First of all, we must avoid making sweeping generalisations. Someone who struggles with writing is not necessarily illiterate, let alone incapable of thinking. Some people suffer from dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties. Others left school with only a fragile grasp of reading. Some people understand a text perfectly well but struggle to organise their thoughts when they have to put it into writing. Still others can read but hardly ever do so, and gradually lose the habit of engaging with long sentences or complex vocabulary.
Functional illiteracy refers in particular to people who have attended school but do not have a sufficient command of reading and writing to be fully independent in certain everyday situations. It should not be confused with illiteracy, which refers to people who have never learnt to read or write. Between these situations and complete mastery of the written word, however, lies a much broader intermediate zone: slow reading, difficulties with comprehension, very poor spelling, and an inability to summarise a text or clearly express an idea.
The problem becomes particularly apparent when written text becomes abstract. Reading a text message or an advert obviously does not require the same skills as understanding a contract, a feature article, an administrative decision or a multi-page argument. It is therefore possible to be technically literate whilst still experiencing considerable difficulties as soon as the text requires concentration, a broader vocabulary and the ability to make connections between several ideas.
Our modern relationship with screens can also alter our reading habits. We are constantly bombarded with notifications, short videos and content that we skim through in a matter of seconds. This does not mean that screens ‘make people illiterate’ – a far too simplistic claim. However, when a person rarely reads long texts, they practise that specific skill – attentive, sustained reading – less. Like many skills, it needs to be maintained.
There is also a major social dimension. Not all children grow up in environments where the same books, the same conversations or the same vocabulary are shared. School can compensate for some of these differences, but not always entirely. A difficulty that arises very early on can then snowball: when reading requires a great deal of effort, one reads less; when one reads less, one’s vocabulary is enriched less; and when one has a smaller vocabulary, texts become even more difficult.
In adulthood, this vulnerability can become invisible. Some people develop impressive strategies to conceal it: asking someone else to fill in a form, claiming to have forgotten their glasses, consistently favouring the telephone, avoiding certain tasks, or memorising information rather than reading it. Shame then often acts as a further barrier to learning.
Above all, it would be absurd to confuse literacy with intelligence. One can have an excellent memory, remarkable practical, artistic or interpersonal intelligence, and yet still face real difficulties with reading or spelling. Conversely, excellent command of grammar obviously guarantees neither depth of reasoning nor the relevance of ideas.
But the written word remains a formidable tool for empowerment. Reading enables us to verify information, understand a contract, discover a way of thinking different from our own, follow complex lines of reasoning, and avoid having to constantly rely on someone else to interpret the world for us. Writing enables us to clarify our own thoughts: searching for the right word sometimes forces us to understand what we really meant.
Perhaps this is where the key challenge lies today. In a world saturated with images, videos, slogans and, soon, texts generated automatically by artificial intelligence, truly knowing how to read is no longer simply a matter of deciphering words. It means knowing how to understand, interpret, question, compare and think. And, paradoxically, this very skill is likely to become increasingly valuable at the very moment when we feel we have never read so much.
