Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.
I truly cannot imagine being unable to read. That even 1 in 5 people I met could be there is mind boggling.
The literacy rate is calculated as reading above a 5th grade level which seems like a really low bar to set for adult literacy. https://www.libraryjournal.com/binaries/content/gallery/Jlibrary/2020/04/literacycrisis/ljapril2020litcrisischart1.jpg
Yeah. This is genuinely sad, but also confusing. Like, how do these people interact with the world? Ignoring anything uplifting, how would you work, or find places & things you needed without being able to read?
Here's a better map https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/ that paints an even bleaker picture of only 46% nationwide "full literacy"
from experience, most functionally illiterate people will know a few key words, can perhaps read numbers, and know how to sign their own name. What they can't do is scan a document for relevant information nor can they read a passage of text and gain information from it. They can maybe recite the alphabet, maybe. They can also sometimes sound out certain words if they really, desperately need to get through some text.
Almost all of them I've known have worked in manual or household labor type jobs. A few have done pretty well for themselves actually. One of my students worked as an HVAC installer. A lot of the time they'll have kids or a spouse who knows how to read as well. Almost all of them I've known have had miserable lives, shuffled around living from one relative to another, long periods of homelessness, losing custody of multiple kids, never making above minimum wage. It's hard for them to do basic things and yeah, they're often very reliant on family or close friends.
A guy I went to high school with is functionally illiterate and will admit it. He owns a tire shop in my hometown through sheer happenstance and lives in a mcmansion. America is a silly place.
I read an ethnography about a guy in New York in like the 90s. Guy couldn't read, but he'd managed to set up what was basically a drug dealing company, with all the managment practices you'd expect from a small company with a few dozen employees, and the author kept pointing out that the guy had basically re-invented the McDonald's franchise model from scratch. The actual end point drug sellers even made about the same wages you'd get at McD's
afaik literacy isn't just the ability to read but also the ability to gather and analyze information from a source.
How much reading do the average service job, or even many office jobs, really require?
A lot. Office work is all paper work. Even past that, lots of factory work requires you to be able to read enough to see where things go.
I've never known a functionally illiterate person to work in an office setting. I've known a whole lot who work at the docks or refineries, which I really believe is why all the safety training for those is done through oral lectures and videos.
Especially when you consider that most middle class white kids are at that level in 1st grade.
This is the first time I've ever heard Parenti speak. He does not sound like what I expected him to.
You have got to go and watch all of his lectures now. He is an incredible speaker.
Damn, its almost as if private education doesn't actually offer any benefits over public education.
Hey now! It clearly benefits the pocket books of the... You know I don't actually know where the money goes in these charter school schemes. Not to the teachers they get paid worse than public school teachers if such a thing is possible.
Funnels money from public schools, increasing the draw of for profit private schools
private education doesn’t actually offer any benefits
:astronaut-2: :astronaut-1:
It let's you do segregation and get away with it, which is what the conservatives are really after
There's some kind of irony that the whole root of Evangelicalism is because they started to publish bibles in the local vernacular and people started realizing the local Catholic priest was full of shit, kicking off the reformation.
Meanwhile Florida is doing its damndest to ensure that kids won't even be able to read the fucking bible.
Oh god I actually forgot about that until you mentioned it. That was so funny watching them twist themselves into knots trying to talk about how reading is actually bad.
Did they ever actually say that? I mostly remember them saying that Castro was a horrible man who did horrible things, and then they trotted out that dead-eyed gusano-senator from New Jersey to talk about how Castro was horrible and evil and took my candy when I was a baby. From what I remember, they never actually talked about the Cuban educational system, and the entire media-cycle was just various gusanos crying to whatever journalist was near.
Not literally, just indirectly bad mouthing Cuba's social programs as a vector of criticizing Castro.
Not original, but a gusano acquaintance of mine says shit like that all the time
According to the dictates of the seventh international you are hereby required to dunk on them with Cuban literacy stats whenever possible.
It was a tweet, but my high school History teacher said something similar unironically when we covered literacy improvements in the USSR.
The PISA test is an attempt to measure the academic performance of 15 year old students in 79 relatively developed countries. In the latest study the US got a slightly above average score in reading skills and ranked 24th, just below Taiwan, the UK and Portugal. The highest ranking countries were Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada, Finland and Ireland.
You should be careful about these kinds of tests as they don't measure things like critical thinking or creativity but clearly, the US is far from being number one.
PISA sucks. All versions focus on producing a ranking, maybe because that's how university administrators think. The test may produce some usable results (oh schools that do X are better at Y) but iin the end all of that is flattened in arbitrary lists and that is all the public really is told.
Some 20 years ago, the first round of PISA tests caused a big media kerfuffle in Germany, because German students scored pretty badly, even lower than some developing countries (oh no). The technocrats of course used this to fuel "reforms" that amounted to cutting a year off the Gymnasium track and some other "economy-friendly" anti-intellectualist measures, most of which had nothing to do with "Literacy and Numeracy". Turned out the incentive structure was extremely uneven across countries, there were problems with the methodology, some governments apparently just cheated... but nothing of this was very big in the media. The ratchet only works one way.
I remember when one of the first big rankings came out, and Denmark also apparently scored lower than we would have liked. In particular, there was a lot of focus on China, and the chinese system. My mom was a teacher at the time and flat out said that the reason why China was scoring was better, was because the schools that were sampled were private schools, who could just kick students out if they underperformed, or didn't have the ressources to get their grades "back" up. In general there was a lot of anxiety at the time about China taking over, which died down for almost a decade before roaring back to life in the mid 2010's.
I don't remember much China focus during the years after the PISA debacle, when I was old enough to really remember. There was a lot of talk about Finland and South Korea, and there have been since some attempts to copy some elements of the Finnish system, a little.
Apparently South Koreans were primed with the national hymn and speeches telling them to be patriotic brain athletes for the fatherland before taking the test. And Finns are in their system trained to take apparently ungraded tests very seriously. And both of them fell and rose in subsequent PISA rankings, because uh PISA sucks
At least in Denmark there was a documentary made about how the Chinese school system worked. I'm not entirely sure about the reach of it, but it was released over a couple of weeks, and supposedly pitted the students at an ordinary school in Shanghai up against the students of an ordinary danish school in a series of tests. Danish kids obviously failed quite badly in most areas, except for "world news" since that was mostly based around western history, which is already taught here, and english language tests, since we are taught english from like 3rd grade, and english is significantly closer to danish than to Mandarin.
I really don't know enough about the Chinese school system. I half remember some articles that were mostly "China different(bad)" or "Authoritarian factory-like education actually good!"(...that's what I get for reading the haute-burgeois reactionary/neolib newspaper FAZ sometimes). I would presume Chinese schools are good, but that's because I'm a socialist.
I imagine it's a very differentiated picture overall.
I don't know a whole lot about the chinese educational system either, and after watching the danish documentary, you'd also not be terribly clever either. Supposedly after the documentary aired, it was revealed that the school in Shanghai was in fact an elite private school, and that somehow none of the documentary makers had been informed about this. Anyway, it was a really dumb time in Danish media, and thankfully they stopped talking about china for the next 5 years, which was a blissful time of quiet.
You should be careful about these kinds of tests as they don’t measure things like critical thinking or creativity but clearly, the US is far from being number one.
Critical thinking and creativity are often brought up in this context, especially when it comes to high scores received by East Asian countries and I always wonder how much of this is just Westoid cope.
I've heard a lot of white people claim that Asian education system is too focused on rote learning and doesn't teach critical thinking or creativity but you only have to look at Facebook and Twitter to see the general state of Western "critical thinking". As for creativity, obviously that's really hard to quantify, but an absolute fuckload of popular entertainment comes out of Japan, South Korea, and (more recently) China.
And I'm not accusing you of being racist at all, but the whole thing with creativity and critical thinking really mirrors the "goldilocks" theory of racism where white supremacists claim that black people are stronger physically and Asians are smarter but Whites are the goldilocks blend of strength, intelligence, and creativity.
the “goldilocks” theory of racism where white supremacists claim that black people are stronger physically and Asians are smarter but Whites are the goldilocks blend of strength, intelligence, and creativity.
I love this because of how this belief manifests through history. Like, the Romans thought that western Europeans were stronger physically and Africans were smarter, but that they were the golidlocks.
It'll be around as long as racists need to cope for being inferior in some perceived way to a race they hate.
More than once in my life, I have heard white Americans say that "we'd score higher" if only white kids in America were tested.
:amerikkka: , of course
All of them want credulous impressionable naive potential followers. All of them. :agony-4horsemen:
I don't even know if its that. This just feels like Ebenezer Scrooge style stinginess for its own sake.
The most indoctrinated Americans are consistently some of the most educated. Plenty of doctors, lawyers, and engineers in the reactionary and fascist fringes.
American public education has historically been a pillar of western propaganda. You're not going to be able to substitute 13 years of Protestant Work Ethic boot camps with a few Amazon sponsored TikTok dances.
doctors, lawyers, and engineers in the reactionary and fascist fringes
Because they know where their bread is buttered. A well-educated mop pusher questions, "why is this my role? Do I deserve more?"
There's no shortage of exploitation in the professional classes. ER doctors pulling 24 hr shifts. Younger lawyers expected to pull down 60+ hr work weeks just to keep their jobs. Engineers expected to spend months, or even years, on the road for their employers.
But they aren't lumpen. They aren't really replaceable cogs who can be disposed of on a whim. So indoctrinating them is vital to prevents professional trade unions or any kind of professional/lumpen coalition from forming.
