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Generalize much?
OP's being a smart ass, but I recently learned that their statement is true, for a certain value of "read".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
There is much literature (heh) that quotes the same numbers, or near enough. So yeah, I'm going to say most Americans can't read. And BTW, this is one of the most shocking truths I've learned in life.
Yeah, the US has reached an incredibly low standard of literacy for what is supposed to be a developed nation. The numbers on reading level are scary. Also look at how much people read as adults. We just don't learn how and then we don't practice during our lives. It's a nation of partial literacy being kept together my hyper nationalism and smart phones to distract us with 6 second videos.
Yep, this is generations of slowly gutting public education at work.
The privileged kids get to go to fancy private schools, many of which are ironically now funded by the public (who don't get to send their kids there). Everyone else goes to underfunded public schools, which have tragically underpaid teachers who run the risk of losing their jobs if they don't give every student a passing grade. Teachers in struggling school districts are just shoving their students' deficiencies onto the next grade up, which continues to snowball until you end up with a majority of high school seniors graduating with a 7th grade reading level at best.
In saying that, it's not all doom and gloom, but it highlights a key disparity that affects some parts of the US more than others. Some US states actually have very good public school systems, up there with high performing countries in Europe and Asia. But when considering how bad the average is in the US, it means that there are a lot of states that are substantially worse than that, where things are just incredibly dire.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lowest performing states are mostly in the southern US.