What is "functionally illiterate"

Usage examples of "functionally illiterate".

Moreover, the idea that a child from a broken and/or functionally illiterate home, without the requisite privacy, quiet, and electric lighting, will succeed at homework is absurd.

And the only thing I have to look forward to, when I reach it, is the dubious care to be rendered by a functionally illiterate technician who was drunk during our last conversation.

Back in the kitchen, the radio alerted her that thirty five million Americans were functionally illiterate and another twenty five million couldn't read at all and she snapped it off, filled a jar to water the plants and spilled it in a lunge for the phone, for a pencil, for anything handy to write on, yes just a minute.

And the illiterate (or the functionally illiterate, since some learn their letters for religious motives but cannot read with any skill) have a vernacular which is held to the conservative mainstream only by the necessity to communicate with the upper classes.

It's even topical for the '90s, in that its central character, Rick Luban, is a juvenile delinquent and a functionally illiterate product of our modern education system.

However, he turned out to be capable of that as well and Jeffcoat, who it turned out was on the near side of functionally illiterate, turned more and more of the administration of the camp over to him.

She tried to argue with me that children should learn more than that until I reminded her that much of the population in this country is functionally illiterate.

It had been Ryan's observation that as many as ninety percent of the entire populationnot counting mutieswere functionally illiterate.