The Expert Podcast

So we've seen a lot of news stories about how there are problems with students at all grade levels being able to read or do math or, you know, some other basic things. This isn't an indictment or a criticism or a judgment on how that happened or why it happened or whose fault it is. There's a place for that conversation, but this is more about what are the consequences for everybody involved, even people who are not part of the group that's falling behind in an educational platform.

Let's say you, according to this article, are one of the fifth of Americans who struggle to read well. You know that's going to have problems in your life, where you're not going to be able to read contracts, read agreements, maybe get a job. The rest of society needs to help out with that. The reason is because if you are the other 80 percent who can read or do math, maybe you're a business person, maybe you're a manager, maybe you have a family member, this lack of literacy is going to create problems for you as well.

If you're a company that sells things to customers and as part of that sales process you have to have an agreement, maybe you're a cell phone company and they have to sign off on an agreement, maybe you sell something online and there's terms and conditions to read, maybe you're an employer and you have to have customers read safety briefings, if those aren't able to be comprehended by 20% of your customers or staff, you may have efficiency problems. You may even have legal problems.

There are some credit card companies right now who are cracking down on merchants who have too many chargebacks on their account because of the fact that the customer couldn't read the agreement. If you're a merchant, you sell something online, and part of the sales process is where they click a box saying, "I have read the terms and conditions and I agree to them," and they buy something and didn't understand what they bought and now they do a dispute on their bill, the credit card companies are cracking down on merchants who have too many people that can't understand what they are being presented. That's a business problem. That's a societal problem.

If you are a family member and you have a person in your family that needs to maybe do basic things like run a budget or go shopping and they can't read, that's going to create additional responsibilities for you. So this falling behind in educational progress—maybe it's pandemic-related, maybe it's other things—is going to start having a domino effect on the rest of society. The other parts of society should start taking a look at it to see how they can adapt accordingly and make adjustments to keep this from becoming a larger problem in general society, even if you're not one of the people who are disadvantaged by this lack of education.