I feel like just knowing that, will explain a lot about America and her way of life.
Math. prof at the University of Warsaw (former prof. in USA & Japan). British & Polish citizen, resident of Japan. Reaganite, Thatcherite, Zionist.
His pinned tweet is Stephen Pinker jerking off to the inherent greatness of aristocratic families. :poland-cool:
And has a 30+ post thread why dropping nuclear bombs was the better choice actually
To go with my 50 page explanation for why Stalin should have run over his grandfather with a tank on his way to liberate Europe.
Not surprising. Part of the reason why Poland (including Western Ukraine which was historically Polish) and Lithuania are the way they are is that like 10% of the population was "nobility" in the late 18th century vs barely 1% in western Europe, and nobles had a lot of power, to the point that one man could veto the entire parliament during the 1600s/1700s.
to the point that one man could veto the entire parliament during the 1600s/1700s
wasn't poland annexed because they made a new constitution proscribing that & other noble privileges and then the Russians & company invaded on behalf of nobles having a hissy
Not exactly, it's more like the country fragmented as foreign powers increasingly meddled in the country's politics (because all those nobles could be bought off) to the point where leaders were effectively chosen by the Russian czar. Eventually they were carved up into client provinces of Russia, Austria, and Prussia as a diplomatic way to avoid a war between major powers because Frederick the Great expected Russia and Austria to fight over the right to take over the collapsing Polish state, and Prussia had an alliance with Russia and would have had to fight the Hapsburgs again which they didn't want to do.
I've argued with people that say this shit irl lol. Cuban literacy is actually bad because they read propaganda. Did you know?
Just one of the most chef's kiss pieces of writing in the English canon.
I went to school with a number of people who were strictly illiterate, which is also pretty common. Could not read a sentence, but had the ability to work with simple numbers and write their own name. That's all they needed to get a job at the docks.
I used to have a job as an instructor working with functionally and strictly illiterate people. Maybe it was just the nature of the job or the way it was presented, but every single student I had was being coerced to be there in some way. The majority were on parole and learning to read as part of that, but a significant amount were having trouble getting work beyond domestic cleaning or stocking shelves. Which was a problem because a whole lot of them were getting to the older end of middle age and the work was getting more demanding and their medical costs going up.
One guy was an HVAC technician who made close to $80k a year and he was the least interested student I had. He was only there because his boss wanted him to get a GED. A throughline between all the students I had was they were all very insular individuals who were very reliant upon family members, their spouse, or friends. I'm not sure how to express this part. They all had a limited view of themselves and the world. The whole world for them was the people closest to them. I don't mean in a sweet kind of way. As in, we'd do a basic literacy and education check for every incoming student to gauge where we could start them out. Part of it was a basic geography test, a blank map of the world and we asked the students to label it in as much detail as they could. Every single student we had except for 2 left the entire thing blank, those 2 were able to label the USA and Mexico correctly, nothing else.
They also often had extremely similar stories to one another, yet were always surprised when another student also went through the same things. Like losing custody of children, being harassed by cops as a teenager, going homeless before high school, those were common. They always thought their own poverty and miseries were their own and no one else's. They had all been smashed into atomized pieces separate from one another.
also don't get me wrong, I don't mean these were incurious, bad people. They were all unfortunate victims of poverty and a lack of healthcare and it resulted in atomized pockets of people with no ability to demand justice as a unified voice, because they didn't even realize they were all victims of the same thing
I have a new appreciation for communist literacy campaigns. They're not just the morally correct thing to do, they're creating a pathway to solidarity and shared experience of humanity* for people who have maybe never been able to conceive of the world that way. Treating knowledge, culture, and history as 'optional' and distributing is based on 'willingness to pay' is such a grotesque way of organizing society. The treatment of education as merely an instrumental good to neo-liberal 'productivity' is definitely part of what radicalized me - but of course that runs all the way down. What good is free higher education to someone who can't read? To someone who can't afford the time and luxury of not working long enough to actively learn?
*autocorrect FUCKED me. Autocorrect FUCKED ME SO HARD.
The first thing I thought about too was all the poverty reduction videos I’ve seen. Good stuff
holy shit American communists are going to have to do literacy campaigns like it's 19th century rural Kazakhstan. Can we do it from roving agit-trains again? Everyone loves trains
Fuck yes, I bags the weird cosmist-futurist one that no one can understand the meaning of other than "uhh...triangles...in...space?"
Imagine if we included selective illiteracy in the metrics as well. Any :reddit-logo: or Hacker News thread will be full of people who have developed very strong opinions about a topic despite never reading about it, often staking everything on a claim that's directly refuted by the article on which they're commenting.
Using more selective methods like that, only about 50% of American adults are fully literate - level "3" on this literacy scale which is defined as
Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy, and include continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages of text. Understanding text and rhetorical structures become more central to successfully completing tasks, especially navigating complex digital texts. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inference. Many tasks require the respondent to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. Often tasks also demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate content to answer accurately. Competing information is often present, but it is not more prominent than the correct information.
And based on that last line, technically someone might have to be Level 4 or 5 to not "stake everything on a claim that’s directly refuted by the article on which they’re commenting". Only 13% of US adults are Level 4 or 5.
That's the minimum level to be able to read something and actually pick out useful information, without someone tailoring the text for your exact situation. Which is the entire point of books, and reading in general.
I'd argue if you can't read something and make use of the information in the text, you are functionally illiterate. You may be able to read signs, you may be able to read basic instructions with guidance, but you can't actually read without assistance. Being unable to actually make use of a text and learn from it is illiteracy.
Not only does it explain our... difficulties with theory, it also says a lot that America has never made any serious attempt to eliminate illiteracy, a straightforward and easily achievable goal.
This is generally correct. Half of American adults cannot read beyond a 6th or 7th grade level, right around the level of something like The Hunger Games or a normal non-op-ed newspaper article that doesn't deal with a subject that is too complex. In fact, that's why news articles are written to that level: That they should be decipherable to the most literate half of the country and capable of being explained to the next 10% most literate below that curve if they take the time and pull out a dictionary.
Truly how will we get them to read theory when literally half of the country would consider Harry Potter, The Magic Tree House, Goosebumps, or even Diary of a Wimpy Kid to be a challenging read at the very limits of their capabilities, if not outright too difficult for them.
I hate this line of thought. I would bet more than 21% of jobs don't require 'functional literacy' and I say this because the term is pretty much defined by one's ability to hold an office job. You can screw on a bolt on an assembly line or mow a lawn without knowing a letter of the alphabet.
Most people feel under-stimulated by their jobs rather than intellectually overwhelmed.
Functional illiteracy doesn't explain why think tanks, TV news, and establishment papers have such great power over the minds of people.
I had an accounting professor back in college whose net worth I would estimate above 3 million. Really smart person but he was about as reactionary as it gets. So no, that doesn't explain shit. Plenty of better societies have had more illiterates.
I had an accounting professor back in college whose net worth I would estimate above 3 million. Really smart person but he was about as reactionary as it gets.
Your accounting professor is massively profiting from the current state of affairs, so them being a reactionary is entirely unsurprising.
Illiteracy isn't the only source of reactionism, but it makes it easier to propagandize people against their own self interests. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that most functionally illiterate people aren't rich.
agree with everything you said, but the point im trying to make is if labor unions and other radical organizations had some presence in people's lives, the functionally illeterate would be just as likely to be propagandized by the left as the right.
the taft hartley bill alone is a better explanation of why we're where we're at. bourgious society has had complete control over public discourse for the past 50 years.
My "advanced" reading level in elementary school and high school was just average or below average for most other countries lmao
Jesus. Just looked up Canada. We have 99% literacy. The differences between us are like, almost nothing but they are clearly in some specifically dreadfully areas.
There is a difference between functional literacy and literacy. Roughly 16% of Canadians are functionally illiterate according to a 2013 PIAAC study.
I can vouch for this. Most of the people i work with and around can barely read anything not related to what they are doing at that time.
How do they pay taxes? Use any form of social media or communication except actual phone calls?
How was this tested?
they're able to identify certain words and can possibly phonetically understand unfamiliar words if you give them a minute to say it out loud. They're also often able to recognize numbers without problem.
A lot of the folk I worked with got help from their kids or from something like a Wal-Mart tax prep service. Usually they're able to write their own name, recite the alphabet, and perhaps recognize every word in a sentence like "My dog is brown." The technique I usually saw was they'd have a repository in their heads of the first few letters of a word, usually two or three, then assume the word is one they've memorized. So I had a few students who would struggle at first to see the distinction between words like trim and train, or table and taken. In terms of social media, it was pretty common for the students to ask me how to use Facebook, so I'm going to guess the answer is they either get help from their family or they simply don't use it at all.
A lot of people who struggle with literacy simply "get by". They get relatives to help them out with tax forms or go to a tax prep service. On the job, they rely on coworkers to get them info or they do their best to try to read signs and instructions. It's rare that someone just "can't read" unless they don't speak English at all, usually it's just that they can't make out that many words and can't make sense of more complex writing. That's why pictures are so important for safety/warning signs because even someone who struggles with reading can use context clues around a big red X.
I swear I'm getting there with autocorrect. I cam read fine but it's been a while since I needed to spell correctly or write at length
I will never use autocorrect just because of all the messages I've seen rendered incoherent because it used the wrong word.
The one thing I don't like about this site is that it marks new posts as edited even after like less than a second. Always dumb autocorrect shit.
Oh I thought it was 14-15%. Did the illiteracy shoot up in the past decade?
https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=How-Serious-Is-Americas-Literacy-Problem
It comes from the national center of education statistics.
