Why Singapore’s Adult Literacy Is Falling Despite High Global Rankings

Singapore's literacy challenge is often overlooked, being neither a pressing economic concern nor a matter of fundamental rights. Given our national focus on pragmatism, these issues of literacy can seem peripheral. Singapore consistently ranks among the world’s best — with one of the highest GDPs per capita, exceptional human development, and even top-tier happiness scores. Ironically, Singaporean fifteen-year-olds also top the PISA rankings for reading. Amidst all of these achievements, why is our adult literacy lower than the OECD average? And, more importantly, does it matter?

Why are literacy rates dropping over time?

This trend isn't unique to Singapore. Dropping critical literacy is a global issue among countries blessed enough to have a mostly literate population. In the United States, professors of great-books courses report that their students are now unable to keep up with traditional reading requirements. In the United Kingdom, only about a third of 8- to 18-year-olds enjoy reading (compared to about two-thirds in 2016, just 9 years earlier). Singapore too faces this decline, with the proportion of people failing to reach even rudimentary Level 1 levels of literacy increasing over the past decade. To put that into perspective, a Level 0 in literacy reflects an ability to comprehend only basic, single-sentence texts.

One reason may be that, while we are not reading less overall, what we read has changed — becoming shorter, simpler and more casual. The rise of social media, and especially short-form video, has decimated the need for the comprehension of long passages and even long sentences. It's a common joke that smartphones have ruined attention spans, but there's some element of truth there. Reading a book or an article is a long process; if you want a dopamine hit sooner rather than later, you would much rather watch an Instagram Reel or browse X. Imagine spending five minutes reading an article and then realizing it wasn't worth your time? Or imagine five hours with a book of questionable quality? By engaging more with shorter texts, we're telling our brain that literacy is secondary. Reading is a skill that can deteriorate as easily as it can improve. Without exercising our cognitive muscles, we lose the plot (quite literally).

Why are literacy rates dropping with age?

Another notable phenomenon is the gap in literacy performance between Singaporean 15-year-olds and adults. The data seems to suggest that somehow adults lose literacy with time, which is surprising at first glance. Many jobs do not involve large amounts of reading, and over time, reading skills will decline. Still, going from first-place to below average seems pretty steep. Does Singapore fail to encourage the maintenance of literacy?

To some extent.

It's important to consider that the PIAAC test that measures adult proficiency in literacy is administered in the primary business language of each country, which, in Singapore's case, is English. At many workplaces, you can get by with limited English proficiency, especially since Singapore is a very linguistically diverse city. Considering this, it's not a surprise that, in the aggregate, Singaporeans do not perform as well as expected in a test measuring English literacy, especially as the aging population becomes increasingly distanced from their years of formal education (where English is the standardized language of instruction).

Another important aspect is that most jobs don't require a lot of reading at all. After all, different jobs require different skill sets. This trend of older populations performing worse is replicated in the test data for other countries. However, Singapore is an outlier in how much this rate plummets, especially when comparing teenagers to working adults. Again, this is likely because English isn't necessarily the main business language in many workplaces.

How do we reverse this trend, and will this get worse?

Do Singaporeans read enough for pleasure?

It's worth asking a more uncomfortable question: do Singaporeans read for leisure? To be more specific, do Singaporean adults engage in recreational reading? The 2021 NLB National Reading Habits Study on Adults offers us a snapshot of the state of reading in Singapore among adults.

The study found that 34% of the adults surveyed read books (including e-books) more than once a week. When zooming into genres, 28% of adults read non-fiction books more than once a week, and 17% of adults read fiction books more than once a week.

How does this compare with other countries? In Britain, 35% of readers read books more than one a week according to a 2020 YouGov survey. A 2022 BookNet Canada survey revealed that 33% of Canadians report themselves as reading daily and that 50% read weekly, placing Canada in a similar 33-50% range, comparable to Singapore and Britain.

There doesn't appear to be a significant difference between different English-speaking countries. Singaporeans do read their fair share of books. Considering the number of adults who read books more than once a week has been increasing (from 19% (2016) to 25% (2018) to 34%), perhaps the drop in critical literacy will be reversed eventually. It looks like the uncomfortable question has a comforting answer.

Of course, 2021 is four years ago. It would be interesting to see how reading habits have been influenced by the rapid proliferation of AI technologies into our daily lives.

If AI can read and write, do we still need to?

Is literacy still relevant? Or has AI killed it? AI can autocomplete sentences, proofread emails, and refine documentation. With the power of AI, anyone can generate passable ideas and present them in a coherent and concise way; you don't need perfect grammar or any fancy vocabulary.

Like many discussions of AI, there are two dimensions where one needs to argue for or against: the practical and the hypothetical. Let's start with the practical. AI is just not there yet. It hallucinates often, sometimes reasons poorly, and its inability to understand the full context of the task might cause unexpected or incorrect outcomes. LLMs speak with confidence even when they are completely wrong, placing the burden of discernment on the user. Without critical literacy skills, we become passive consumers of algorithms we scarcely understand.

But in the hypothetical world where LLMs are flawless — always accurate, never hallucinating — do we still need literacy? Can’t we rely on them to decipher inputs and generate perfect outputs? Not quite. Importantly, our minds still need to interface with these systems, and until the machine can read our minds better than we can understand them, we need to speak to the machine in human language. This hypothetical world favors semantic precision more than our current one, as the best instructions give the best results. For this precision, we need critical literacy.

And let's not forget: in both the practical and the hypothetical sense, we still need to communicate with other humans, and here too literacy will help. Unless we find a way to communicate without language, we need to stay literate.

Perhaps it's the romanticism of this hypothetical future that drives ideas like Mark Cuban's contentious sentiment that Philosophy will become a more important degree than one related to programming. (He said this in 2017 and I admire the prescience.) I'm not sure if I agree with that, but what is for sure is that a new set of skills is going to be increasingly valued, and critical literacy is one of them. With AI, we get another vector of inequality: some will be adept at using AI to enhance their own abilities, while others will use AI wrongly and end up worse off compared to if they had never used it to begin with.

Which side will you be on?

Personally, I've learnt many important lessons from books, and I'm glad to see an upward trend in terms of reading among Singaporean adults. With any luck, this trend will help reverse the literacy challenges facing modern Singapore. A literate population underpins a competitive workforce, especially in our service-driven, developed economy. For Singapore, human capital is everything. To quote founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, "it is the quality, the mettle of a people which decides its future; not the size of the territory, the girth, the numbers".