>>16
Read the next sentence. The one about schools.
Protip: anyone can become a world class illiterate, if the school can just fuck them over badly enough.
Example: A teacher I talked to once (from a country much whiter than Amerika), told me about some maths classes he'd done for adults (dunno the English name for that type of program, but it's got to do with finding them new jobs when the old one's gone to shit).
At some point they'd covered fractions. Everyone'd had fractions in elementary school, so they should know them. However the elementary school had fucked that up, so in reality, they'd been learning that they could never understand fractions. And sure enough, there was zero progress.
Then they moved on to trigonometry. Which no-one'd had in elementary. Or later, for that matter. No-one had learned that they couldn't do it, so everyone went on to get straight A's. Srsly.
Point here being: Learning that something cannot be done, is the most dangerous learning of all. It stops all intelligent thinking dead, faster and more permanently than anything else, even religion. Also, it's damn hard to un-learn.
And all it takes is a few years in a fucked-up excuse for a school.