Just post something ๐
Lemmy's general purpose discussion community with no specific topic.
Sitewide lemmy.world rules apply here.
Additionally, this is a no AI content community. We are here for human interaction, not AI slop! Posts or comments flagged as AI generated will be removed.
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.
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.