Bad News

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most lemmy communities have some bad news, but this one is all bad all the time.

see also: !goodnews

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Human Intelligence Sharply Declining (futurism.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 37.6 percent of Americans said they'd read a novel or short story in the year prior — a share down from 41.5 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012.

That's quite a drop. I def notice that reading is very polarized now, someone either reads like 30 or more books a year, or they read nothing.

The plummeting literacy rates is pretty scary too. Literally the richest country in world history and their literacy rates are worse than many dirt-poor countries, and getting worse.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

The US' literacy rates are worse than those of the USSR just a few years into its existence, having inherited a semi-feudal agrarian state.

And US literacy rates are highly racialized, as poverty (including child poverty) is racialized and so is school funding, both directly by racist policies and segregation and indirectly by geographical funding models. In addition, the US has been slowly privatizing more and more of its education system, starving public schools of even more funding at the same time that it makes an increasing percentage of parents go through poverty and an increasing number of children take jobs.