What is this trash article. It throws numbers out with completely no basis for doing so. I don’t even know that I necessarily disagree with them, or the thought that America is probably not as literate as it ought to be, but this article is someone yelling into the void.
So to the OP, I’m not sure how one could suggest they learned anything from this article but the author’s opinion.
The article makes several bold statements and cites zero sources. I don’t see any reason to believe it.
So mostly good Vorin men and some women a little below average?
Clearly the DOE has been doing a great job for 40+ years, reducing the average reading level
Yeah, you don’t know what you’re talking about; yet you make a bold statement as if you do. Curriculum is decided by the state and literacy rates can be skewed by the amount of ENL students and citizens you have in your population. The problem is bigger than what this article alludes to. No war except class war. Socioeconomic disparity is the biggest problem in this country, but the people with the money gives us scapegoat after scapegoat and we keep falling for it.
What’s ENL?
English as a new language learners.
Class content is determined almost entirely at the local or state level, not the federal. How well students in Mississippi read has almost nothing to do with how the DOE has been doing, because what kids in Mississippi (and every other state) learn is determined by the state.
And much of it isdetermined by Texas, one of the most regressive and oppressive state
Funding does impact what, how, and by whom kids are taught. A large portion of education funding is federal.
Mississippi is subject to the same funding standards as every other state, and is miles behind everyone else. What they choose to do with that money locally is what is affecting outcomes, and it’ll be that way as long as curriculum and standards are set at the local and state level.
I’m not arguing that state and local levels don’t have any impact. There’s no doubt that they do, but imagine if federal funding was double or triple what it is now. The outcomes could be so much better, even in places like MS where the government is actively working against its people.
Edit: I also agree with where you seemed to be heading, which is that there should be some national minimums both or education content and how funding is spent.
blanket federal funding wouldnt mean shit to the bottom states, it would just be ratfucked into the local robber barons coffers like everything else is currently.
fixing mississippi starts by removing the slavers-sons running the state like it’s their personal piggybank, same for pretty much all former slave states.
It appears from my searching 8-10% is federal funding did you see a number somewhere else that was much higher?
I reviewed a bunch of sources from a quick (and not extensive) search, and it looks like it may vary by district, but I’m seeing sources (across different years) with averages as high as 13% and as low as 8%. I don’t know where I was getting my number, but I thought it was more like 43%. Even 13% is shite. 8% is abysmal. So sad.
You were probably thinking of state funding. That’s often right around 43% with the rest being local funding.
They significantly reduced reading comprehension and made a large chunk of the population reliant on smartphones and technology for basic tasks. This timeline sucks.
It is unfortunante that this was propably planned in order to result in a workforce that doesn’t question things.
I googled a map of US literacy by county. Interesting view.
I’d love to see a combo map of literacy and who the county voted for in the last presidential election by county.
I mean, I know how it’s going to read but still.
I mean probably 3/4 of lemmy comments and commentators also can’t read or write beyond that level. And half of them probably don’t know what a fraction is.
Mapping this to age to help.
“The internet” says grade 6 = 11-12yo, which for my reference is Year 7 in NZ, or the first year of intermediate (Y7 and Y8; between primary and secondary school) which is a fairly low bar.
So I checked the OECD and we are basically average; just above the US in the 2023 data. So better but not much better.
To be fair, newspapers back in the day aimed to write for a 6-8th grade reading level here in the US.
At this point though, I’ve been told that this is basically functional illiteracy here.
the vast majority of people don’t need advanced reading skills.
and those that do, typically only need them temporarily during their college years.
Where i live tons of people have advanced degrees, but outside of work/college, they see reading as boring and stupid and have no interest in it.
Now who benefits from a poorly educated populace?
Follow the fuckin money.
Just enough to win elections
Everything published at or below 6th grade reading level
Americans consume this content almost exclusively
The median reader consumes at or below the 6th grade level
even ivy league students don’t read books anymore.
College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different.
I love Vibes Based Reporting.
I was in college 20 years ago too. I read multiple books per week for fun, often on top of my regular coursework. It wasn’t hard, it was just a matter of priorities. My priority was to learn. I probably read 500 pages a week on average.
Your presumption is wild. You basically think because you didn’t do the work, nobody could, or should do it. You are part of the problem here. Reading a 400 page novel is not that time consuming dude, esp in college. In my AP English class we read one every 2-3 weeks.
Rather than rise to the challenge of learning, you want to pretend that it’s an onerous requirement that nobody could possible attain. What, so you can party more, or dick around on the internet? Are you the type who goes to book clubs and doesn’t read the book and then thinks anyone who did is a stupid nerd? I’ve definitely encountered plenty of those people in my book clubs, which is precisely why I don’t do them anymore.
I probably read 500 pages a week on average.
Pride and Prejudice alone is 400 pages. Crime and Punishment is another 600 pages. If you have two Lit classes in the same semester, you’re going to have to double that rate or fall behind schedule. Nevermind retention.
I remember sitting in a library surrounded by books, struggling to solve the 15 problems a class Engineering Physics assigned. Just a fist full of brain-teasers day in and day out. Three of us working together managed to clear the load in a couple of hours. Then on to the next assignment, which was another two or three hours. Five classes a day, you’re lucky when you have enough time to sleep.
I’ll admit, I did a few summers at a community college and that workload was much smaller, the tests were far easier, and the graders significantly more forgiving. Crazy how little work it takes to ace an exam in High School Plus relative to a University weed-out program.
I fail to see the point of any of what you are talking about.
You weren’t taking English classes, what do you care about the workload in them?
You weren’t taking English classes
Wasn’t I? Could have sworn my transcript says otherwise.
So what are you mad about? that you had to read books in English class?
Why were you taking english class if you don’t want to read books?
Are you angry you had to do engineering problems in engineering class too? Sounds like it.
$20 bucks says this guys “regular coursework” was liberal arts BS lol
Some of us studied actually challenging stuff, mate
Literary and technical literacy are orthogonal. All you’re achieving here is to denigrate yourself.
Nah, but when someone is acting like a prat, I’ll give it right back to’em. I maintained a 4.0 GPA through medical school, and have read so many god damn books. Doesn’t make me smarter or better.
right, anyone who reads books that aren’t engineering is an idiot, right?
So what makes me stupider, my minor in mathematics, or my minor in music? because both are ‘useless’ fields.
I didn’t say you were stupid, but YOU said
I read multiple books per week for fun, often on top of my regular coursework. It wasn’t hard, it was just a matter of priorities. My priority was to learn.
So because I didn’t read extra books on the side, my priority wasn’t to learn? pretty insulting.
You are part of the problem here. Reading a 400 page novel is not that time consuming dude
Even more insults!
Rather than rise to the challenge of learning, you want to pretend that it’s an onerous requirement that nobody could possible attain. What, so you can party more, or dick around on the internet? Are you the type who goes to book clubs and doesn’t read the book and then thinks anyone who did is a stupid nerd?
Yeah, your whole comment and subsequent attempts has you coming off like an arrogant prick. The books the original poster mentioned? I read those in middle school mate, so I guess that makes me even smarter than your pretentious ass. And that’s why I wrote a snotty comment.
I used to teach. My lazy students told me I was an arrogant prick too. They usually got Cs and would leave me angry reviews about how stupid my course was and how dare I make them try hard because what is the point I was going to give them a bad grad because i didn’t like them personally.
My students who did the readings, showed up to class, wrote good papers, to enjoy my class and usually got As.
Weird how that works. It’s OK if you don’t like to read man, but don’t go around generalizing that your lack of drive and interest in the topic necessitates that it’s a waste of time for everyone else.
I would guess you don’t run marathons either. Are people who run marathons wasting their time too? Or should they just take blood dope?
I’ve wrote user instructions and setup guides for my last job to copy paste in for common issues. A ton of people struggle to follow the instructions even with screenshots and big red arrows for each step. I’ve run a few though analyzers and find targeting a 3rd grade reading level is the max you can do before you get questions about the instructions.
Best bet is screenshot for each tiny step(cropped with the big red arrows) with nothing more complicated than “click here” as text. Just assume the end user can’t or won’t read.Same. You can’t write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.
They refuse to read anything that’s in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don’t you dare make it a compound sentence.
A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads… they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are ‘too many words’.
A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I’m overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can’t just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.
Meanwhile I vividly recall my 2nd grade teacher giving me a weird look for reading Stephen King in the classroom.
Damn, and I thought I was doing good reading 6 grades above my level.
Stephan King writes at a 6-8th grade level. His fiction is simplistic and so is his sentence structure. He writes at the level of genre fiction.
If he wrote at a 12th grade level he’d have have been a figure in pop culture. Because most of the population that reads his books wouldn’t be able to read them.
My only issue with King is he needs an editor to trim down his books. I went through a King phase back in the late 80s and by the early 90s I couldn’t pick up another one.
At that point his best work, IMO, was Four Seasons but yea, his prose isn’t James Joyce.
Amen to that. I thought the first Dark tower was great, but they kept getting… longer and longer and pointlessly so.
I feel the same way about Murakami too. I read his novels and was confused why people liked them so much they were so long and annoying. Then I read his short fiction and was like ‘oh he’s actually good’. He just needs to cut out the filler.
Hence the pivot to video.
And as someone pointed out, that is basically functional illiteracy.
It’s worth noting that illiteracy isn’t simply a pass/fail test that depends on if you can read individual words. Literacy is largely determined by critical thinking skills and the ability to intuit things that aren’t directly stated.
For a good example, a large part of higher literacy is based on being able to see a piece of work, (a news article, video, book, song, etc.), and identify who the intended target audience is. Usually, the answer is not “me”. But I mention this specific example because people have become accustomed to laser-focused algorithms that only show content that is directly relevant to themselves. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc all have finely crafted algorithms that are designed to keep you engaged. And they do so by serving content that is directly aimed at you.
As algorithmic media feeds have become more common, people have literally lost the ability to identify when something is not meant for them. People used to see an irrelevant piece of media, and they would just go “oh it’s not for me” and move on. But now they tend to be surprised that they’re seeing the media, and they tend to get angry when something doesn’t directly confirm their lived experience. And they tend to take it out on the creators. We have literally seen content creators start changing the way they make their media, to avoid people getting angry when something isn’t directly relevant to themselves.
For instance, maybe I make a TikTok about the proper way to throw a football. Pretty basic stuff, right? Previously, if I left it at that, anyone who wasn’t interested in throwing a football would just move on. But now, I’d inevitably get angry comments about “but I’m in a wheelchair, what about me”, “why is this on my feed, I hate football”, “I have a torn rotator cuff, why are you excluding me” types of comments.
Now, content creators literally add disclaimers in their content, to directly state who the intended audience is. To go back to that same example, I’d probably have step 0 of the tutorial be something along the lines of “okay so this is obviously just for the people looking to check their throwing form. If you don’t like football, can’t throw a ball, or have some sort of disability that stops you from doing so, you can obviously move on.” Because if I don’t have that disclaimer somewhere near the start, I’ll inevitably get some angry comments. And those comments are being left by functionally illiterate people, who have lost (or never had) the ability to determine an intended audience.
Agreed. The person who was talking about it referenced media literacy and being able to discern valid sources from, effectively, propaganda.
Critical thinking skills were more to the point of the “functional illiteracy” label.
And god damn that example hits home because the worst of social media posts are exactly that. The Reddit “um akshually” guy who wonders why a simple statement post doesn’t include every possible extrapolation because it has to be a one-upmanship game instead of a clarifying question.
Critical thinking skills aren’t completely dead in America, but they are on life support and I’m not sure it’ll survive.
Our university system is hell bent on eradicating it the past few decades. It used to teach them.
Now critical thinking is considered dangerous and offensive and harmful, and the students who are suppose to be learning it, are opposed to it because it ‘hurts’ them to have their raw emotional pre-conceptions about things challenged.
Anti-intellectualism has always existed in the US but I’ll take your word about universities since I haven’t been in one since the 90s.
But honestly kids back then weren’t much better.
There has been a major cultural shift in the past decade, starting in the early 2010s towards creating ‘safe spaces’ at universities, and students refusing to learn critical thinking skills and replacing them with quasi religious dogma, of a leftist political bent often. It is very new that this type of thing is going on at universities.
Relatedly, grade inflation is also rampant again. 60% of Harvard undergrads get straight As last year. in 2005, 25% of of them did. Failing or getting bad grades is basically impossible at universities these days unless you are deliberately negligent. Showing up and making minimal effort usually gets you a B or higher. Because being lazy and getting a C would ‘traumatize’ a student these days, so it’s not allowed.
There are some great books about it. Coddling of the American mind is probably the most popular.
Also students don’t study anymore. Average study time is like a dozen hours a week now. It used to be 30+ 2-3 decades ago.
Didn’t I see this post yesterday but it was 81% and 3rd grade level?
