Shameful statistic of the day:
Close to 1 million working age adults in New Zealand lack the literacy and numeracy skills needed to function in a modern workplace.
To put it another way, about 4 in 10 (that’s 2 in 5) adults have difficulties with reading, writing, maths and communication.
These results may seem far-fetched but they’re backed up by research (2006 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey) – and their impact is very real.
Poor adult literacy rates cost New Zealand businesses daily through accidents and injuries, as well as millions of dollars in wastage, mistakes, missed deadlines and low productivity.
Even if some of these people are immigrants who aren’t fluent in English that is a staggering number of people who can’t read instructions, newspapers, warnings, employment contracts, school notices, road rules, menus, or help their children with homework.
Many will also have insufficient grasp of maths to budget or even count change.
That is nearly half the adult population ill-equipped for work and life.
We’ve had some work for us and have offered them help but none have wanted it and they’ve soon moved on.
The reasons for poor literacy and numeracy will be many and complex and it would be most unfair to lay all the blame on teachers or the education system.
But they are the people best equipped to ensure the next generation of workers is far better equipped than the current one.
Homepaddock 
Let’s remember the standard normal distribution. IQ is mean 100, standard deviation 15. So roughly a sixth of the population has IQ less than 85. Drop much below that and functional literacy gets tough.
See Linda Gottfredson here on IQ.
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004075.html
In short, for at least some of this cohort, we probably couldn’t expect a lot better.
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Eric – does that mean there’s always been this level of functional illiteracy but it’s noticed more now because technology has replaced so many manual jobs?
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Baseline capacity has been increasing on average over time (the Flynn effect) but we’ve perhaps been moving from a system that was more accommodative of baseline capacity differences (moving more quickly to training in specific skills for those for whom vocational training would be most effective) to one that aspires to send everyone to university. That doesn’t work so well for the folks below the mean.
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