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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.
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.
That's something I'd expect to hear in defense of someone who doesn't want to choose a STEM/medicine/business career path, not in defense of not being able to read and understand a NEWSPAPER.
the newspaper doesn't benefit most people. it doesn't report the drama between their friends and family and neighbors.
Okay, well if they can't or don't want to be literate then college isn't the place for them. I don't know what's so hard about that for you to grasp.
You're basically saying that the track team should let anybody join, even if they can't walk a mile let alone run one in 6 minutes.
Having standards is not discrimination.
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.
I never said otherwise. That's a red herring.
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.