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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.
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 thought I was 2nd grade wtf!
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.
Hah, this again. The uninformed yet self righteous comments that flow in the comment section whenever this is posted anywhere are more proof of the real issue than the original underlying article ever claimed.
Why else do you think short form content took off and immediately became the dominant way many people get news?
The secret to using a semicolon is that there are no rules; people just make them up to tell you that you're wrong.
But there are rules. A semicolon is a pause in text, measured in beats for length of pause
That's what YOU say it is, the problem is there are many different opinions on it.
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
I;can;think;of;a;few;rules;worth;mentioning
Don't abuse the German rules for commas to spread semicolons in English!
This sounds like every semicolon, you're clapping for enthusiasm.
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.
This is depressing, but it also explains a lot. If people canβt comfortably read the news, misinformation doesnβt 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
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
"journalism output"
Who writes like that? The entire statement is poorly written, which is ironic.
Seriously, the author was really struggling badly
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.
Wot chu meen it's not spelt Bree-UGH-nn!?
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.
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.
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:
Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing. They can combine various processes (accessing, understanding and evaluating) if required by the task . Adults at this level can compare and evaluate multiple pieces of information from the text(s) based on their relevance or credibility. Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy, including continuous, noncontinuous, mixed. Information may be distributed across multiple pages, sometimes arising from multiple sources that provide discrepant information. Understanding rhetorical structures and text signals becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially when dealing with complex digital texts that require navigation. The texts may include specific, possibly unfamiliar vocabulary and argumentative structures. Competing information is often present and sometimes salient, though no more than the target information. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inferencing. Tasks at Level 3 also often demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate text content to answer accurately. The most complex tasks at this level include lengthy or complex questions requiring the identification of multiple criteria, without clear guidance regarding what has to be done
I could not find which source originally cited level 2 as β6th gradeβ 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?"
Is this why you can't say almost anything (besides regurgitating clichΓ© 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.
No, all this is is a perfect example of an article that shows how people like yourself and so many others in this thread are so frustrated with online discourse and other issues that they will take any excuse to feel justified about it, despite not reading or understanding the original study. Also, the fact that so many here are not realising the study has been misquoted and taken out of context to form a viral narrative is equally concerning.
So really what this has shown to me is most of the people in this thread lack the exact type of comprehension skills and scepticism that they themselves would proudly complain other people seem to lack.
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...
If you understood the article, you'd understand that countries with the highest literacy rates in the world scored 35-45% values in similar metrics. But you didn't want to understand the article, you wanted to be angry. "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.
The metric isn't flawed, you just don't understand what the metric is saying, and the "article" is severely misleading about what the study actually found. There is not even a single source that links the results of the study to a "6th grade reading level" - that was entirely made up.
My point was other countries with high rates of LITERACY also scored similar amounts or amounts that were only marginally better, because the test taken was quite high level, and the methodology was flawed, it's a bit of a double whammy.
This is genuinely taken out of context because it's perfect outrage clickbait.
The metric isn't flawed
the test taken was quite high level, and the methodology was flawed
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...
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.
This is how Trump got elected twice. His ramblings actually make sense to a lot of people
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?
