Happy World Literacy Day. Or, as an increasing number of people would apparently prefer to spell it, Wurld Literasy Daye. Today, September 8th, is the day UNESCO set aside to celebrate the ability to read and write. But these days it feels like a welfare check on a patient whose vitals are not looking so peachy. In true TikTok fashion, a new trend has been doing more to surface this crisis than any government report. The Illiterate Boyfriend trend, which is exactly what it sounds like, involves women presenting their male partners with a list of words and filming the results. The words include epitome, hyperbole, faux pas, gnocchi, hors d'oeuvres, fuchsia, conscientious, and challah (although, don’t be embarrassed by that one if you aren’t Jewish). The boyfriends and their partners seem very unbothered; the comment section less so. "The fact that his vote matters just as much as mine," one woman wrote, "is really pissing me off." One man completed the list with a perfect score, which you would think would end well for him. It did not. "This is the barest minimum of bare minimums," one commenter noted. "The men are being praised for literacy. We're in hell." Another correctly identified colonel and regime, prompting a commenter to observe that he was "obviously a Republican." He may simply have an interest in military history, which is a time-honoured hobby of boyfriends everywhere, but nuance has also had a difficult year. Most of these boyfriends would be upset if they could read the comments. Last year, boys were thinking of the Roman Empire; now we are here. But is this what we deserve? Is this the culture we have bred and longed for? Let’s find out. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 21% of American adults have difficulty completing tasks that require comparing information, paraphrasing, or making basic inferences. That translates to approximately 43 million adults operating at the lowest levels of English literacy. A further 54% of adults read below a sixth-grade level, which means that well over half the adult population of the most influential nation on the internet is functionally struggling with written communication. But all those numbers don’t seem toooo bad. Right? What are the folks doing in countries where we usually like to point fingers at? Iran, a country facing significant economic and political pressures, has an adult literacy rate of approximately 88 to 90%, with youth literacy approaching 99%. We aren’t saying Iran isn’t allowed to be literate, but a country with all the resources in the world who likes to shout “we’re #1” should be doing some introspection if it is easily beaten out by a country that has been in the clutches of a shadow war for the last 50 years. thewhimsywell, snopster, griffinandspencer The Harvard Gazette reported this year that average reading scores for high school seniors fell to their lowest level since 1992, the first time twelfth graders had been tested since the pandemic. Martin West, academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, noted that "American students' literacy skills peaked in roughly the middle of the last decade and have fallen significantly since that time." This decline predates COVID, those dark times just accelerated something that was already in motion. Damn, just one more thing we can’t blame on the plandemic! The Nation's Report Card found that 14% of thirteen-year-olds reported reading for fun almost every day in 2025, down from 27% in 2012. In thirteen years, the proportion of young teenagers who read for pleasure halved. The kids did not suddenly become less curious. Something changed in their environment, and most of us are holding it in our hands right now. Thought Catalog / unsplash (not the actual photo) The Illiterate Boyfriend trend is being discussed primarily as entertainment, which it is, and as evidence of a gender gap in reading habits, which it also is. Men's rates of book reading have declined over the past decade at a rate that is now showing up in dating dynamics. Nearly half of all women read at least one novel or short story in 2022. Only one in four men did the same. According to Tinder data posted in The Guardian, mentions of books in dating profiles jumped 40% among women this year and only 23% among men. A 2024 Pew Research report found that 47% of women aged 25 to 34 now hold a bachelor's degree, compared with 37% of men in the same age group. In 1995, those figures were equal. Dr. Wendy Walsh, a clinical psychologist who studies dating behaviour, says the consequence is that "we have in our mating market an oversupply of educated women and an undersupply of formally educated men." The YouGov survey data on book reading adds another dark shade. Six in ten Americans read at least one book in 2025, which sounds reasonable until you register that four in ten Americans read no books at all in an entire year. Democrats read more books on average than Republicans, though the median for both parties sits at two books, meaning the difference is driven by heavy readers at the top end rather than typical reading habits across the board. Independents also read less than either party. Americans who pay close attention to public affairs read more than those who do not, which raises the question of whether reading habits shape political engagement or political engagement shapes reading habits, and the answer is probably both, in a loop that is currently spinning in the wrong direction. Ishaq Robin / unsplash (not the actual photo) The literacy crisis is not confined to the mispronunciation of foo-chia. It has spread into how people engage with every form of media, and the results are very alarming but not surprising if you have ever opened a comment section. There are people who will not read first-person narratives because the protagonist does something they personally would not do, and the use of the word I makes it feel like an accusation. There are people who cannot engage with morally complex characters because they believe that a character doing something bad means the author endorses it. By this logic, Agatha Christie was one of the most prolific killers of history, which would make her biography considerably more interesting than it already is. Subtext has become a casualty and the death of hyperbole as an understood rhetorical device is the worst thing ever. “Worse than the Spanish Flu?” you might ask. Well, you have proved my point. Someone posts that they are starving and is informed that people in developing nations are starving and they should be more careful with their language. The ability to understand that language operates at multiple registers simultaneously, that a statement can be expressive without being literal, has completely left the chat. It wouldn’t be a full analysis of the state of global literacy without paying a visit to Love Island. A contestant described something as “a ball of fresh air.” Another attempted the word compromise and arrived at come-promise. The only thing I can do is shake my head. The internet argues that if an author writes “the curtain is blue,” that is all they meant. But this argument is for the lazy. The teachers were trying to show people that language carries meaning beyond its surface, that context shapes interpretation, that a writer chooses words for reasons that reward attention. People decided that was unnecessary, and now we need Elmo to teach us big words. dslr_newb / unsplash (not the actual photo) The response to the literacy crisis from the education system has been, at best, complicated. A parent in Kentucky recently discovered that her daughter's middle school had been providing AI-generated materials to students. North Dahota, New Mizone, and Venecky were just some of the states found on the map. And no, they were not victims of Trump renamings. Elements on the Periodic table were also very confidently wrong and Marc was the newest planet in our solar system. Teachers on TikTok are crying, understandably so. Darius Williams, who teaches at Wheatley High School in Houston, posted a video describing a three-hour class with seniors, students on the verge of college, in which he became visibly emotional describing their struggles with basic literacy. “They have the ability to reason when they are talking to their homeboy,” he says, but they simply could not apply their thoughts to a text. The political response has been interesting. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, displaying his characteristic preference for doing something rather than discussing it, announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI tools for students from kindergarten through eighth grade. Teachers can continue using AI for planning and operational tasks. High school students will receive AI literacy lessons twice a year and limited supervised access to approved platforms. The Los Angeles Unified School District announced similar restrictions, citing concern that AI access when children already struggle with nuanced reading and thinking makes things considerably worse. A school in Western New York nearly introduced an AI-powered robot teacher before parent complaints halted the plan, which represents possibly the only documented case of a “Not in my backyard” philosophy producing an outcome most people would agree was correct. The most irritating recurring complaint in the literacy conversation is the one that goes: why didn't they teach us this in school? Specifically directed at things like taxes, which is maths, by the way. What about critical thinking about media? Well, that’s English literature. And so is the ability to interpret ideas that differ from your own experience. All of this was present in every school curriculum and dismissed by the people now complaining about its absence as an exercise in pointless curtain analysis. The disrespect shown to English literature might be at the heart of the problem. Media literacy is English literature with a different name. The ability to understand that a character is not the author is English literature. The ability to engage with a hypothetical, to sit with a moral question, to understand that a story about a murderer is not an endorsement of murder, is English literature. The skills being mourned were being taught. People opted out of them, and the internet has been a very expensive remedial class in why those skills were not optional. heyquilia / unsplash (not the actual photo) Dr. Jess Carbino, former sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, notes that when people are asked what they want in a partner, intelligence rarely makes the top three. Kindness, humour, and attractiveness tend to lead. "Maybe people on the coasts might say intelligence," she says. "But by and large, that's not one of the top things being measured." Couples therapist Robin Hamilton says that "it's not that someone needs to know every word in the dictionary. It's more: are you able to communicate with me, are you able to meet me halfway?" The illiterate boyfriend trend is rage bait, as Dr. Walsh acknowledges, directed at a dating market that feels unfair to many women for reasons that go well beyond vocabulary. "It's OK to date a guy who can't say epitome or niçoise," she says. "I have a PhD, but I need spellcheck for hors d'oeuvres." This is both gracious and correct. The ability to pronounce gnocchi is not a reliable indicator of someone's capacity for kindness, emotional intelligence, or meaningful communication. But the ability to read, to engage with written information, to understand that language operates beyond its most literal surface, to sit with a text and extract meaning from it: these are not elite skills reserved for the highly educated. They are the basic infrastructure of a functioning democracy, an informed electorate, and a society capable of navigating the enormous volume of written information that now determines almost everything about how we live. Drop the vape. Pick up a book. Make your mom proud. Happy World Literacy Day!
