In the summer of 2023, I worked part time as a camp counselor at my old school. It was meant to be an easy summer job- take my assigned group of kids to the scheduled activities, and then do a half hour of group reading after lunch. I thought the kids in my group were just extraordinarily shy, since none of them ever volunteered to read, and I wasn’t going to force them to do so. The first two weeks passed, and group reading had turned into story time. Only, I realized that my initial mental explanation of shyness couldn’t possibly be true when so many of the kids were extroverted and whispering to their friends while I read to them. So, I started making reading mandatory, to an honestly unexpected degree of protest. I soon figured out why.  

Nearly every child in my group couldn’t read a full sentence out loud without stumbling. These were all kids from underprivileged areas of my city, and the whole point of the camp was for them to have better learning opportunities while school was out, but it still shocked me that 8–9-year-old kids wouldn’t be able to read a full sentence out loud. I had to correct my course and use much simpler books for group reading until it was clear that everyone was on the same page. By the end of the summer, all of them had improved a bit, but they still weren’t even remotely close to the 9-year-old reading level I had expected.  

So, when the World Literacy Foundation revealed that global literacy rates were dropping by 5% every year in developed countries, it didn’t surprise me. I had attributed my personal experience to COVID-19, since kids who were 9 then had been in lockdown at as young as 6 years old and had missed the crucial first few years of schooling. And since they were from disadvantaged schools, online learning was inaccessible, due to how much money was involved- money for Wi-Fi, money for a computer, and enough financial security for their mothers or fathers to be able to take frequent breaks from their own work to monitor them and keep them on track. The pandemic had set those kids back two years, and more if they weren’t actually caught up when they were thrust back into school. Teachers are required to follow the curriculum, but what happens when none of their students can keep up with it?  

Things look even worse in underdeveloped countries. The World Literacy Foundation revealed its findings in the same article that 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read or understand simple text, continuing at a rise of 20% of that number a year. Before COVID, the number of children and adolescents lacking foundational literacy skills was 260 million- during COVID, that number jumped to 1.6 billion.  

It’s important to remember that this doesn’t just apply to reading for fun, (although that is an invaluable part of a child’s education). We’re talking about 1.6 billion kids who may never hold a mid-level job, who may never make it into any form of higher education, and who won’t be able to do things like file their own taxes. It’s said that education is the great equalizer. All that illiteracy serves to do is keep the impoverished exactly where they are and kick the disadvantaged in developed countries down even further.  

So, what do we do? We’re in a digital Dark Age- without access to the internet, it’s difficult to get access to books in many of these countries. Bill Gates has suggested that AI chatbots could help kids learn how to read, but that requires stable internet access as well. Unless there were suddenly some way to give every child a functioning computer with inherent internet access, I can’t see the internet being the best way to combat this. A more effective route would be a taught course, individualized to each country, which would take kids through the basics of reading from the very beginning. Kids who excelled could be excused from it in favor of designated “reading time,” while kids who need it would have a teacher specially trained in teaching literacy skills. That would still be expensive, of course, and how it would be funded would need to be worked out through the UN and UNESCO, but a total solution is probably far off in the future. And these kids need help now if they’re ever going to catch up. 

Image Credit: Kyle Glenn on Unsplash