Lol also the CIA Factbook says we have a 99% literacy rate

    • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      most Americans experience with reading is a bunch of incomprehensible books about centuries-old conflicts

      :side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:

      Maybe we should be putting theory in plain, modern language instead of directing people to read Lenin's dunks on obscure European leftists who've been dead a century.

          • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            https://www.docdroid.net/HmIfK7Q/jacobin-leigh-phillips-michal-rozworski-the-peoples-republic-of-walmart-how-the-worlds-biggest-corporations-are-laying-the-foundation-for-socialism-verso-2019-pdf#page=5

            • sam5673 [none/use name]
              ·
              3 years ago

              to go with that this site converts epub to pdf

              https://www.freeconvert.com/epub-to-pdf/download

        • sam5673 [none/use name]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Wordsworth especially is terrible we had to read a three page poem he wrote about a time he was scared by a rock. It was the opening to a five book series about the same incident

      • sam5673 [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Maybe we should be putting theory in plain, modern language instead of directing people to read Lenin’s dunks on obscure European leftists who’ve been dead a century.

        No that can't be it. We should double down and reference to the extreme obscure internet arguments.

        Seriously though if I'm reading theory and it starts trying to roast some random fucking guy no one has ever heard of I just skip it. If I wanted centuries old arguments over nothing I would get more involved in my families arguments

      • vccx [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The People's Marx someone mentioned a while ago

  • ultraviolet [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    In communist countries, people are denied basic education so they are unable to criticise the state.

  • ElGosso [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    As the 1 in 5 I appreciate you highlighting the relevant information for me

  • Sacred_Excrement [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Judging by the percentage of my coworkers that can't read emails or basic error messages, that number seems low

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I've talked about this before, but I used to work in a municipal literacy program and the number we normally worked with was an 87% literacy rate for Americans. As in, functional ability to read a text, know most of the words, then rephrase the information back. So it tracks from my own experience that 20% of Americans can "read" but lack an ability to gather information out of the text.

    • Lucas [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Ugh. You know for all the pro-life arguments like about how a fetus could've been a doctor, you don't hear much about how a living person could get there if given the education.

      • BeamBrain [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Once it's outta the womb, it's a neoliberal subject and thus any failure to become a doctor is its own fault and no one else's

  • GothWhitlam [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    You guys are fucking brain geniuses compared to Australia. A 2012 study here found that nearly 50% of adult Australians were functionally illiterate; we would have trouble reading things as complicated as medication bottles.

  • VHS [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    good thing there's a yellow highlight on it, then

  • inshallah2 [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    What's the source? Link?


    Edit

    For fuck's sake - is it so hard to give a link?

    Literacy in the United States

    Measuring adult literacy

    Functional literacy can be divided into useful literacy, informational literacy and pleasurable literacy. Useful literacy reflects the most-common practice of using an understanding of written text to navigate daily life. Informational literacy can be defined as text comprehension and the ability to connect new information presented in the text to previous knowledge. Pleasurable literacy is the ability of an individual to read, understand, and engage with texts that he or she enjoys. In a more-abstract sense, multiple literacy can be classified into school, community, and personal concepts. These categories refer to an individual's ability to learn about academic subjects, understand social and cultural contexts, and learn about themselves from an examination of their own backgrounds.

    In 1988, the Department of Education was asked by Congress to undertake a national literacy survey of American adults. The study identifies a class of adults who, although not meeting the criteria for functional illiteracy, face reduced job opportunities and life prospects due to inadequate literacy levels relative to requirements which were released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 as trend data. The 2002 study involved lengthy interviews with adults who were statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the country, and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. The National Adult Literacy Survey, conducted in 1992, was the first literacy survey which provided "accurate and detailed information on the skills of the adult population as a whole." The U.S. has participated in cyclical, large-scale assessment programs undertaken by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) and sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) since 1992. The survey revealed that the literacy of about 40 million adults was limited to Level 1 (the lowest level, an understanding of basic written instructions).

    The Institute of Education Sciences conducted large-scale assessments of adult proficiency in 1992 and 2003 with a common methodology from which trends could be measured. The study measures prose, document and quantitative skills, and 19,000 subjects participated in the 2003 survey. There was no significant change in prose or document skills, and a slight increase in quantitative skills. As in 2008, roughly 15 percent of the sample could function at the highest levels of all three categories; about 50 percent were at basic or below-basic levels of proficiency in all three categories. The government study indicated that 21 to 23 percent of adult Americans were "not able to locate information in text", could "not make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were "unable to integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." About one-fourth of the individuals who performed at this level reported that they were born in another country, and some were recent immigrants with a limited command of English. Sixty-two percent of the individuals on that level of the prose scale said they had not completed high school, and 35 percent had no more than eight years of education. A relatively-high percentage of the respondents at this level were African American, Hispanic, or Asian/Pacific Islander, and about 33 percent were age 65 or older. Twenty-six percent of the adults who performed at Level 1 said that they had a physical, mental or health condition which kept them from participating fully in work and other activities, and 19 percent reported vision problems which made reading print difficult. The individuals at this level of literacy had a diverse set of characteristics which influenced their performance; according to this study, 41 to 44 percent of U.S. adults at the lowest level of the literacy scale were living in poverty. A NAAL follow-up study by the same group of researchers, using a smaller database (19,714 interviewees), was released in 2006 which indicated some upward movement of low-end (basic and below to intermediate) in U.S. adult literacy levels and a decline in the full-proficiency group.

    The United States was one of seven countries which participated in the 2003 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL), whose results were published in 2005. The U.S. and dozens of other countries began participating in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), a large-scale assessment of adult skills – including literacy – under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in 2011. The NCES describes the PIACC as the "most current indicator of the nation's progress in adult skills in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving in technology-rich environments."

  • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I am a dumb guy and I was top 3 in my state for reading comprehension, and literally bad at everything else.

    I am not sure what to do with that

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]M
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      This is more about how poor black communities, immigrants, and people with learning disabilities are just abandoned. Most of them reportedly never finished highschool.

      Also, I do feel like the number would be a bit better of the test was in both English and Spanish. I think a lot of this is just adults that don't speak English not being able to speak or read English beyond what they need for their job.

  • Grownbravy [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Anyone else do that thing where you read the first half of a paragraph because new information is presented there, then skip over the second half because thats where they get explained and you were taught to format like that?

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I used to do this a lot, but I had to train myself out of it when I started reading theory/nonfiction because I would get to the end of a page and have no fucking idea what I just "read".

      I'm sure it doesn't help that I got through honors english and AP Lit in high school without reading a single required book and just glancing over the sparknotes for them instead.

      • Grownbravy [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        but like, that WAS something we were taught to do right?

        it's like a generation of people taught how to write wrong.

        • Nagarjuna [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          American theory is usually written like that. Europeans don't use that format. Obviously there's exceptions, but it's a regional rather than generational standard.

      • Grownbravy [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        new information is only on the first half of a paragraph, the rest of the paragraph is explaining the information's detail or relevance.

        It was something i swore i was taught really early on about writing essays in elementary school, and i've been seeing it consistently in writers around my age, who happen to also not be very interesting.

        • ANITINSTITUTIONALISM [any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Paragraph Stucture:

          1. Topic Sentence

          2. 3 - 4 sentences with only one conjunction in each.

          Pretty sure it comes from being trained like good little workers to do business writing.