It isn’t true, in any practical sense. Lemme tell ya a story from The Mismeasure of Man (Author? Date? I dunno)
It seems with the huge influx of recruits for WWI the Army (that is to say The Army of Rightiousnesss, the US Army) tested the intelligence of each new guy coming in. A long-haired professor was given the job of developing a test that was culture-neutral (after all lots of new Americans back then) and he even produced a version for people illeterate in English.
All very scientific.
The results were shocking. It seems the average young American man was an freakin’ idjut. Much debate in postwar America was based on these reams of results. What did it mean to Democracy when the Average Kid couldn’t read beyond the (whatever the number was) grade level?
The numbers showed that Northern European scored better than Southerners. As (just one) result of the national concern, quotas were established for new arrivals from various countires. Greeks and Turks need not apply.
Well, looking back on it now we can see the falacy here. The reports were all screwy. The test was (unintentionally) biased as hell. It was poorly administered and poorly graded. Looking back on it, the test and the resulting numbers were a steaming pille of horse pellets.
But it was printed in scholarly jounals so it was assumed to be true.
Same, I suppose, is true here. The report does not support what I see with my own eyes. I prefer to believe my own eyes.
That was my whole point of the OP. If this number is a statistical anomoly, what factors would cause this and how much of an influence would they have on the average? I mentioned a very few in my OP such as new immigrants who havnt had an opportunity to learn yet, the learning disabled etc. Take these groups out and is the result 70% read above 8th grade? Or 51%?
Well, you could also consider that an eighth-grade education was considered perfectly adequate not so very long ago. Out of my four grandparents, only one graduated from high school (as opposed to later getting a GED), and he only got that chance because he was the youngest in his family and wasn’t so needed on the farm. If your parents needed you to help out around the farm or around the house, eighth grade was generally considered good enough.
Also, I believe that eighth grade was the last grade in which I actually took a “reading” class (as opposed to just a general “English” class.) It’s the last grade in which reading is actively taught. If you’re going on to college, you’ll pick up more reading skill in your “college-bound” curriculum, but if you’re not…well, you probably won’t understand some scholarly journals, but you can read newspapers, magazines, road signs, and pulp fiction. Good enough to get by in society (unless, apparently, you need to install a child’s car seat.)
In order to graduate from Minnesota high schools, you need to pass the eighth-grade basic skills tests. Notice that there are no twelfth-grade basic skills tests.
My point? Yeah, I can believe that many Americans read at about an eighth-grade level. I also think that car seat manufacturers are deluding themselves if they think that that is the big problem, rather than their poor writing (Look at Shakespeare vs. dylan_73’s post :)) and design (these things aren’t easy to install anyway, even if you do know what you’re doing.)