Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
Adding this to my job security copium alongside "knowing what a file directory is and how to navigate it"
"knowing what a file directory is and how to navigate it"
god DAMN that one gets me hard, I have had to explain the basic concepts of filesystems (literally just a file can go in a folder, but so can other folders, see? so you have to put the files in the correct folder) to a number of young people in the past year. Young people who are already working on PROGRAMMING courses (I do not work in education).
General computer literacy peaked with xennials, with average boomers and zoomers being equally terrible.
i think i learned like 80% of my computer literacy from modding video games Xd
No it peaked with boomers. In my family the boomers are fine. Then, except for me gen xers and younger dont know a file system from their ass.
And, of the milenials i know only the wierd nerds know how to use a pc. Even in programing class. As in, "man you are suposedley a chemichal engeenier this is your computer dont tell me you dont know wich key is the exponentiation sing?"
This is why all the boomers were into q anon and 4 chan memes. I think it has to do with boomer entitlment, the same thing that makes them go out without a mask and spit in each othets faces, they feel they are the best and invincible and so they give these computer things a try and learn to use them because its not that hard.
You have a weird family and 4chan is mostly millennials
Yeah, like roofer said below, the old guard of 4chan users from the mid-2000s are mostly made up of millenials. I'm right on the border between millenial and zoomer, and I was around 10 in the days of the earliest 4chan memes.
Critical support to Windows for having a slow search so that I had to learn how to use the file directory
I'm a bit of a ludite but the course that I teach uses R so the first few labs is just learning to set a working directory and now more than ever all of these students have clouds that double all their file locations and it's been annoying because I hate clouds and macs and that's all the damn kids use.
This is perfect. One of the faculty I work with is a Dropbox person so this describes my life everytime he asks if I put something in the Dropbox.
I have a story of when I was working with someone on a class project over Discord and I asked them to send me a screenshot of something. They said they didn't know how to take screenshots, and eventually they had to e-mail me a picture of their screen taken using their phone. This was a programming class BTW.
How can someone even hope to survive a programming class in this day and age without being able/willing to Google how to accomplish basic tasks?
I remember when I started my apprenticeship as a mechanic and being told the younger generation was going to be so much more tech savvy. Fast forward to now and they're somehow worse than people at my age were with pc's. Even their skills with tablets and smartphones aren't that much better.
Only the gamers really know how to operate all three.
I knew things were bad - just statistically (something like 60% of Americans have below a 5th grade reading level) - but it's alarming that it seems to be getting worse according to those on the ground. As far as I can tell, the only reason the United States keeps up is by exerting massive brain drain on the rest of the world. I work at one of those Fortune 500 companies or whatever that shit is and the vast majority of my "high skill" coworkers are people from other countries.
Are some of the kids you’re teaching not know how to genuinely read?
Gotta love it when this is the person soliciting all the commentary on how kids these days can't read or write. The post is almost incoherent.
I'm really not trying to be a weirdo here, did you read the same post I did? They're like, lecturing people about teaching kids morals and how parents are entitled and don't want to help their kids emotionally? They say this:
I’m not even knowing what they are intellect level is.
If I ever personally become a parent and any other parent reading this or the comments please raise your kids right especially knowing how to read,write spell.
???
I mean maybe English isn't their first language or something but there's genuinely something off about the post, it almost looks like a bit.
Yeah some of this tracks when I was a substitute. I had kids who didn't know how to write their own names. I asked one kid to write his name and address on a form the office gave me. Kid didn't know how to write either and didn't even know his home address. These were 9th graders (first year of high school, 13 to 14 years old)
Literacy is not a strong suit of the American population in general and it's not getting better.
how tf can a 14 year old not know their home address? were they homeless or living outside the school district or something, and therefore unwilling to share their address? it feels impossible to me that a teenager wouldn’t know their own address
Death to America
Well this kid couldn't read either, so I'm not sure. Could have been a lot of circumstances. Could have been an unstable living situation as well.
14 year old kids are still driven everywhere by their parents. There's no public transportation where I was working, so kids wouldn't have to know how to get around. I could easily see a scenario where an illiterate kid has no idea what street they live on because it's never mattered
I was pretty shit at writing until I started writing comments in BBS forums and Digg.com in the early 2000's
You'd get this sort of natural feedback that teachers just couldn't or wouldn't do. Instead of pointing out rules or passive voice or counting the amount of whatever dumb bullshit, you'd get people pointing shit out that you had already said, but weren't clear about. And I learned to be conscious of linebreaks and how they affect the visibility of certain parts of the text
reason number 13209753985789 that i will be moving abroad before having kids. my hypothetical children deserve way better than this shit hole.
Death to America
they deserve a life thats undoubtly more valued then medicine , all people do .
This is primarily the result of neoliberalism, yeah. Budgets getting crushed everywhere for decades, not keeping up with inflation, all while being asked to take on more and more work - largely work induced by problems of poverty, itself an intentional creation of neoliberalism. Lower wages also mean it's harder for a parent to spend time with their kids teaching them, helping with homework, having a preschool, helping socialize them. This includes not only an inability to have a stay-at-home parent, but also less time even for working parents, who must pick up longer hours, farther away, and at less regular hours.
As a revealing counterexample, after-school programs have been shown to be widely beneficial for a huge number of outcomes, including academic performance. Simply having something enriching to do, supervised, after school. I think they are mostly smoothing over issues of poverty.
The destruction of the teaching profession is part of this as well. I'd try to be a teacher myself if it didn't mean poverty and 70 hour weeks and an inability to properly teach students due to structural issues like poor teacher:student ratios.
The education system also refuses to pay teachers for those after school programs, relying on teachers volunteering their time to run them
Would make sense as the USA is locked into it's encroachment into burger style fascism that you have generations who can't think critically let alone read/write. Probably going to see an uptick in vilifying socialist countries that properly educate their kids. More libraries turned into private prisons for youngsters coming our way.
I don’t recall the full details, but the American library system was genuinely impressive to a Soviet leader at one point, and pointed to a something to emulate. It’s like the one time we did something aspirational.
And now it’s being destroyed to facilitate the disciplining of children. Whenever America identifies a part of itself that is good, it brings death to itself within that specific area.
Just the same old lack of class analysis. Quick to blame parents for failing their kids without stopping to ask why they aren’t teaching their kids to read.
- they themselves are illiterate
- too much time spent working for too little pay just to provide basic necessities
- lack of support structures to help ease the burdens of child rearing
that literacy is what would allow the working class to take over running a society. The issue of illiteracy preventing revolution would therefore be mitigateable by a literate vanguard party that after the revolution set about mass literacy programs.
I'm not sure about that kids seem perfectly able to talk to each other in person
Hard disagree, if anything that makes conditions dire enough revolution becomes all but mandatory.
The Internet and the ability to vlog might be an X factor that Marx didn't account for. Not that I'm not talking out of my ass, but it is a method of relaying information that Marx didn't have
I would argue akin to Vietnam, the early leftist movements in the US didn't have the benefit of high literacy amongst the working class. As a result you have a lot of leftist folk music traditions where a song writer would take a popular song everyone probably knew, changed the lyrics, and then sang it and helped people learn it. The Preacher and the Slave, Dump the Bosses Off Your Back, or the pretty obvious 3fer of John Brown's Body, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Solidarity Forever.
Utah Phillips explains it pretty well in the opening of Dump the Bosses Off Your Back
If workers become illiterate and lose access to the ability to reproduce society thats game over,
Kinda reminds me of slavery but in reverse
Instead of enslaved people becoming increasingly educated and more demanding of freedom, free people become increasingly illiterate and closer to a slave-like status
Passes bill called "No Child Left Behind"
Leaves millions of children behind
??? what the fuck is this country
That threads is a mixed bag. A lot of comments correctly blaming NCLB and the general switch to testing and metrics over teachers autonomy, even some “there are larger socioeconomic issues at play here” takes. But also a lot of blaming parents, blaming kids instead of the systems. And I don’t buy “oh it’s TikTok/YouTube/Instagram”; people been saying the newfangled media is rotting brains since the printing press was invented. Not to get all tooting my own horn, but my kid is reading a couple grade levels above his age and he watches plenty of YouTube. It’s about getting the fundamentals and encouraging them to explore their interests. And yes, some parents check out of the IEP and special ed processes, but if you’ve got single working parents or dual income households and all these processes take time you don’t have and involve meetings you’ve got to try to get out of work to attend, well yeah of course they’re not going to follow through.
The scapegoating and inability or refusal to identify the systemic issues gets to me tenfold more than the sorry state of education.
I looked at another thread in that sub and there was literally someone who went "it's all ipads -> tiktok is a Chinese conspiracy to dumb down its enemies." I only saw 2 posts that had anything deeper.
Still can't believe that TikTok conspiracy is still so widespread when the US government hasn't been hiding its ties to the app.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
This is all true. And now the literacy crisis will be used as further reasoning to defund public education and promote private/charter options
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate
correct
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright
incorrect
Idk, man. I've seen counterpoints (sorry I couldn't find a reference that wasn't a joke, but that's just my internet diet).
We've never been more dependent on literacy as a means of navigating the world than in the modern moment. Maybe the shift from text to videos as a means of communication is changing that, but even then... how do you even operate a cell phone without some degree of literacy?
Generally speaking, education rates have only trended upward since the Depression Era. We have a higher percentage of college students, a higher percentage of professional workers, and higher levels of literacy in Gen X and younger than in the Boomer and older cohorts. That's not to say we don't have an absolute mess of an educational institution.
I think a lot of people we count as officially literate are functionally illiterate though. I'm still surprised by the amount of people who just can't read every sentence in a paragraph, find it difficult to read and follow step-by-step instructions, or insist they can't explain something in text and then explain it in one or two sentences verbally.
There's a difference between literacy and composition, though.
Also, I've seen plenty of instruction guides that do a piss poor job of telling you exactly what to do.
Idk how many people straight up can't read a menu or a newspaper. But I've seen ample evidence to suggest it less than "a lot"
Yeah I'm talking about people who fail to follow all the steps in a bullet-pointed four step guide, or just completely omit one or two crucial sentences which state how important doing the thing in the sentence is. People who can do it if I just read the paragraph or steps out to them while they follow them.
According to this
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2023.
54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level.
On average, nationwide, 66% of 4th grade children in the U.S. could not read proficiently in 2013.
And just to confirm that it's a US education problem:
34% of adults who lack proficiency in literacy were born outside the US.
The majority of illiterate adults were educated in the US.
According to this
I'm not saying I don't implicitly trust Forbes, HuffPo, and TechCrunch journalists...
But these are the same folks constantly trying to fix education by privatizing it.
"66% of 4th grade children in the U.S. could not read proficiently in 2013."
I just have no scope for this. What is "read proficiently"? Is that high or low for 4th graders? Why did we move from "6th grade reading standards" to "4th grade reading standards" inside two bullet points?
I've spent my whole life being told how schools are failing to teach basic skills, but university enrollment and professional work forces have only grown over that time.
The problems in the education system are well established. But the "nobody can read!" trope is so heavily sensationalized that I'm reluctant to take it seriously on its face.
Literacy isn’t just reading the words and having a basic understanding, literacy also involves how comprehensively you understand what you’re reading and the critical thinking skills to engage with what you’re reading. And it’s the latter two parts that are severely lacking in our education system.
Maybe. But I see quite a bit of naked disinformation in mass media that can't really be refuted unless you abandon the outlets themselves entirely.
Comprehension only gets you so far on third hand info. At some point, when all your media resources say X, you're going to believe X whether or not its true.
That's not "education" per say. It's access to data.
That’s a good point, but it’s not exactly against what I’m saying. With poor literacy it’s very easy to internalize propaganda because you lack the critical thinking skills and broader knowledge base that enhanced literacy provides you. Those tools are what is necessary to dismantle propaganda, and those are the tools that aren’t being effectively learned in school.
With poor literacy it’s very easy to internalize propaganda because you lack the critical thinking skills and broader knowledge base that enhanced literacy provides you.
Sure. But even advanced literacy won't save you from an abundance of misinformation. Just ask Thomas Aquinas or Emmanuel Kant.
You can have an extremely well researched and erudite debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
With poor literacy it’s very easy to internalize propaganda
I'm not sure how related these are, there are plenty of highly literate people are extremely propagandized, and vice versa
definitely a bad thing on the whole though
Here is a more official study (that had a less dire analysis) : https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
However even this shows only 12.9% of American adults are at a level 4/5 literacy. In the footnotes it stated these levels were combined because only 2% reached level 5 across all surveyed countries.
I'm not sure how America defines those levels, but this is how the UK does:
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Level 1: Adults can read relatively short digital or print texts to locate a single piece of information that is identical to or synonymous with the information given in the question. Knowledge and skill in recognising basic vocabulary, determining the meaning of sentences, and reading short paragraphs of text is expected.
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Level 2: Adults can make matches between the text, either digital or printed, and information. Adults can paraphrase or make low-level inferences.
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Level 3: Adults are required to read and navigate dense, lengthy or complex texts.
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Level 4: Adults can integrate, interpret or synthesise information from complex or lengthy texts. Adults can identify and understand one or more specific, non-central idea(s) in the text in order to interpret or evaluate subtle evidence-claim or persuasive discourse relationships.
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Level 5: Adults can search for, and integrate, information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Adults understand subtle, rhetorical cues and can make high-level inferences or use specialised background knowledge.
However even this shows only 12.9% of American adults are at a level 4/5 literacy.
Is that abnormally low on a historical/geographic scale?
Lower than average (overall, not just 4/5) in the linked study in the footnotes.
https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-2013/the-supply-of-key-information-processing-skills_9789264204256-6-en#page9
It seems like several of the articles covering this are being a bit doomer about all of this now that I've seen the actual study. It's funny how the articles complaining about literacy also refuse to cite things properly.
I think there was one done by the dept of education in the US too which had worse results, but I'm on my phone and dont have time to find it.
What I'm usually more concerned about is how many adults I've met have terrible media literacy, and get most of their information from TV news, Facebook videos, and YouTube videos and take all of that in uncritically. But that's a different problem. I know very few people who read anything more complicated than a cheap novel though, which isn't great, but that's all anecdotal.
It's funny how the articles complaining about literacy also refuse to cite things properly.
Nobody wins the Nobel for proving the Null hypothesis (which is a shame, in its own way).
What I'm usually more concerned about is how many adults I've met have terrible media literacy, and get most of their information from TV news, Facebook videos, and YouTube videos.
That's what is within easy reach.
I'll recommend this or that source to my elderly mom, for instance. But she struggles with the medium of PDFs and is totally beyond podcasts.
Meanwhile, MSNBC is just... right there on the TV. YouTube is consistently in the front page of a Google search. Facebook shoves headlines right into your feed full of grandkid pictures.
Complaining about media literacy is fascille when the "bad" sources are prominently on display while the "good" sources are buried in the weeds. At this point, it isn't a media problem but a technology problem.
Complaining about media literacy is fascille when the "bad" sources are prominently on display while the "good" sources are buried in the weeds. At this point, it isn't a media problem but a technology problem.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it
-
I think at a base level of "Can read and communicate concepts and ideas" it's true that the USA is literate but in the sense of having strong reading comprehension and the ability to synthesize/critique based off of that comprehension, we absolutely suck.
having strong reading comprehension and the ability to synthesize/critique based off of that comprehension
I see plenty of long winded heavily overanalyzed power posters on Reddit. But when they treat the CIA Factbook as gospel and denounce Seymour Hersh as Fake News...
That's not a comprehension issue. It's a trust issue.
I'm saying that learning to distinguish garbage from not garbage is an important facet of critical thinking
Yes. But those same skills, absent reliable information, can be subverted.
What you're describing is ultimately just an understanding of institutions. Having a very well refined understanding of libraries doesn't get you useful data if you're trapped in the fiction section.
Ask Decartes how that works. "What am I able to know is true?" is a very fundamental philosophical question without many bulletproof answers.
Fair enough, thank you for explaining where you're coming from, have a good day
how do you even operate a cell phone without some degree of literacy?
I don't know how it's done, but I assure you that I have tried to teach people basic tasks which amount to "read this sentence and then press the button it says to press" and been unable to even with coaching. Fully grown adult people in their 20s and 30s who have jobs and families and hobbies and all.
Well, not so much hobbies. A lot of them do nothing with their (dwindling) free time but watch TV, movies, or anime.
Honestly. If i was in that position: were i have to read a sentence and press the button i would also pretend i cant do it. Just to mess with whover is making me do it.
As for watching anime dont you have to read a lot of subtitles for that? Or do they speak japanese and chinese?
Honestly. If i was in that position: were i have to read a sentence and press the button i would also pretend i cant do it. Just to mess with whover is making me do it.
As for watching anime dont you have to read a lot of subtitles for that? Or do they speak japanese and chinese?
Just to mess with whover is making me do it.
I'm not making anyone do anything, if you can't read don't get a job doing paperwork
As for watching anime dont you have to read a lot of subtitles for that? Or do they speak japanese and chinese?
Every popular anime since 1980 has been dubbed in english
Every popular anime since 1980 has been dubbed in english
Eventually. But it usually takes months, even years, for a dubbed release. Meanwhile, I can get fansubs inside a day or two of the show airing in Japan.
I've noticed ever since Crunchyroll became a thing and Netflix started showing anime the number of people watching fansubs has gone drastically down. And dubs are quite quick nowadays. Funimation was dubbing MHA as it was being released in Japan for instance.
Actually the number of fansubs has probably stayed the same, but more people watch anime now. MHA, Attack on Titan, and Kimetsu no Yaiba are sincere cultural forces the likes of which I've never quite seen before. And most people are watching them dubbed through legitimate channels. Fansubs are considered a weird nerd thing among the typical anime watcher outside of Japan. Maybe they always were?
Funimation was dubbing MHA as it was being released in Japan for instance.
I suppose so. But when I was in college, back in the early 00s, I had friends who were taking Japanese classes just to be part of the fansub community. We could get episodes of FMA and Bleach a day or two in advance because the show was on the UTexas intranet before it got picked up in force by the bigger file-share services.
Crazy to think you could have gotten a legit dub inside of a year.
I suppose by now English subs are just baked into the main release schedule (especially when AI can do a half-assed job of translation on the cheap). And since every major production studio has its eye on the American audience, we get some pretty high profile voice actors in modern releases. Samuel L. Jackson in Afro Samurai, for instance. Or Matthew Mercer doing Attack on Titan's Levi Ackerman.
Even then, I tend to see a delay on the scale of months on dubs in the English-speaking markets. The official Attack on Titan Final Chapters dub release wasn't out until a few weeks ago. I watched those episodes subbed back in... I want to say February or March?
Dont do paperwork period. Thats the devils work.
I didnt know about the anime thing. I was under the impresion that most anime was not oficially localised for english. And fans were only able to aford subs.
Much of anime is dubbed these days, esp on major streaming platforms.
anime
Is the undermining of US literacy an attempt to decisively win the subs versus dubs debate in favor of dubs?
i think the caveat gotta be comprehension of some degree. the people making and popularizing novel communications, and by necessity using it a lot---they're very literate, knowing rules and bending them. but you can just learn distortions without really knowing why or what the differences are. you can pick up the context & appropriate uses of a contraction or acronym without knowing what they actually mean---and there's many old words that are just calcified versions of that which nobody but pedantic nerds know the origins of.
nobody's clever for using OK now, but it would've been a sign of literacy (and iirc aristocracy) back in the day
I think the caveat gotta be comprehension of some degree
Certainly possible. But I don't think social media is degrading that comprehension any more than the newspapers degraded it a century ago.
nobody's clever for using OK now, but it would've been a sign of literacy (and iirc aristocracy) back in the day
Just like any language skill, its a learned affectation. You're still more literate for knowing it than not.
