Now we think it is a tragedy if everyone can't read and write. Statistics prepared by the U.S. government indicate that the literacy rate in the U.S. is in the high ninety percentage range. We know that it is not the case, for many students leaving high school cannot read or write. The difficulty lies partially in definitions. From a governmental point of view, anyone who has completed fifth grade is literate.
Any educator knows that is a faulty definition.
The governmental definition of literacy may serve political purposes, but from a functional point of view it is useless. Stripping away the verbiage, literacy is the ability to encode and decode a message. If one encodes and decodes very well, he is well-educated at most, or at the least, he can read and write very well. In other words, there is a minimum level of attainment if one is to be literate, but at the same time, there is a range of literacy. The same conditions must apply to technological literacy.