I would like to point out that not everyone is from the USA. I for one come from Slovenia, where we have quite a good school system and a literacy rate of about 99.6%, compared to the USA with99%(source). I have no idea where you got the statistics. Can you maybe provide a source?
I should have said half of the Americans reading my comment rather than half of the people reading it, though if we include all people who speak English as a first language, the statistics don’t change much—Americans make up more than 60% of all native English speakers, so at the absolute least, 3/10 of the native English speakers reading my comment are below an 8th grade level (assuming there’s no correlation with Lemmy users having higher than average literacy, which I’m sure Lemmy users would like to believe, but we shouldn’t make this assumption without data to back it up)