The United States is the most affluent and technologically advanced of all the industrial nations on earth. With its "free" compulsory education for all, a network of state-owned and state-operated teachers' training colleges, strict teacher certification requirements, and rich resources dedicated to education, the appalling illiteracy rate of the country is a disgrace to educators.
However, one cannot ascribe the illiteracy or the general poor reading skill of children in this country entirely to the inefficiency of the education system; parents are as much to blame as teachers in not efficiently teaching children to read.
Teaching children to read should be the foremost responsibility of parents. Sometimes you cannot blame the parents, because they themselves may be poor readers to begin with