Well, this is quite upsetting to read.
More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don't fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
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That's not really a good scenario for a modern democracy to find itself in for reasons that are unfortunately already very clear
I think one way we see this play out frequently is watching people debate issues unproductively with obviously zero theory of mind for their opposition due to one or both parties involved having poor communication skills.
you mean how like every time someone 'argues' with you on lemmy they call you names like zionist? or tells you how stupid and ignorant you are because they are 'very well informed' and you are just a stupid moron who is head is full of lies and propaganda?
In fairness there's way more shameless propagandists on lemmy than anywhere else I've been shy of conservative reddit. But it's close.
Don't worry chatgpt will fix this, they'll explain all the hard concepts for us dummies with only a bit of advertising and corporate propaganda injected.
/s - fixed it for you
I’ll take the win, I get to be elite at something
You were always elite in our hearts, Shortstack
I've studied this a little before (at graduate school) and I don't think we know exactly why, mostly because it's a ton of factors and none of the different camps in academia seem to agree on one.
Your standard Lemmy user may appreciate that late stage capitalism probably is the biggest factor, since poverty and illiteracy are hand in hand. The professor I RA'd for, for instance, just did projects that gave families money and they just did better. It was really that simple, since a ton of this is in the home, even before starting preschool.
But others have argued that there's also an anti-intellectualism in our culture (even before MAGA, kids go "ew nerds") and even more say it's pedagogy. That includes theory, like whole word vs phonics (my advisor spoke of the reading wars of the 90s like he had PTSD lol) as well as practice, like memorization vs reading for reading sake.
And, of course, the government under Bush Jr. really did the opposite of research by enacting the bipartisan No Child Left Behind which fucked both poor folk with contextless "accountability practices" while pushing soulless memorization.
Sorry for a long rant, just, y'know in 2025 onwards it's easy to forget that education has been routinely fucked, usually by conservatives. I can always explain more though, just don't want to make this comment too long, lol
They were supposed to bring critical thinking to the high schools and conservative parents in the US threw a shit fit because they truly believed their kids would no longer believe what they did. We never got critical thinking in high school and most people don't get an introduction to it until college.
Critical thinking should start in kindergarten and by third grade children should be able to create a simple opinion based on facts they understand. We are doing such a disservice to young people it isn't funny.
I'm not sure if it played out quite like that originally, though I guess there would be some people's parents thinking that way, especially in 2026. Keep in mind, NCLB was bipartisan.
In 2003, though, I read that the reality for a majority of schools is a bit more stupid, they don't understand testing and statistics at the federal level and designed a system of accountability that promoted teach-to-the-test methods, which is mostly memorization. That's because low performing schools (read: poor schools) got punished for not meeting an arbitrary test score, so it was a go to survival tactic.
Conservatives still get their desired result, though, which is an education system with minimal critical thinking practiced. Perhaps it was a poison pill, or something, given it's made Americans by and large even dumber since then (and we were already doing bad for other reasons and Reagan).
This was back in 2012ish when the Republican Party platform was the following.
"Knowledge-Based Education We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Yeah, can't have it in high school because that's lib-rule college shit.
That's around when the tea party movement was taking off, so that tracks. You see the seeds of what we see today back even in 2008, too; but to bring it back to reading deficits, we've had problems long before then (which, obviously, snowball into what we see today, e.g. Florida banning sociology and such).
Ooh, I kind of forgot about the madness of schools being funded mainly by their local neighborhood, making schools in poor neighbourhoods poor. Could it be that increased segregation or relative marginalization have had an impact significant enough to bring the mean down?
That's quite correct, but it's two fold. Even if you have funding from the state and feda (which we do get to offset this effect), the home lives of these kids are generally much worse than middle and upper neighborhoods, which also brings down the mean. We're talking pollution, 80 hour work weeks, higher incarceration, etc. it all brings down the mean.
Then the feds have the gall to REDUCE funding if schools can't bring themselves to by the bootstraps? It's awful. That said, Obama admin did help a little in this regard, since at least they did listen to the educational research on this.
The fact that it's called "critical thinking" rubs me the wrong way. Makes it sound like there's also another way of thinking even though the alternative is just not thinking
liberal parents also hate critical thinking. it's not a partisan issue.
i live an in ultra liberal city and the parents are 100% against critical thinking here too. they just want their orthodoxies taught instead of conservative ones.
You have no idea what teaching critical thinking actually is, do you? It’s teaching thought exercises tin elementary that make students evaluate how they form their opinions and how to vet sources, in college or AP high school it turns into critical theory and trying write irrefutable dissertations of your position. It isn’t just CRT and it sure isn’t “identity politics“ though identity politics (which is an abhorrent term btw) can be defended through critical theory, see Judith Butler for instance. Anyhow you’re kinda dumb.
Oh I know that people who use insults to try and 'win' arguments are not people who know what critical thinking is.
And you are completely wrong about what critical thinking is, and proving my very point that it's been turned into nonsense indoctrination treating Judith Butler type figures as geniuses when they are hacks who's work is based on the thesis denying critical thinking is even possible, because we are all trapped by our race or sex or nationality and to be evil beings.
Judith Butler's and her cohorts work is basically taking the concept of original sin in Christianity, and just replacing the word 'sin' with race or sex. It's a dogmatic belief system.
If you had critical thinking skills you'd be able to recognize that. Critical thinking doesn't lead to belief systems. It tears them down. If you are trying to create a belief system or teach it as truth, you are not engaging in i critical thought, you are indoctrinating people. And one way to do that is to shame, shun and harass the non-believer.
You are believer.
Where and when does Butler state in any of their works that we are “trapped” by race or gender, etc. It’s on you to challenge her dissertations academically. That’s the whole freaking point of critical theory as a whole. It’s why weirdos like Jordan Peterson can’t win actual intellectual arguments against Žižek in an actual academic setting and have to result to grifting on X and youtube. FOH, you’re clearly mentally challenged and reactionary.
If you can produce official platform comments that the Democratic party was against critical thought like the Republicans are on record saying then I could believe you.
Otherwise I am going to chalk it up to your excessive devil's advocate nonsense.
Democratic party supports identity politics. that's the antithesis of critical thinking.... lol
one of the key reasons Harris' campaign was so terrible and was poorly supported was her active embrace of ID politics above common sense economics. to the point that many minorities didn't support her because they recognized how backwards Democratic were on immigration and other social issues.
and the Dems continue to support his nonsense despite how incredibly unpopular it makes them.
Yeah, that is what I thought.
So you think ID politics is critical thinking?
Or is critical thinking... not judging people by their race and sex, but evaluating them on their individual merits and circumstances, each with their own set of concerns?
No, that you were just playing devil's advocate with nothing to back you up.
You are confusing critical race theory with critical thinking. I had a heck of a time researching this because all that would pop up in a search was critical race theory. It was annoying.
there is anti-intellectualism in universities now. it's rampant. one of the reasons i left my PhD was seeing how bad it was getting back in 2010.
because intellectual thought is dangerous to tribal allegiance, and people prioritize tribal allegiance above all else.
(interested in more!)
Sure, I'll give you another piece of the puzzle: reading (and language deficits in general) start young. Like, very young-- by age 2, you'll see a difference in working class families and upper class families by "6 months of development" or more, depending on the study. (I lost my Zotero citations, but you can search Google Scholar for "differences in vocabulary by socioeconomic status of toddlers" to find a few).
Experts try to offset that by promoting not just preschool, but early childhood education from birth onwards. Of course, widespread implementation stalled in Congress but you can still see some districts with at least free education at age 3, and you do have (or had?) language support for toddlers through disability services. It's very minor compared to the need, though.
That said, there's still a billion other factors. Free breakfast and lunch at school, for instance-- easy enough to pass in a sane state, makes a tremendous difference at all grades. Parent involvement programs that are sensitive to parental schedules (like night shifts) and home language and so on. It only makes a dent, though- a statistically significant dent, but until family life isn't as stressful and difficult for the working class, it's a bandaid over a gushing wound.
Thanks for the thoughtful, informative comments. It's people like you who make Lemmy what it is. Appreciate your contributions!
Honestly, the education backsliding is one of the tragedies that will be take us generations to fix an education is the best defense against propaganda
I know you didn’t mean it but the irony of this poorly written comment is downright humorous.
Valid, I'm using voice to text and was in a rush. At least no one can ever accuse me of being an LLM.
Is it backsliding or has it always been this bad?
It's backsliding It's the constant war for defunding education that Republicans fight as soon as they get in
Definitely backsliding.
We used to teach phonics, now a lot of schools use some bullshit called three-cueing which literally teaches kids to guess words they don't recognize.
“By the 1990s and early 2000s, research began to conclude that phonics was the necessary method of teaching reading to children, with an American congressional panel in 2000 concluding that the essential components of reading instruction were "vocabulary, comprehension and phonics". Programs began to re-incorporate phonics around this time, although three cueing remained a part of curriculums in the approaches of balanced literacy and whole language.[1][4] As of 2020, an estimated 75% of American teachers used three cueing”
I agree that we have made recent changes that were bad. But we've also expanded access to free lunches in some places, decreased some extreme poverty metrics, have expanded AuDD diagnosis and treatment, raised the minimum wage in a handful of large metro areas, etc.
Is it obvious that a worse teaching method (and the many other bits of bad policy) does more damage than the improvements? This isn't clear to me.
A worse teaching method would produce many generations of uneducated people. And education is important because even with all these advancements made right now, if in the future the people fail to keep up with it, its going to be nothing.
I agree bad teaching practices can have knock-on effects (though I don't think knowledge of phonetics was at real risk of dying out?). But so can bad health outcomes, learning environments, etc?
I think, especially in education, that effect sizes are difficult to judge. And I can't find good data for reading ability over time. So I am very interested in what we are sure about/evidence is.
Something that I did find is this. Its US-only and doesn't actually provide the numbers, but it tells you the general trend.
Ah, found one that does. 2022's decline seems pretty significant, in both mentioned subjects.
Yeah that's possible. Maybe in a few years, if the statistics stay the same, it's a teaching failure.
Considering the post and comments are about literacy specifically, and those things you mentioned don’t really have anything to do with literacy directly, I’m gunna go with yes.
I don't think specificity is enough to guarantee a large effect. We have tons of homeopathic ointments for extremely specific diseases, and their effect is entirely negligible compared to, say, improved sanitation.
Sorry are you saying that something like literacy, which has well-studied and accepted pathways to widespread adoption, is comparable in any way to homeopathy, which is pseudoscientific nonsense from start to end?
Because lol no, homeopathy is nonsense regardless of whatever other nonsense the education department is doing..?
I'm saying that just because something is specifically intended for something doesn't imply that it has a larger effect than other things which have broad effects.
So no, the fact that homeopathy is psudoscience is irrelevant for my example (and the argument as you phrased it above). I read you, effectively, as saying:
There's a reason why Republicans are constantly cutting school funding, and pushing idiotic policies that basically force school resources to get diverted and underperformers to be passed regardless of readiness.
This seems to be hard to tell from the data. While the others are right that there have been recent downward movement, the country is old and we don't have data going back very far.
basic literacy has almost certainly increased (meaning one can write a sentence about onesself, and read it). The large majority of Americans meet this bar (and the rest are children or quite old/sick), while only ~80% met this bar 100 years ago.
But it seems we haven't kept data on reading level for very long. The wikipedia page is pretty good afaict. I suspect what actually matters for democracy and such is the literacy rate of voters, though I haven't seen great data on it. We know a large share of folks don't vote, I would guess this correlates very strongly with literacy.
Also, there's a relevant confounder here (which the wikipedia page highlights): one can be american and not speak english, but still be literate in their childhood language.
it's never been better if you are rich.
if you are not rich, it's backsliding.
same with the economy too. if you are rich, you'll never done better, but if you aren't, you can't get ahead no matter how hard you try.
40 years ago the difference between being rich and poor, didn't matter as much in terms of education and opportunity. there wasn't a huge gulf between rich schools and poor schools. now there is a huge gulf between rich schools and middle class schools.
This statement is kind of glossing over things:
"If you can read a New York Times article..."
It's not that most people can't read the words, and possibly understand the basic surface level of what it says. But at the "6th grade level "they're sometimes failing to recognize sarcasm/tone, potential biases, implied meanings, and the greater context of things not directly stated in the article that would impact the full understanding.
Yes! It's actually an important distinction to make between being able to read the article and being able to comprehend it and then furthermore being able to contextualise it.
Interestingly, I believe this is somewhat similar, but also a bit of a digression so forgive me lol. I am autistic and many people I interact with don't notice unless I tell them. My report actually says, that, particularly with verbal social interactions, although it can appear that I understand everything I'm actually only getting that kind of "surface level" information - hence I can miss social cues and such. I can get along okay with that surface level information because I can still participate in the conversation with the bare bones.
I think this is somewhat similar to how some people can read - they can read the words, get the general gist but they miss a lot of the implications that aren't directly stated. This is why you get a lot of people who can regurgitate kind of "headline news" but don't actually understand the issue being discussed - they understand the formed sentences but not the full picture. I'm not sure if that makes sense but that's how I am starting to understand the difference that some people have between reading and comprehension. And how it explains that sometimes someone can sound like they might know what they are talking about - until the conversation gets to a certain point.
This is why Trump resonates with so much of the country. They can understand him.
The idiots version of a smart man.
This but unironically. Many people's first time even paying attention or participating in politics, I bet.
he also legitimizes their problems that the liberal elites ignore.
the liberal elite basically think everyone should go to college or get fucked. and most of the country... doesn't go to college and is getting fucked.
No no. The elites think we should go to college AND get fucked.
Why hello there, hyper-literate fellows. Fancy exchanging some five-syllable words? Perhaps a few phrases? Or cock jokes? Cock jokes are nice too. I am hyper-literate, you see, so my cock jokes are veeeeeery long
May I introduce you to the phrase: bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
It bounces when you say it
The irony is if you're smart enough to read a nyt article you should be smart enough to realize what a rag it is. Unless you support genocide I guess.
Plato's cave
Catch 22 lol
Another day, another time I have to copy-paste this comment clarifying the 54% stat:
For clarity: this is based on piaac test results. The literacy test results are sorted into 6 categories (1-5 and <1) for comparing the distribution internationally. 54% of Americans score less than 3, compared to top-scoring Japan and top-english-speaking Australia at approximately 35% and 45%. The task description for level 3:
I could not find which source originally cited level 2 as “6th grade” equivalent, though the oecd recommends against drawing that parallel
This is a really complicated statement to refer to test questions that probably say shit like "The ball is blue on Tuesdays. It's Saturday today. What color is the ball?"
Exactly. Show me an example question for this test and then we'll talk
https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/piaac/piaac-released-items.html
Scroll down for samples.
More realistically, it would be stuff like
rainbow color, because ball is gay on Saturday and it's only blue on Tuesdays because of cisheteronromativity that is enforced at it's workplace.
I've always wondered why the old timers across the globe have always pushed education this hard with the youth. This is why. The consequences of proud ignorance are catastrophic.
This is depressing, but it also explains a lot. If people can’t comfortably read the news, misinformation doesn’t have to work very hard.
If you ever had need to wonder why the US public education system has been methodically erroded and underfunded, an uneducated populous is an easily led populous
The reason is that people don't want to pay property taxes.
It's not nefarious cabal, it's the fact your neighbors hate paying taxes on their homes and vote down tax increases, such that education has been systematically underfunded for decades.
This started in the 70s. Look up 'property tax revolts'.
Education funding plummeted, so states and the fed were expected to make up the difference, but it only made things worse and worse because their aid packages were tied to standardized testing, lower teacher wages, and etc.
I worked in my local town on the town meetings. the #1 thing that came up every year, was do we raise taxes, or do we cut school funding. They chose to cut funding 80% of the time. year, after year, after year. until the state came in and basically forced them to raise taxes, or lose their aid package. that was the only time they got raised the taxes. my dad lost his fucking shit, even though the increase was only about $150 per year, which was less than his monthly cigarette budget.
Towns with great schools, overwhelmingly have very high priced homes, because that's how they get their money, from the property taxes on those homes. If you can afford a home that's over a million dollars, you likely live in a great school district. If you can only afford a home that's like 200-300K or less, you live in a crappy one.
The tax rates are often lower on the high value homes, because the overall income from those taxes is much higher.
80% of school budgets come from property taxes. the state and fed funding is very limited by comparison, and it's mostly used for capital or other large/sweeping projects like building schools, standardized testing, etc. it doesn't pay teachers or operating costs of the school.
teacher pay also varies wildly by district. teachers in good districts make 2-3x what they do in crappy ones. because they can hoover up all the good teachers and leave the crappy ones in the crappy schools.
Those are all true statements but I was referring to the degradation from the top levels (fed/state) pushing for private schooling and further ignoring public education despite the fact that it would be an investment into the country as a whole to improve education. Similar to how universal healthcare would relieve the already overburdened system by allowing people to take care of their problems before they become expensive and complicated problems.
While most money comes from local taxes and people hate to pay them (a different discussion on percentage of taxes for different socioeconomic groups), this could have been offset by federal or state funds to make up the difference to a certain level.
Ideally, we'd have a system that looked at the metrics such as test scores, higher education or trade pipeline, and other necessary data to find the weak spots to focus on for improvement instead of the current "if you don't have x amount of y score, you lose funding" punishment method that only incentivises people to massage the numbers or is otherwise advantageous to more prosperous areas that can afford to meet the metric.
With all that, you also have to get the buy-in of the average taxpayer who only knows "gubment raised muh taxes!" instead of looking at it looking term.
I think I've rambled enough on it for the moment. Hope it made sense
I don't know about this. I'm a teacher, and I've taught poor kids and wealthy kids. The way I see the home value/education value thing is that, to some degree, it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
There are always exceptions, but generally the pattern I have seen is that educated people who are successful and have money also want their children to be educated and successful. These parents have steady jobs, often with good hours, so they can help with homework or pay for tutors or services like Kumon to supplement their struggling kids' learning. So even if schools in the rich neighborhoods don't get a lot of funding from property taxes, they still perform fairly well.
Uneducated people are less likely to value education for their kids. My husband (also a teacher) heard a father tell his son that the kid shouldn't try to go to college "because you're not better than me." The kid was close to the top of his class and could have won some competitive scholarships.
Parents who struggle to make ends meet are more likely to work jobs with odd hours or even multiple jobs, so they're less likely to have time to sit down and do homework with their kids. Tutors are an extravagance they cannot afford.
There are a lot of factors at play in the overall literacy rate and public education quality issue that is at the heart of the original post. Personal greed versus the public good (in the form of opposing property taxes) is a part of it, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Family values, local and state politics (I'm looking at you, vouchers and charter schools), and even the consistent undervaluing of "women's work" all play a role in school funding and the general level of literacy in the population at large.
Especially seeing tons of people never doubt what they read and headlines nowadays are distorted as fuck.
Can't read the New York Times? Probably because it's behind a pay wall.
Have they tried to create a free account, or log in?
You can gain access to limited free articles, news alerts, select newsletters, podcasts and some daily games.
https://www.removepaywall.com/
this didn't work
see the thing is that I've already misjudged how dumb the average person is. I give too much credit to people.
same thing with people being assholes. I just kind of assumed that people generally want to not be assholes. nope, absolutely not, wildly incorrect. the average person doesn't give a fuck about anything but themself at that moment
Now you're getting it.
Most people (compared to the average dork that ends up on lemmy) are in fact dumb stupid idiot assholes, who act 1000% sure of things they are completely mis or disinformed about.
Sure, if by "average" he meant "median"
*contingent on a symmetric intelligence distribution
How mean
Boosh
Man there are a bunch of math/stats nerds on Lemmy 😀
You know what's even better?
The next generation isn't going to be able to read nor focus on anything for more than 60 seconds, and after it comes to pass there still won't be any meaningful regulation of social media either.
TL;DR
TL...🦋🐿️
https://lemmy.world/post/45426897
What did you think social media was made for, if not to make the vast majority of people (that have been failed by a hollowed out education system and exposed to unfettered anti intellectualism lobbying from pro oil lobbyists hitting the news like the US hit its people with crack and LSD) into unthinking easily manipulatable cattle that buy what you tell them to, think what you show them is real, and then spread that misinformation like gospel.
That and there is also an uncontrolled virus going around that literally eats your nervous system to the point where some people that caught it were physically incapable of reading.
Why do you think it's so easy to convince people there's a conspiracy around an Antarctic pyramid by showing them a zoomed in glacial mountain range and drawing a square around one peak?
They're already regulating social media...in all the wrong ways. Age verification is just the start.
Why else do you think short form content took off and immediately became the dominant way many people get news?
So wait, do I struggle to make friends because I read two gewd or cause Im a asshole?
definitely both.
reading good makes you an asshole.
read bad, think stupid, make you friends!
Might have something to do with society being overrun to hell with demands for attention from worthless trash text that wastes our time while begging for money. Like the New York Times, for example.
Give kids a reason to learn to read, stop making it a gateway to an onerous burden, then we'll talk.
Existence itself is an onerous burden in a world where half of people can't read.
Yeah they're the ones making life miserable for us, and definitely not the perfectly well educated elite pedophile genocidists driving the world straight into hell while praising Jesus. It's the dumb poor people who are at fault. Of course. How could I not have seen it sooner.
The ones who are driving genocide being educated does NOT mean that a meaningful proportion of the educated are responsible for it. The wealthy and powerful can afford education, so the wealthy and powerful happen to be educated. Education does not cause genocidal power. Correlation is not causation.
There is, however, an EXTREMELY high level of causation between the poorly educated and not having the critical thinking to recognize bad arguments.
I didn't make that claim. The fact is that being uneducated doesn't mean you're the problem, and being educated doesn't mean you're not the problem. The problem is definitely traceable to educated, wealthy people using their knowledge and wealth to destroy the systems of public education and spread misinformation. Fuck outta here with your bully apology and victim blaming.
Just remember that the classism is the point. No one is free until we all are
When they say "If you can read a New York Times article" do they literally mean just READ the words and understand them individually, or do they mean read and possess the ability to apply critical thinking skills to what you just read?
I think they must also mean comprehension.
I read a little about how they determine "levels" of reading ability, and while vocabulary is part of it, higher level reading also considers sentence complexity, the ability to identify concepts, make inferences, pick up on the theme or tone, consider the author's biases, etc.
Ahh, thank's for looking that up! It makes me me feel... slightly better? Although it doesn't make me feel great that there are so many people out there with just enough reading skills to be dangerous (applying their own biases, etc).
Exactly. Or just enough to read an opinion piece, but not enough to consider conceptual flaws in the argument or the author's intent/biases.
The other end is concerning too. I sometimes get the sense that even well-intentioned "elites" in politics/journalism/media come up with solutions for stuff that would work in their bubble, but are a complete disaster when applied to the general public because the nuance is lost.
"That's right, it goes in the square hole!"
because elites don't live outside the bubble and they don't know how the rest of us live. they are born into it and never step outside of it outside of it, except for well-manicured volunteering like when they do teach for America for a year or two.
and when we tell them, they tell us we are stupid and wrong and misguided and that they know better than us.
and they wonder why we resent them... they are 'just trying to help' us 'little people'.
It's your ability to spot potential author bias, leading language, context outside the article that might point to inaccuracies or omissions, tones like sarcasm, etc.
They can read the words at the most basic level, but are missing a lot of the actual meaning.
meaning is fungible and largely a product of the readers projection onto the authors words.
two-highly educated people can read a passage an come up with wildly different interpretations of it's meaning and context.
also why people think quotes are 'deep'. because they are decontextualized wells of personal projection.
I see you've written words that I can read, but I have no clue what you're trying to say... so idk, can't answer your question (I think it's a question at least, there's definitely a question mark at the end)
I wonder why is everyone posting random letter-combinations on Lemmy, it seems fun and definitely gives me those dopamine boosts. It seems like they have these spaces in between, and together it almost looks like a picture! I dont understand it, and im sure nobody else does, but Like, it's fun right? These glyphs on this imaginary beykoard thingy just suddenly appear on your screen when you click on them, and you can just make these funny big chunks of texts! So many goodlooking combinations!
Vocabulary vs reading comprehension.
(If your comment is a joke, please ignore this reponse and chalk it up to Poe's Law)
That's the difference between 'reading' and 'comprehension', I guess.
The secret to using a semicolon is that there are no rules; people just make them up to tell you that you're wrong.
I;can;think;of;a;few;rules;worth;mentioning
This sounds like every semicolon, you're clapping for enthusiasm.
Don't abuse the German rules for commas to spread semicolons in English!
But there are rules. A semicolon is a pause in text, measured in beats for length of pause
There they go again putting rules on English. It's like I cand farafadarf on gruekeleypoopers these days.
you can, just remember to verp the filikosher after the semicolon
Sometimes I will read a particularly insightful article from a scientific journal that a lot of sources have been referencing lately, and find that I can't quite follow all the high level technical jargon discussing the topic, and I'll feel just the smallest bit insecure about my level of intelligence.
But then I see posts like this and it all goes away lol
Field-specific jargon is so niche that it should hardly count. Even if you're in the same field, you might not be familiar with the tests and metrics they're using if it's not your area of research anyway.
jargon is always changing. it's used as a social sorting mechanism more than anything else. it's used to signify something is new or special or different or 'more advanced', when that is rarely true.
which is precisely why it makes you feel inadequate. it's designed to do that, to make you feel like you aren't 'smart' and exclude you from the in-group who uses the jargon.
it's also why marketing companies love jargon. it plays all over people's insecurities and group-belonging.
Is this why you can't say almost anything (besides regurgitating cliché pre-approved tropes) without being misconstrued, taken out of context, turned into a strawman, and attacked as a position completely different from the one you were taking?
I swear, I knew this was coming the moment I noticed that people were calling basic literacy and writing ability "elitism."
I was in a college English Composition class, of all places, and people were shaming me for insisting on using proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It was an Honors course too, if I remember correctly. Like, why the fuck are you here if you really feel that way?
And why are colleges even admitting people who can't formulate basic sentences; at least without serious remedial courses before the 101 level. These people are graduating with degrees without learning anything, because professors are too afraid to fail them.
And I got all but chased out of campus for getting A's. It's not "favoritism" or "privilege," I just knew how to write.
It's not elitist to have basic standards.
I think it's a combination of a) schools passing everyone they can out of misguided empathy and funding tied to graduation rates, and b) universities with a financial incentive to accept as many warm (paying) bodies as possible.
Yeah, it ultimately boils down to the commodification of education, but it think there are also aspects of being allergic to anything perceived as elitism, and being terrified of accusations of discrimination.
I mean, holding everyone to the same basic standard isn't discrimination. Even if some people from marginalized backgrounds don't meet that standard. In fact, it's kinda racist to assume those people need the handicap, as if none of them can meet the basic standards unless they're lowered...
Amazing how you parlayed an undifferentiated critique of adult reading levels (one that specifically mentioned that immigration, i.e. "brown people", wasn't the cause of the low percentage) into an attack on affirmative action. If you knew what you were talking about/weren't being disingenuous, you'd know that "holding everyone to the same basic standard" is the goal of affirmative action. Because people of color often require higher credentials to receive attention at equal levels to less skilled yet less visually-ethnic applicants.
This and the previous, hyperbolic remark that you were "all but run off campus" because you were being a grammar nazi makes me believe it wasn't just the "grammar" that was the issue.
Potentially this user takes issue with affirmative action; it's hard to say. I read the comment you responded to as referring to the lowering of academic requirements for inner city public schools.
Thank you! It's literally a disservice to marginalized communities to assume "oh, they can't handle the same standard so we need to lower it for them." Aside from being racist.
It's funny how that commenter assumed I was talking about affirmative action, though. Almost as if they assumed affirmative action means lowering educational standards.
Expanding opportunities for disadvantaged youth to enter educational programs they qualify for? Good 👍
Allowing anybody into an educational program that they don't even meet the basic prerequisites for, because you're afraid to deny someone who could blame prejudice? Bleh 👎
It's not that hard to comprehend.
Amazing how you assume "doesn't meet the basic prerequisites for the educational program" means "brown people." You racist or something?
I on the other hand understand that "brown people," as you say, are perfectly capable of meeting the same requirements as everyone else, so it's patronizing to act like they need those standards lowered.
Affirmative Action is about securing positions to qualified candidates who would otherwise be looked over due to their demographic/background. It's not about lowering standards to let anybody in because (as you seem to be assuming) "brown people are too stupid to meet the same standards." If that's what you believe Affirmative Action is about, then you've fallen for right-wing propaganda about it. Good job.
Also, it doesn't make me a grammar nazi to believe everyone in a college writing class should be able to formulate complete sentences in the language the class is instructed in. It's on the education system to prepare future college students for that, and if they can't do it in 12 years of primary and secondary schooling, then that's a failure of the system. And you're not doing anybody any favors by saying we should let that slide just because you don't believe brown people can actually do better.
brown people... attack... disingenuous... nazi
the spiral hypnotizes
The whistle calls
affirmative action is fucked up, and often undermines itself. it should be done away with, and often it's used by well-off minorities to secure educational resources that they already have in abundance from their wealth and deny less affluent whites.
it should be replaced by economic affirmative action. which is far more equitable and would benefit poor minorities more.,
it's effectively dead right now anyway. how that changes enrollments is yet to be seen clearly.
I agree strongly. Putting a thumb on the scale and unevenly lowering the bar in order to achieve equal success rates for everyone causes more problems than it helps.
Yeah, I wish more people could see that instead of crying racism any time someone raises the concern. Because it does not help disadvantaged communities, it only excuses the failures of the education system to adequately serve those communities.
yeah but it looks good on paper when you are judging people and districts by metrics like graduate rate.
the problem with education, broadly, it has become reduced to a system of gaming performance metrics by which it's measured.
it isn't judged by the individual students, or even individual schools.
All I hear is "mental gymnastics to justify low literacy rates and add virtue signaling on top of it."
Seriously, don't you have anything more prescient to manufacture outrage over? Like for instance the fact that the education system is systemically failing in its duty, and also being systematically defunded, degraded, and dismantled? Or the resurgence of right-wing extremism that that degradation enables, as well as the return to power of fascist insider-trading nepo babies? At the very least, how about climate denialism and the anti-vax movement, both of which are predicated on low literacy rates?
But no, I'm the one being offensive by suggesting society should do better? As if the students being failed by the education system aren't being disadvantaged by that systemic failure? As if my pointing out that as a society we should expect better is what's really disadvantaging those students?
Sure, buddy...
Are you suggesting that it's okay just because other countries have high rates of illiteracy? Or are you saying that the metric is flawed, and that that obviously means the US doesn't have an illiteracy problem since the research methodology was flawed?
Either way, I hard disagree.
Okay, once you get your own argument straight without contradicting yourself then maybe I'll take you seriously?
So is the whole world as illiterate as the US, or is the US as literate as the rest of the world? Because you seem to be saying one or the other and I still can't figure out which...
is it elitist to expect the majority of your population to be able to run a 6 minute mile?
Running a 6 minute mile is not the same thing as reading a basic news article, and framing it as such is disingenuous.
No, it's EASY for you. Just like it might be easy for someone who is genetically gifted to run 6 miles without any training.
for most human beings, it takes lots of training to attain these abilities, and life-long training to retain them. if you stop training, your body degrades in weeks, and in months all your training is lost. your mind is similar. use it, or lose it.
your assumption that read is so easy, is what's elitist. it's like if you were an Olympic running and wondering why some average 30 year old can't keep up with you, IT'S SO EASY BRO.
If you weren't elitist you'd be able to put yourself in other people's shoes, and realize how HARD reading is for them, to them it's like running. it's painful, difficult, and not desirable in any way to do it unless they absolutely have to.
the only it becomes enjoyable, is when you've turned it into a self-reinforcing habit, which the vast majority of folks won't ever do and takes a lot of time and effort. running takes months of work before it becomes 'rewarding' and for some people, it never does.
your 'basic standard' is like expecting the average person who can't run a mile without feeling like they are dying, to run a half marathon. that's what you don't understand. could they run a half marathon? yes, but it would take a year or more of training, and for them to run it well, as in like in 2 hours? it would take years.
you've been running you're entire life on a daily basis and you expect other people who never jog to keep up with you or you look down on them as lazy and pathetic. That's extremely elitist
That's exactly what you and pretty much everyone in Northern Amerika and Europe did in school. Training your reading and writing skills, increasing your vocabulary, practicing reading comprehension...
Sure there are some that have it easier than others, but a 6th grade reading level is the equivalent of getting winded after a 100m stroll on even ground. At that point its detrimental to your own wellbeeing and day to day life. (The few percent that have an actual disability are excluded here)
American schools, especially poor ones, don't do this. Rich ones, do.
I wrote at about a 7/8th grade level, and that was considered genius for my high school. When I went to college I had to re-learn how to read and write, because it never was taught to me beyond an 8th grade level. My A+ in high school translated to about a C- in college.
I took AP English classes... it didn't matter. the standards at my high school were extremely low, because it was poor. And mine wasn't even THAT bad. The parents are often even stupider than the kids, but the 'floor' of education in the USA is extremely low due to poverty and anti-education culture that is the default outside of a handful of elite and wealthy zip codes.
Further, my family and the culture of my community... punished me for my academic 'success'. The teachers, students, and my own family members, HATED me for not being as stupid and dumb as they were and not actively embracing it. It was look down on, shamed, and resented.
Anyway, the rich and the poor in the USA are living in totally different moral, educational, and financial universes. For rich people, reading at 8th grade is 'a failure' for poor people, it makes you an 'egghead' that they hate.
That's obviously a disservice to students in disadvantaged backgrounds, so why are you trying to argue against me when I'm saying we shouldn't lower the floor further just to permit the education system to continue failing young people while fixing their metrics to look more successful?
because you can't force people to be something they can't or dont' want to be.
The education system cannot rescue people from themselves. You can't rise them up from the top down.
They have to want to improve themselves.
If the foundations of freedom in our society were built on everyone being able to run a 6 minute mile, then by-god everyone needs to be out there everyday, rain or shine, hoofin' it.
are you serious? that's not how any of this has worked, or ever worked. our society was, is, and will always be run by a small group of elite people.
the question really is, what do those elite people believe in? do they believe in the general welfare of everyone, or do they only give a fuck about themselves?
history shows us that this goes back and forth, and usually when the elites stop giving a fuck the society collapses or has a revolution and wars. then in the post revolution/war period things get broadly better, but eventually after a generation or three it erodes back to the elites only caring about themselves.
Allowing those political elite to permit schools to fail to bring students up to a basic level of literacy does not help the working class. That only helps the elite, which is why they're so intent on defunding, degrading, and dismantling the education system.
History shows us time and time again, that every successful revolution has been led by educated people.
The political elite doesn't care about the working class. They are disgusted by their existence.
The only people they want to help is themselves, and their children.
You make elites care by having leverage over them. You get leverage and power through various ways, but one of them is a majority of the population being able to understand when the wool is being pulled over their eyes. My point is not that people need to bootstrap, it is that they are powerless without reading skills (in agreement with most of this thread). If they want to be able to protect themselves/ have rights, then they need to arm themselves with the tools to defend those rights: basic logic, reasoning, and reading.
You will never be able to guilt someone with power into giving it up. Maybe a few of them innately have no desire to hold onto it, but the vast majority of people that have clawed their way to the top were... Well, willing to claw others.
It may be hard, and the odds may be stacked against them, but we need to fucking get the underprivileged there if we want to survive. Or you cater to their current state of ignorance and reap the rewards.
Are you implying that the reason I'm literate is because I'm "generically gifted"? I'm sorry, but that's a wild take. I'm literate because I went to school where they taught me how to read. I didn't enjoy it all the time. I didn't learn to appreciate reading until later in life. But it's not too much to expect schools to teach people to read at a basic literacy level.
Yeah, that's called a K-12 education. If you didn't complete that or a qualified substitute, or you got to the end of your schooling and still couldn't read or write basic sentences yet somehow graduated, then you don't belong in college. Hence why I said they should be required to take remedial courses before the 101 level.
Allowing primary and secondary schools to fail in that basic expectation is doing a disservice to everybody. I don't care how many mental hoops you want to jump through and excuses you want to make, if a person is illiterate then they need to fix that before they should be admitted into a college-level education program.
If they can't or won't do that, then I'm sure there are plenty of blue collar jobs that they'll thrive at. But pretending literacy shouldn't be a basic requirement for college is wildly absurd.
No, you're just privileged af and you don't understand that other people aren't as privileged as you, and you think other pepole not living up to your standards is a fault of theirs, or societies.
which is typical of most privileged people. rich people also don't understand why everyone else is so poor. fit and healthy people don't get why other people are fat and unhealthy. so on and so on.
You are totally blind to the circumstances of your life that allowed you to become you who are, because most of what you are is entirely circumstantial. You don't understand how little opportunity most people have and how the vast majority of the population has. Or how little colleges care about anything other than making money.
You're adding a lot of layers and assumptions to this that aren't there.
If someone isn't literate, then they're not qualified for higher education. You can focus on the actual problem, which is the education system failing to adequately support students in disenfranchised areas. Fixing that would help them qualify for higher education and get a leg up, so that they could enjoy some of that "privilege" of literacy that you accuse me of having.
But no, instead you want to say anyone who's literate is an elitist, and we shouldn't give a shit about the educational outcomes of marginalized areas because expecting those poor marginalized kids to learn how to read is just too much. Do you have any idea how patronizing that is?
I'm not the one denying that students in impoverished areas are capable of learning how to read and write. All I'm saying is that if they want to pursue higher education, they need to be able to read and write. It's not that controversial. And their K-12 education should prepare them for that. If it doesn't, that's a problem.
You calling me "elitist" is a distraction from the problem, and that doesn't serve students in marginalized areas who are being failed by the education system. If you want to just coddle them and say "It's fine, you don't need to be literate. Literacy is for the privileged elite," then you are the one actively harming their future and obstructing them from gaining this "privilege" that you seem to despise so much.
Statistics says yes: https://runninglevel.com/running-times/1-mile-times
Long numbers short: You have to be in the top 20% to be able to run a 6-minute mile, if you somewhat regularly run.
Discussing economics with my sibling in law showed me that it's unlikely anyone will ever be able to meaningfully educate them outside of going so far as to directly alter their circumstances to illustrate a point, and even then I doubt the understanding would be persistent or extensible
I got pretty sad that day
So, your step bro be dumb?
Yeah. I wish I could reverse flowers for Algernon so I could make a point to them.
There's alcohol, I guess
https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_items.asp
If you want to see some of the sample questions (from 2003 or earlier), you can see exactly the kind of questions that so many people struggle with. After reading some of the sample questions and confirming the answers, it's kind of depressing how many people are able to get them wrong.
tl;dr heh
This is how Trump got elected twice. His ramblings actually make sense to a lot of people
It's got electrolytes.
they don't have to make explicit sense.
that's where smart people get it wrong. the average person doesn't care about the content of what is being said. they care about the tone. the average person doesn't listen to words, they listen to the mood of the speech. Trump rambles nonsense, but he's consistent in his confident tonality and people like that. he also doesn't come across as talking down to his voters, the way democratic politicians almost always do.
also applies to popular films, songs, and etc. general audiences love stupid shit because it's relatable. they are turned off by shit that is more sophisticated because it's scary and strange.
Who writes like that? The entire statement is poorly written, which is ironic.
Seriously, the author was really struggling badly
1/3 of it being caused by immigration is an angle I'd never thought about that actually makes me feel a tiny bit better
Bingo. My father is an illiterate immigrant but managed to work (in a different time) and retire early as a result. Put me through college. These statistics are depressing at face value but they're not as awful as they might seem.
Its both because people don't want to be intellectual because its depressing and alienating to be smart around a bunch of dumb people, but also the rich and powerful do not want us to be smart either.
I myself wish I was fucking stupid. I'd be happier.
Reminds me of the church of sub-genius (being a full genius would be exhausting)
Yeah. There are negative social consequences to being intellectual and pursing mental self-improvement. One of them being, people hate you.
Socially successful people now that you have to play stupid to get people to like you. You also say/embrace stupid shit to make other people feel like they are smart...
Just like if you are physically large and strong, people are also afraid of you and you have to be very careful about your body language because it will terrify people. You have to act all modest and downplay your size for people to feel comfortable around you.
This sounds like a cope someone would come up with to explain why they watch Joe Rogan.
Is that something Joe Rogan has said? I legitimately don't understand what you are saying here.
Are you saying I'm coping about actually being stupid? Because I am stupid in certain ways. Just not in the ways that I wish I was.
So sure, I am coping... just not because I listen to Joe Rogan because I don't.
Have you not spent time around groups of people and been painfully aware that what they're talking about is incredibly simple and vacuous? And wanted to rip the flesh off of your face in sheer frustrated boredom but you just nod and be polite?
I've also been around people smarter than me, and I find it way more enjoyable. I'm the likeable dumb guy, learning things about what the experts around me know about.
I wasn't trying to call you out or anything, I was just making a joke about how people who listen to Joe Rogan are stupid. Idk if he's actually said that, but if he has, then that's hilarious. It fits my mental image of him perfectly.
Again, not trying to dunk on you or anything, but are you autistic? I've never met anyone like this IRL, only le redditeurs trying to be edgy online, but I suppose someone on the spectrum might actually feel that way in some situations? I legitimately don't know, and am not trying to use "autistic" in a derogatory way here.
As an example, I'm the only software engineer in my social circle, and don't ever feel like that around people even when they're saying really stupid things about a topic I'm an expert in. If you find yourself getting frustrated with people in those situations, I think it's a sign that you have shitty social skills, not that you're smarter than everyone.
I am autistic, and if someone doesn't have at least a rudimentary level of knowledge on important shit like politics, philosophy, science, etc. I'm not going to assume its because they are an expert in something else. I'm going to assume its because they are incurious and/or focused on fundamentally pointless stuff. They may or may not actually be interested in this stuff but its usually stuff that will gain them social advantage and financial benefit with other people also into said pointless stuff.
If one cares about the most recent celebrity gossip or gets angry when someone is a fan of a rival sports team, but say, shows no interest in the nature of dark energy & expansion of the universe or the effects of free will's lack of existence on justice: They are going to have an uphill battle to convince me they aren't a fucking troglodyte. Unfortunately, there are like, ten of these sorts of people for every one person who is the reverse.
You sound like a real asshole. Jumping to conclusions about someone based on a single conversation is stupid, because it's not enough to know them. Try giving others the benefit of the doubt more, and maybe you'll find them less intolerable (and others will find you less intolerable as well)
As an example, my initial reaction to reading this is a cringe so intense that I feel it in my bones. Despite this, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt before letting that reaction tarnish my opinion of you, as I truly do not know you IRL, and there's always more to a person than what they can present to the world. There's also a lot that gets lost when communicating through text, so I'll reserve judgement. I'll just end this with a quote from the great philosopher Curtis James Jackson:
Sure. I am.
I'm working off statistics. Maybe I'm wrong like, 5% of the time, but I'm saving time and energy the other 95% if I'm permitted by circumstance to exit the conversation. Often times I can't because of social dynamics or professional responsibility unfortunately.
To be cringe is to be free. Honestly, cringing that I want to talk about shit with more depth than a puddle is your emotional reaction to what I said I want to spend my time with. I don't need to worry about your emotions, that's on you. Especially since... we actually will never meet in person, and we do not owe each other anything.
Its nice that you are willing to give the benefit of the doubt though. I mean that unironically. I just don't have that kind of patience, nor blame others for the same level of impatience. If you want to give people that amount of your energy, more power to you. Chances are though it doesn't take much energy from you because you are probably just on the same wave length as most people, if so congratulations on being allistic.
I'm not sure how seriously you expect me to take this.
Have you ever been trapped in a conversation with your racist, MAGA uncle? I'm assuming he meant that.
No no no, you wish you WERE fucking stupid. The subjunctive mood is a little off beat, but the good news is you could be closer to your goal than you think!
I was wondering "wait, if they can't read that, then what do they read?" But of course they just don't. Unless Reddit or Facebook counts as reading.
they watch reality tv, sports, and listen to pop music. all of which is constructed at a 3rd grade level of language
That's actually a good question. How much do certain platforms play into literacy, I wonder?
I can definitely testify that there's grades to it: Whenever I peruse Hacker News I feel like I'm studying for a university level exam lol
when I read it, i feel like I know why technical documentation is so stupid and obtuse instead of clear and obvious.
tech people generally have a poor grasp of how to communicate information effectively, let alone in a style that isn't tedious and boring.
everytime i read a technical document I ask myself who the hell wrote this and what the hell were they thinking. then i re-write it for my employees in a way that is actually understandable and applicable to reality, instead of paragraphs and paragraphs of self-referencing jargon that seems to be in love with itself.
People don't often get into tech to be writers. Also, though, I've found that paraphrased tech manuals usually leave out the most important bits of information whenever I have to use one.
Immigrants typically have a higher bar/burden to surpass than any naturalized citizen; I wouldn't ever think to even look there as a source of the problem. It's a home grown issue.
Those boomers were much more upset about school integration than I really understood.
250 years of slavery, 90 years of forced segregation, 60 years of institutionalized racism.
The US government has been fighting back against the civil rights ever since they were created
Now we are set to take away the negro vote once again. We are at 50+ years of the War Against Minorities err I mean the War Against Drugs. Truly incomprehensible for anyone who pays attention to these things.
I know there's the old addage about "if you're average, then 50% of people are dumber than you" - but Jesus Christ that's a horrific statistic!!
No wonder people are being so easily swayed by false extremist narratives in media these days - they literally can't access the truth because they can't read it.
my favorite spin on that is.
the dumbest person you know is smarter than half the world.
depending on how absolutely diabolically inept the person you know is, sets the lowest "high" bar for the world. I think that's probably about as close to the truth you can get.
education has little to do with it IMO. it's about social ineptitude and the abolishment of shame against the general public.
I had two powerful teachers growing up, Shame and Pain. Shame motivated me to not look stupid and Pain motivated me to not be stupid.
If 54% are below a 6th grade level.
And 21% are below a 5th grade level and functionally illiterate.
Then 33% are at a 5th grade level and technically literate.
What do you learn in 5th grade? What is the cutoff? Is there a magic word or concept?
I don't know the scale, but it seems like 21% are so close.
There's literally a game show called "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader" that was hosted by Jeff Foxworthy. I'm guessing everything on that show lol
If you're curious as to the level various books are rated as, you can look them up on AR Bookfinder
The ATOS Book Level is more helpful than the Lexile score - a Book Level of 4.3 (for example) means that a child should be able to read and comprehend that book by the 3rd month of Grade 4.
(The full site is a subscription thing - kid reads book, does 10 question test on book. Kid consistently shows they've understood the books they've read and the site recommends books of a higher level. The catalogue is free, though.)
it's largely a function of word length and sentence length.
There are a whole slew of other not fun facts tied in with it. Being taught to read is far from the only thing working class people are denied.
Yeah the thing that explains this is Republicans spending 40 years (and a lot of campaign money) to destroy public education in every single way possible.
And more recently, brain rotted iPad / tiktok babies. Economy is garbage, parents work all the time, are still broke and stressed, hand the kid a distraction rectangle as a pacifier, it basically melts their ability to focus or concentrate, while also causing addiction to the rectangle.
Its another one of those things like Climate Change: Once you can see the problem in the world, prominently and obviously, it is way too late to fix without extreme coordination and effort.
And yeah, as other have noted, this makes Democracy unworkable, because democracy is just a marketing campaign battle.
So, cyberpunk dystopia, technofeudalism, here we come.
Nyt is 7th grade reading level btw nothing impressive but people are quite poor at reading
My mom was shit in most of the ways a mom can be shit, but she made us read every night before bed and I can’t tell you just how fucking thankful I am for that.
OP is apparently not part of the hyper-literate educated elite.
Are you highly intelligent but not part of the global elite cabal of pedophile baby eaters. You should try suicide.
I'm not highly intelligent.
Is this option available to me?
https://youtu.be/HAAI8aKTkVM
I dunno about that, unsourced image quote I saw on lemmy. There seems to be something wrong with the idea that many people being incapable of it justifies calling it "eccentric" to be able to read.
Reverse search brings up a Substack as the source for this image, but here's a Snopes article from 2022 about the numbers that have been circulating for the past few years. It seems like the percentages for reading level are accurate, but where you draw the line for "illiteracy" is a subjective judgement call that not everybody agrees on (e.g. below 5th grade level). Also, anything talking about international rankings needs to be taken with a grain of salt because of differences in measurement/reporting methods.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
I'll leave the sourcing of the quote and it's validity to someone else but it fits the definition of the word eccentric, albeit in an eccentric way.
Eccentric by definition just means deviating from an established pattern. The established pattern being people can't read. If you can read you're different from the norm, ergo eccentric. Yes we often associate it with more socially unacceptable and possibly mentally unstable behavior, but not always.
This to read.
what a terrible day to be able to read :(
And yet…. The literate Americans with all their intelligence can’t seem to manage to outsmart a bunch of abject morons. Or they’re choosing not to.
This doesn’t reflect well on them, either way.
Trumpty Dumpty is the leader of the largest cult ever. Before him, I thought any dumbfuck could easily become the leader of the idiots if they were willing to vomit up all the lies that appeal to them. But watching everyone who tries to mimic him (Desantis, Cruz, Rubio, etc) completely fail (and be subsequently forced to lick the orange butthole), it seems it takes more than simply outsmarting the hoi polloi to win them over.
You’re still thinking about this in terms of voting. They’re not.
intelligence has nothing to do with competence.
the problem is the intelligent people believe it does, hence why when they fuck up, they blame everyone but themselves.
'the voters are too stupid to vote for us!' no, you're too up your own ass to understand what the voters want, and too pig-headed to listen to their legitimate concerns because you 'know better than them'.
This is not about votes
Tldr
There are people in the UK that can't spell Britain, I've seen so many variations.
I personally don't mock illiteracy, I think it's sad and a shame, I grew up on an estate with really low levels of literacy. I learned to read when I was 3 years old, I could read news articles by the time I started school.
I have a vivid memory of being in a high school english course with a dyslexic girl who wrote this INSANELY beautiful and thoughtful analysis of an Alexander Posey poem...
Nobody understood what it meant, and nobody engaged except to point out the fact that she couldn't spell "conciousness". So she stopped her presentation and walked out of the room.
Wherever she is right now, I hope she understands she was the brightest person there. And one of the only ones who had any semblance of real reading comprehension despite sometimes not being able to spell long words.
Oh right, it's definitely not something to mock. Literacy rates should concern everyone who lives in a democracy.
Wot chu meen it's not spelt Bree-UGH-nn!?
Sometimes it feels like I have to turn on that part of my brain. Like I can just do mindless reading and I can make it through something really fast. Or I can put on my thinking cap and get through something hard and understand it (takes time, re-reading, and sometimes notes).
I'd like to see the difference in my comprehension between the two modes.
I think that's part of it. Everyday living makes people stressed and anxious. I'd like to see how they were tested.
I found the info everyone is quoting: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/
If you compare age groups, the 25-34 seem to be keeping the scores up. Looks like the lead in the air was keeping the scores down?
This must be why people think trump is a literate genius
Me read biggly. Me top smart person in country.
Oh? Guess I won't read it then. I wonder what it said... Can someone just tell me a little more about how I should feel about it?
It starts talking about how illiterate Americans are, and then how the northern Americans, namely the Canadians, are better at it, but there's a twist, the northern americans actually live in ice castles and therefore cannot speak nor read, making the statistics terribly wrong because everyone knows how to read when there's nothing to read, and that Melania Trump does not exist because Jesus did not have a wife, so now people are replacing the No Kings Protest with the No Queens Protest by scribbling out the word Kings, but that ended up going terribly wrong because people are illiterate, making them scribble out the "test" in "Protest" leaving only the "Pro" there, making Apple users think it's a new product released by Sam Tucker, so they all flooded the Apple shops with people and furiously consumed their hard-earned money, but then Donald and Melenia are sad now because more people are going to the Apple store and Noone cares about them anymore, so Trump actually called Tim Apple pretending to be hanging out with him, but then in a sudden he punches Tim, and as we all know when Apples randomly fly around they end up on Newton's head, causing him to suddenly create gravity, and that's why we have a flat earth, it's because that the earth was actually originally a cube, but then gravity pulled it down making it flat. That's why we have homework.
That was beautiful.
Source?
The sixth grade thing is largely made up, but here's an article from a few years ago that references a Gallup article that references the Department of Education
Looks like it's from a Mar-25 2026 paywalled Substack by Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, his blog is called Slow Boring, but I'm not paying to find out more.
That's where this screenshot is from, but this statistic is way older than that. Here's an article from 2022
The see and say method really did a number on this country.
I thought I was 2nd grade wtf!
This doesn't grapple with the actual reality though where all this info is filtered through celebrities and pastors.
When you put it that way, it seems practically medieval.
If a NYT article is considered a "high benchmark", literacy in the US must be really terrible. I consider the NYT as educated, yes, but not exactly difficult. And I'm not even a native speaker.
I just don’t believe research like this. I could be persuaded I’m wrong, but flat earthers are just pulling your leg, and everyone can read pretty good.
I think many people misinterpret literacy, it is not just the ability to connect written glyphs to words, but its also the ability to connect those words to thoughts, and to then think about those thoughts from different perspectives and applications - literacy is not just the ability to read but the ability to understand and apply.
There are plenty of illiterate people who can read, they know the words but do not comprehend what is actually being conveyed by those words.
A person can know the ingredients, but if they still dont know how to cook with those ingredients does it actually matter?
*pretty well.
and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too
I think a lot of people are out of practice. I read a lot for personal enjoyment and I prefer reading articles to watching videos about the news. Its way easier on me sensory wise. But I think we have this fast-entertainment model that pulls in a lot of people and they end up actually reading very minimally (both for pleasure and for utility).
I think people are capable of better, but we have everything set up to discourage reading. Unless people explicitly do the work to go against th flow, they end up not exercising this part of their brain as much.
Agreed im often disappointed when there's a video anout a topic im interested in and there's just no transcript to read. Idk, i just like being in silence most of the time and i just dont want to watch or hear a video, but by popular demand people share videos a lot more than they share text.
Well, don't think of literacy as simply being able to recognize words and define them. Literacy also means being able to read a text and then summarize it, and a lot of people really can't do that. They can read basic directions/instructions and then follow them, they can read posts and texting, but they'd struggle to summarize anything longer than a couple sentences.
I think it just speaks to how much we unconsciously choose to associate with those similar to ourselves, and we can't help but generalize from our personal experiences. Friend choice, coworkers, family, neighbors - all select for similarity compared to the general population.
Even being here on Lemmy, or Reddit, or w/e, is a bubble that has selected for people willing to choose to interact on a text-based platform.
Most people just survive high school on Bs and Cs with no actual accountability and start classes at a two year school and drop out after a semester because they actually fail them at that point. That's the average american.
Ha! I actually dropped out after one year of a two year school to do drugs instead.
If only people could write well too.
Nah, I've got family members that fit this. Reading just isn't important to them.
I acknowledge I may not be living in the real world, but I see no reason to try too hard to live there.
...can I join you?
adults where? all across the globe? not a bubble.
how about the 50% that can’t read live in a bubble, not the other way around?
There's something ironic about how poorly this is written. I choose to believe that they're doing it intentionally; If only to preserve my sanity.
We don't pluralize mass nouns with an S.
Sometimes we do. A single race may be a people, while many races are different peoples. In this case I can see them meaning different outputs from different journalists, or maybe they mean each single article is an output.
Or people and peoples, where the first plural is placed in a larger mathematical set and treated as a nebulous, singular noun.
Language is really interesting
Someone once called me racist for using the term "peoples." I tried explaining it to them, but of course they twisted my argument into a strawman and used it to reinforce their position.
They didn't see my point, but I didn't see there's either. Maybe it was a literacy issue...