The Literacy Problem and It's Causes
Atrioc's Can This Be Fixed? video about child literacy rates is a topic I've been interested in for a bit and I want to perhaps add some other potential factors. I'm not sure what the actual driving causal factors are, its easy to blame tech and it also might very well be the problem, but im not fully convinced. Far as I can tell the larger factors might be socio-economic ones.
First and foremost, I'd like to direct your attention to these two graphs.
From https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy-rates-by-state
Then this one, I grabbed the picture from reddit so if its totally wrong let me know, but it was first sourced from census data so i belevie its accurate.
I want to not the first is from 2026 and the second is from 2023, so not a perfect comparison, but I think it illustrates the point that there might be a correlation, and I dont think its much of a stretch that if you aren't speaking English at home it might be harder to be literate in English. This, to me, seems like it would be a pretty good explainer for a good chunk of the literacy rates.
All of these places still have iPads, so its weird if there is such a stark difference that stops at arbitrary state lines. This makes me think the issue might be elsewhere, or perhaps the solutions have been implemented already in places.
On the retention issue that was mentioned, I do wonder about that being a larger issue; the brain needs downtime to move information from short term to long-term. This often happens during sleep, but i wonder how much happens during boredom or something. Im sure we will study more and find things out in a decade about all the ways we are hurting ourselves lol. Or maybe kids just arent sleeping enough and are all doomscrolling and that's the problem.
This next graph I made myself cause i couldn't find good visuals, ill link the data
First NIH - Poverty (Families below poverty) by State
And then I guess I'll include this one cause i think its kind of neat it can do it, but Claude made this map for me when I was trying to track down data for how many districts use phonics-based learning or whole language learning/three cue methods of teaching.
I won't get into it all, just know that phonics works to teach kids and whole language gets them to just guess, which reminded me of the C H I P S - potato kid in the video.
I couldn't really find any easy-to-use data on how many districts in each state use what method, so i resorted to Claude, and it gave me data for states that have enacted policy to ban the whole language methods, which is a decent idea. These states had a literacy problem; they identified this method as part of the problem and banned it, so you can sort of see what states had enough districts using this method to warrant a ban. Again, not perfect, but the best I could do. If anyone has better data for this point i'd be grateful.
Heres all of them next to each other in a jank way:
All of these are correlations on my part, but I did find this article: "Child Illiteracy in America: Statistics, Facts, and Resources". That talked about these factors as parts of the problem. They didn't mention technology, so im not sure if that just hasn't been studied enough or if its less of a problem than people think. It certainly feels like it must be at least some of the problem, and many people have similar experiences, and I trust teachers to know more than me, but also humans are flawed, and it can be genuinely difficult to determine actual root cause in a statistical way rather than anecdotal. Either way these other problems I mentioned are just as likely to be factors as well if not more so.
Anyways, I just wanted to add some context and give some visuals because I don't want people thinking that all or most of the literacy problem is just because of tiktok. If the problems are economic or in how it is taught, banning phones wont fix it or fix all of it, that sort of thing. Atrioc made some jokes hinting at some of this so im sure he's aware, still i like graphs and visuals cause im a fkn nerd
Thank you to anyone who read all of this or just skipped to read this last line; you get one good boy point that you can spend on future glizzies.
Thank you for coming to my infodu-Ted Talk. :D