably the majority of the text.)

I would argue that in fact what's stopping me from reading complex texts is lack of knowledge of the letters, the words, and the correct structure of sentences.

[Teever]

I think that this is a distinction without a difference in this context.