EU state raises alarm about growing illiteracy
Almost a third of the population in Austria has poor reading skills, signaling an alarming trend, the EU country’s government statistics office has said.
The decline is particularly noticeable among those with jobs that require medium or low qualifications, Statistics Austria said in a statement earlier this week.
In Austria, which has a population of nine million, a total of 29.0% or around 2.6 million people have a low level of literacy, according to data on the agency’s website.
The number of those who have problems with reading increased by 11.9% between 2012 and 2023, the figures show.
The average literacy level among Austrians aged 16 to 65 stands at 254 points, which is significantly below the average of 260 points set by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).
People from 16 to 24 performed above the OECD average, while older people appear to have significantly lower reading skills than the expected level, the agency said.
“The differences in reading skills among adults are large, and this gap has continued to widen,” Tobias Thomas, Director General of Statistics Austria, was cited as saying.
There has been “a particularly strong decline” in the consumption of complex reading materials such as newspapers and magazines, with the Austrians mainly reading emails and other shorter texts, the agency noted.
According to Statistics Austria, the number of those with low day-to-day math skills also grew by 6.7% between 2012 and 2023, amounting to 22.6% of the population.
Russia’s state-owned pollster VTSIOM said last year that “reading remains a popular means of obtaining knowledge and information among the Russians” despite what it called “serious competition” from visual media.
In the poll carried out in November 2024, some 87% of respondents said that they had read something over the previous week. Fiction topped the chart of the most popular reading materials (40%) in Russia, leaving news and social media posts in second place (37%), according to VTSIOM’s figures.
