I didn’t need a study to tell me that, I see it every day at work.

Many of the employees we get can’t read well. They can read, yes, barely. But time after time I have to explain installation instruction documentation. Granted a lot of what we get from Manufacturers is written in some sort of lingo only the engineers can comprehend, but with a little study you can work it out.

And please, please don’t ask them to write anything. The spelling is so horrible it is hard to understand, the production managers (me for instance) have to rewrite it for permanent records.

And let’s not get started on Math skills, I could go on for days. (Many of them can’t even read a tape measure, let’s not mention fractions.)

While I am not the sharpest knife in the box, at least my teachers made sure I could read well enough to survive day to day life. But that was then, when you would get retained a grade if you didn’t pass.
Today? I see the homework and such my grandchildren bring home.

One of the very fundamentals of a functioning Democracy is a population educated enough to have some grasp of what is happening. I have begun to wonder.