EU lagging behind on education, illiteracy on rise

In case you had any doubts, they aren’t just self-aggrandizing, they’re also dumshits.

However, countries have failed to bring down the share of low performing readers. Instead of the targeted 20% decrease, illiteracy has actually increased by more than 10% since 2000.
According to the Commission, all countries have their own relative strengths and weaknesses across the benchmark areas and "there are significant divergences between member states and fields". For example, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Poland and Slovenia "exceed the five benchmarks on average and are still progressing" while France, the Netherlands and Belgium show only "average performance below the benchmarks and have stopped progressing in this respect".