Nearly 30% of Brazilian adults cannot understand what they read. This is a statement about the country’s future. There are those who do not understand because they lack access to education, and those who do not understand because they have learned to read only the language of social media. The problem is the same. The causes are not.
What happens to a democracy whose citizens cannot understand what they read? Public debate in the country revolves around polarization, fake news, online mobbing, and institutional erosion. These are valid observations. But rarely does anyone point to the root cause of many of these problems: Brazil doesn’t read. And when it does read, it often doesn’t understand.
The sixth edition of the “Retratos da Leitura no Brasil” survey, conducted by the Pró-Livro Institute in partnership with the Ministry of Culture, revealed that only 47% of Brazilians had read at least one book in the three months prior to the survey. In 2007, that percentage was 55%. Seventeen years later, the country has lost eight percentage points in the number of readers. This figure excludes more than half the population from the category of readers.
But the decline in reading habits is only the tip of the iceberg. The most troubling data comes from the Functional Literacy Indicator (INAF), whose 2024 edition confirmed that 29% of Brazilians between the ages of 15 and 64 are functionally illiterate. They can read and write words, but are unable to understand even minimally complex texts, interpret information in context, or apply what they have read to everyday situations. That’s nearly 30 out of every 100 Brazilian adults. Among young people aged 15 to 29, the percentage has risen. In 2018, 14% of this age group was functionally illiterate. By 2024, that figure had reached 16%. The problem is worsening precisely among those who are supposed to be the country’s productive and civic future.
There is also a new phenomenon identified by the “Retratos da Leitura” survey: the lack of patience for reading jumped from 18% in 2007 to 40% in 2024. In addition to reading less, Brazilians are increasingly reporting that they lack the patience to read. The culture of instant information, short videos, and endless scrolling is reshaping the attention span of an entire generation.
Brazil's Place in the World of Reading
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) holds up an uncomfortable mirror. In the 2022 edition, Brazil ranked 53rd out of 81 countries assessed in reading, with 410 points, trailing neighbors such as Chile, with 448 points, and Uruguay, with 430 points. Half of Brazilian 15-year-old students performed below the minimum reading level defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—the level considered essential for the full exercise of citizenship.
The indicators have been virtually stagnant since 2009. Over the course of fifteen years and under governments of various ideological leanings, Brazil has spent more and more on education but has seen results that have not kept pace with that investment. In 2009, the federal government invested R$ 18 billion in basic education. By 2018, that figure had jumped to R$ 39 billion, an increase of 116%. Yet student performance on the PISA over the same period remained virtually unchanged.
Ernesto Faria, a professor and researcher at the Roberto Marinho Foundation, summed up the situation accurately: 15- and 16-year-old students are achieving the learning outcomes expected of 11- and 12-year-olds. An entire generation is four years behind in its education. This reality is a burden on the future.
The hidden price everyone pays
Functional illiteracy rarely receives the attention it deserves in economic analyses. The focus tends to be on interest rates, exchange rates, tax reform, and productivity. But data from Inaf 2024 highlight a fact that economists need to take into account: 27% of Brazilian workers are functionally illiterate. More than a quarter of the country’s workforce is unable to fully understand instructions, contracts, technical manuals, or internal communications of moderate complexity.
The economist Amartya Sen, in developing the concept of human capabilities, argued that development is not measured by GDP growth, but by the actual freedom people have to lead their own lives. A worker who does not understand what he reads is vulnerable to exploitative contracts that he cannot interpret. Vulnerable to false information that he lacks the tools to refute. Vulnerable to positions of power that he will never attain because the ladder of advancement was built in a language that he technically knows but does not master.
The study by the IMD World Competitiveness Center ranks Brazil 63rd in terms of how well workers’ language skills match the needs of businesses. What is the point, then, of discussing industrial competitiveness and integration into global value chains if more than a quarter of the workforce cannot read with comprehension?
Democracy without readers is a sham democracy
The information crisis and the reading crisis are part of the same phenomenon. It is not possible to build a healthy public sphere with citizens who cannot distinguish an argument from a statement, a verified source from a rumor, or an analysis from an opinion. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas devoted decades to demonstrating that deliberative democracy requires participants capable of exchanging reasons that must be understood and evaluated.
Brazil discusses fake news as if it were a problem with digital platforms. It discusses polarization as if it were a problem of political radicalization. It discusses online mobbing as if it were a problem of online behavior. However, a citizen who does not read with comprehension is easily manipulated, susceptible to oversimplified narratives and to leaders who focus solely on emotion. The reading crisis fuels individual ignorance while simultaneously reinforcing collective democratic instability.
It is no coincidence that the countries with the most consolidated democracies and the most competitive markets are, in general, the countries with the highest rates of reading and text comprehension. Finland, South Korea, Japan, and Canada have reached this level through cultural and political choices sustained over decades, which have treated reading as the infrastructure of development and a prerequisite for citizenship.
The Patience That's Gone
The finding regarding a lack of patience for reading must be interpreted with caution, because it points to an ongoing cognitive transformation that goes beyond laziness or disinterest. Digital platforms are designed to maximize screen time through rapid stimuli with immediate rewards and content that ends before attention can settle. The result is a generation that consumes more information than any previous generation, but processes that information in increasingly smaller fragments.
Extensive reading requires the opposite of what social media trains us to do. It requires patience, concentration, tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to suspend judgment until the end of an argument. These are skills that need to be cultivated. And if they aren’t cultivated from an early age, they atrophy. The jump from 18% to 40% of people who lack the patience to read in less than two decades documents a profound transformation in the architecture of human attention, with consequences that extend far beyond the publishing industry.
We must, however, resist the trap of imagining that the problem of reading belongs solely to the working classes. Young people from Brazil’s middle and upper classes may have access to books, private schools, and international travel, and yet still inhabit the same desert of deep understanding—with the difference that theirs is better disguised. Technically capable of reading contracts and emails, they fall outside the INAF’s criteria. But they get their information exclusively from tweets, stay “up to date” through headlines they never click on, form opinions based on ninety-second videos, and call this being “in the know.”
It is a sophisticated variation on the same problem: the replacement of in-depth reading with the consumption of fragments, with the difference that this segment of the population has enough social capital that no one questions the superficiality of what they know. The child of the elite who hasn’t read a single book in its entirety in two years and the working-class person from the outskirts who can’t make sense of a water bill are, at different points along the spectrum, on the same continuum in a country that has lost the habit of thinking in depth.
What's at stake
Brazil has bills pending in Congress to strengthen public libraries and create book voucher programs for public school students. These are legitimate and welcome initiatives. But no isolated policy will be enough as long as reading is not treated as an essential public good, comparable to basic sanitation or vaccination. A country that does not read with comprehension is less productive, less just, and less capable of governing itself effectively.
Professor Carla Chiamareli, manager of the Itaú Foundation Observatory, stated that the Inaf 2024 figures indicate that government authorities at the federal, state, and municipal levels must join forces to strengthen education. This statement is correct, but insufficient. Coordinating government efforts is necessary, but it is not enough as long as the culture does not change. As long as reading is viewed as a school obligation rather than an everyday practice. As long as there are no books at home. As long as reading time competes with hours spent scrolling and consistently loses out.
The solution will not come from a single government, a single law, or a single campaign to encourage reading. It will come from a collective, cultural, and political decision to treat the reader as the foundation of everything we seek to build: democracy, the economy, justice, and citizenship. None of these words mean much in the hands of those who cannot read what they imply.
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