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.
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