March 14, 2025/Midnight

Erie, PA. – About a year ago, it became a viral trend on apps like TikTok for teachers to express their frustration over their students’ academic abilities. With many teachers frustrated that their students weren’t performing to the national grade level standard, one specific trend jumped out. Teachers are dealing with a crisis of illiterate students.

The National Literacy Institute says over half of all American adults have a literacy level that is below a 6th grade level. They also say that 79% of American adults are literate. “Developed nations consistently boast adult literacy rates of 96% or higher, while the least developed countries struggle with an average literacy rate of just 65%.” Considering the number of resources that the United States has at its disposal, we should be faring much better with our literacy rates.

If this is how the adults are faring, imagine how much worse the situation is for the children that were educated during the COVID lockdown. Several years of children were educated through computer screens, with teachers that tried to make the best of the hard and confusing circumstances of the time but often couldn’t work out how to teach and control twenty children through a glitchy computer screen.

The Scientific American says, “Biennial testing through NAEP consistently shows that two thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency. An astounding 40 percent are essentially nonreaders.” Unfortunately, it’s my belief that this situation will only get worse as time passes, and we continue to unravel the effects of education during and after the COVID lockdowns.

Recently, another story went viral on the Internet. A Connecticut student, who graduated high school with honors, claims that she is illiterate. The student is in the process of suing her district’s Board of Education, that she claims neglected to teach her how to read or write, despite attending her school district for over ten years. This story has gone viral, in part for its shocking claims that a student can make their way through the public education system without even knowing how to read, but also in part because so many people aren’t surprised by this. The lack of academic standard at all in American public schools has slowly become normal to us.

But I don’t think the education system is the only one to blame for this alarming trend. Only a few years ago, smartphones were not nearly as popular and available as they are today. A few years ago, children did not have access to anything more than a television. Reading books was a much more popular way to pass time, and in my opinion, much more formative and educational than a phone screen is.

I understand that for many parents, it’s easier to give a child a phone to distract them. But we’re starting to see the negative effects of this. While screen time for young children affects many things, such as behavior and attention span, literacy is something that I believe is directly impacted as well. Especially when considering voice-to-text and read aloud options of phones, children are growing up with the impression that they don’t need to learn how to read to handle technology, or to function in the ‘real world’ at all.

There’s a reason that the first step to taking someone’s freedom is taking their ability to read and educate themselves. When you have a society that is unable to inform themselves and properly analyze that information, they become much easier to control and manipulate.

The National Literacy Institute also points out that there is a concerning connection between illiteracy and poverty. The ability to read opens many opportunities for all different types of jobs and careers. The relationship between literacy and poverty can also be cyclic. When a person is struggling with poverty, education can be an aspect of their life that is often ignored. Yet, without proper education, rising out of poverty becomes even more difficult, leading to a cycle that is difficult to break.

The ability to read and understand what you are reading gives you both freedom and stability. Proper education is something that we should fight for and ensure that the next generation of children have access to.