Being able to read the words was never the same thing as being able to read what they’re doing to you.
Modern literacy statistics measure whether someone can decode text — sound out or recognise the words on a page. By that narrow bar, developed societies have never been more literate. But decoding text and understanding what it’s doing to you are two different skills, and only one of them gets taught at scale.
Paulo Freire’s mid-20th-century adult literacy work in Brazil made the split explicit: basic literacy (reading the word) versus critical literacy (reading the world) — the capacity to see the social and political forces a text carries, not just decode its letters. A person can clear the first bar and fail the second completely. That gap is what “functional illiteracy” names: technically able to read, functionally unable to use that reading to reason or resist.
Freire built the framework for adult literacy campaigns among Brazil’s rural poor, but the same split shows up anywhere text gets consumed faster than it’s interrogated.
Source: Freire’s basic/critical literacy distinction is treated at length in Colin Lankshear, “Functional Literacy From a Freirean Point of View,” in McLaren & Leonard (eds.), Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter (Routledge, 2002).