I've recently been reading an excellent book, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Tyack). Among its useful points is that the definition

I've recently been reading an excellent book, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Tyack). Among its useful points is that the definition of illiterate has been changing throughout the history of school reform movements --- first it was defined as 'can you self-reportedly read?', then as 'did you finish $grade_after_which_you_are_literate' --- where this grade has gone from 1, to 3, to 5, as reformers need to argue that reform movements are necessary. The last year that it was asked whether you could read, 97% of people reported that they could. It strikes me as a curious problem that we now think 5th grade is necessary for functional literacy. What's being taught between 1st and 5th grades that's necessary for literacy? How are more people entering the 'illiterate' pool? Cannot we just wait for the illiterate pool to die out? Or perhaps, as some people do, functional literacy is attempting to measure some sort of societal literacy: fluency in a 'common set of core beliefs' of our society. Tyack argues that this 'common set' has always been a low-rigor concept, never well taught by the school system and never well measured, and as such years of schooling and socialization can be used as a proxy for how familiar you are with society. Unfortunately, this societal literacy is sometimes at odds with true literacy: some schools automatically promote societal contingents of one age group to the next grade, regardless if everyone in that group has competency in the current grade. Thus, I claim the fourty-five million figure was not measured with a sound bar for literacy, and urge a more nuanced view of literacy that celebrates America's success in making its population ~completely literate.