In fact, most people are less intelligent and less capable than many of you can probably imagine:
How many US adults score at literacy level 4 or higher? About 12%, or 1 in 8.
Since over 60% of high school grads go on to enroll in college, we know for a certainty that the vast majority of them are below level 4 in literacy. College kids are functionally illiterate. QED. But what about those level 5 literate types, the ones who comprise around 1% of adults? What can they do?
This is the subject of a recently released study making waves in the education world. Researchers decided to sit with current college English majors and see how much they understood of what they read. In other words, these are competent high-school level readers by any national standard.
So how do they do on more complex and archaic language, like Dickens? Not well!
We placed the 85 subjects from both universities into three categories of readers: problematic, competent, and proficient. A summary of our major conclusions gives some basic data for our ensuing discussion:
* 58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the introduction to Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own.
* 38 percent (or 32 of the 85 subjects) could understand more vocabulary and figures of speech than the problematic readers. These competent readers, however, could interpret only about half of the literal prose in the passage.
* Only 5 percent (4 of the 85 subjects) had a detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House.
To summarize even further for those skimming:
- 58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
- 38% could understand about half of the sentences
- 5% could understand all seven paragraphs
These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs.