How can a child spend 11 years at school and leave clified functionally illiterate?

I attend secondary school and there are some people that I just can't imagine picking up a book, or likewise doing their homework. I often hear them asking if they can copy their homework from someone elses, attempting to cheat and exam and generally they are disruptive and immature in cl. One, who was sixteen, but was only in 2nd year (my year), dropped out at the beginning of 2nd year. She now loiters around the streets of the town I live in, doing nothing. Why? Upbringing. Her parents don't care about education, they don't care about her future, and in turn, she doesn't care either. It isn't so much that it's seen as uncool to pick up a book; it's that they can't be bothered. And their parents aren't ever going to right that. It is your parents who vastly make up who you are (if you live with them), and what your motives are. I couldn't think of a future without college and a good career; some of these people don't even think of a future, full stop, or if they do it's usually about how much alcohol they're going to intoxicate themselves with at the next disco on Saturday. Another issue is that, no offence, but these people almost always are as thick as two short planks. Maybe they have the bad parents, too, but it's especially hard when they have to work twice as hard as many brighter students. And then they start hanging around with all the other kids who have similar IQs and they all come up with the view "I ain't bothered"; so, they have friends who are bad influences, their parents don't care, they don't care, they're ignorant and they probably are weak minded, i.e. they'll do whatever is supposedly "cool" - God they irritate me. If I started acting like that, my parents would go crazy. I also, as another answerer said, read a lot - I had a reading age of 16 at twelve.