Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can’t help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
Yeah some of this tracks when I was a substitute. I had kids who didn’t know how to write their own names. I asked one kid to write his name and address on a form the office gave me. Kid didn’t know how to write either and didn’t even know his home address. These were 9th graders (first year of high school, 13 to 14 years old)
Literacy is not a strong suit of the American population in general and it’s not getting better.
how tf can a 14 year old not know their home address? were they homeless or living outside the school district or something, and therefore unwilling to share their address? it feels impossible to me that a teenager wouldn’t know their own address
Death to America
Well this kid couldn’t read either, so I’m not sure. Could have been a lot of circumstances. Could have been an unstable living situation as well.
14 year old kids are still driven everywhere by their parents. There’s no public transportation where I was working, so kids wouldn’t have to know how to get around. I could easily see a scenario where an illiterate kid has no idea what street they live on because it’s never mattered