Literacy rates are vitally important, but have been so consistently high in the west that they are taken largely for granted.
It has gotten to such an extent that there isn't even an exhaustive approach taken to finding the literacy rate.
It is instead assumed that in the US literacy is in the upper 90s at this point, and the few truly illiterate will to a certain extent always be with us.
Literacy is so common that it's not considered a real issue.
While not everyone has an "ideal" vocabulary as well as such an ideal could be defined, most people can read enough to function in an information heavy world.
We don't even realize how much our lives are surrounded by printed and digital words.
When you stroll down a street in a city like Austin you're surrounded by signs advertizing stores and what they have to sell and signs to warn you about how to handle traffic and where to move.
Home printers churn out pages and pages of documentation.
We send more electronically, and other bits of information are distributed to professional printers to produce signage, documentation, or a myriad of other possible things to convey information.
It's hard to tell the exact cause of this increase in literacy in the western world.
There are several possible causes, one of which is the advancement of professional printers.
As they produced printed word cheaper and faster, it became more economic to print things.
As reading material became more common and cheaper, more people had incentives and rewards for learning how to read.
Another possibility is that it was the spread of mandatory (public) education that made children have to learn how to read, and for others it was the advancement of the economy as a whole demanding more educated workers, and creating workers with enough consistent downtime that they could read.
Printers and the printed word have shaped our world in ways that we can't fully appreciate.
Technology has that effect, once it's become common enough and utterly changed the world people tend to lose the ability to see all the ways the technology has changed their world.
Printers have made it easier to share important or mundane information.
We can print at home, or we can use electronic means to disseminate the information.
With the spread of literacy we know that a well written sign or board will display the meaning of a message very well.
While people like to talk about the dumbing down of America or the world in general, consider how many more things are displayed in the aforementioned Austin street with words instead of pictograms.
Words are an assumption of literacy, pictures assume illiteracy.
It has gotten to such an extent that there isn't even an exhaustive approach taken to finding the literacy rate.
It is instead assumed that in the US literacy is in the upper 90s at this point, and the few truly illiterate will to a certain extent always be with us.
Literacy is so common that it's not considered a real issue.
While not everyone has an "ideal" vocabulary as well as such an ideal could be defined, most people can read enough to function in an information heavy world.
We don't even realize how much our lives are surrounded by printed and digital words.
When you stroll down a street in a city like Austin you're surrounded by signs advertizing stores and what they have to sell and signs to warn you about how to handle traffic and where to move.
Home printers churn out pages and pages of documentation.
We send more electronically, and other bits of information are distributed to professional printers to produce signage, documentation, or a myriad of other possible things to convey information.
It's hard to tell the exact cause of this increase in literacy in the western world.
There are several possible causes, one of which is the advancement of professional printers.
As they produced printed word cheaper and faster, it became more economic to print things.
As reading material became more common and cheaper, more people had incentives and rewards for learning how to read.
Another possibility is that it was the spread of mandatory (public) education that made children have to learn how to read, and for others it was the advancement of the economy as a whole demanding more educated workers, and creating workers with enough consistent downtime that they could read.
Printers and the printed word have shaped our world in ways that we can't fully appreciate.
Technology has that effect, once it's become common enough and utterly changed the world people tend to lose the ability to see all the ways the technology has changed their world.
Printers have made it easier to share important or mundane information.
We can print at home, or we can use electronic means to disseminate the information.
With the spread of literacy we know that a well written sign or board will display the meaning of a message very well.
While people like to talk about the dumbing down of America or the world in general, consider how many more things are displayed in the aforementioned Austin street with words instead of pictograms.
Words are an assumption of literacy, pictures assume illiteracy.
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