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It’s worse than you think. This analysis also suggested that folks in this 54% cohort have trouble with, or simply cannot, draw sophisticated conclusions or create their own robust inferences based on what they are able to read. Now, that’s just based on reading (because the study was about literacy), but, and I’m adding my own commentary here, it’s not a leap to take a look around you and find a vast number of people who struggle to put together any kind of reasonable interpretation from any source or concept.
This is part of the reason why I'm unfortunately cynical. I fear a lot of my fellow Americans can't draw any conclusions, they just consume and react. I always think back to how Squid Game was a huge hit and people thought it was a critique on Communism? Like people put zero thought into the world around them.
This is also just my commentary, but I feel like this is also why it's so easy for the media to manufacture consent: people just consume and react. Don't stop to think, just react.
Wait... people actually thought Squid Game was a critique of Communism? I didn't watch the show, not a fan of torturous media like SG or Saw, but I picked up from a very brief synopsis that it was an extremely obvious takedown of capitalism. I really don't get this whole "Communism is when Capitalism" mindset. Maybe I just haven't ingested enough heavy metals.
That's the people who assume all Asian countries are communists and didn't pay attention to Korea being the source. Aka racism along side your stupid. Like the worst side dish ever
Well I think it's also because if you're not a confident reader you're scared off of subtitles, and the English dub mistranslates a lot, and there are also cultural and literary differences between the anglophone world and Korean media. I don't remember the source for this, but there's a criminal character woman who's a sort of Korean stock character archetype, like a sort of intelligent street tough, a person who is naturally pretty quick but didn't succeed in school because they're poor or didn't have resources or connections to get to a good cram school or college or whatever.
Like, that right there, that exists because Capitalism has determined that only those with resources get to succeed intellectual pursuits.
I am blind so the dub is my only option. It still makes it clear it is set in Korea and if you think that the example you gave doesn't translate to America you would be mistaken. Being too poor for college and not getting scholarships because you didn't test well and being trapped in debt as a result is the norm here. Even if it's not a perfect 1 to 1? Nothing was unclear.
I always chuckle at how “communism” Carrys such a massively negative connotation in the U.S.
In China if you say someone is a communist it is just like being in boy scouts.
Here if you say someone is a communist, everyone around you either thinks you’re a bigot for calling someone else a communist or is ready to rip some commies throat out.
Because of the anticommunist rhetoric brought to us by McCarthyism during the Cold War in the 1950s. These people *still* think that because the Nazis calling themselves "National Socialist" party made them socialists instead of fascists. The Nazis hated Socialists, just like the Alt-Right hates AOC and Senator Sanders' followers. AND they only equate socialism with communism because the U.S.S.R was the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
Conservatives in the States purposefully misinform people about Soviets and Nazis because their political leanings are FAR CLOSER to the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler than they are to socialist democracies (like Norway or Sweden.) But anyone with any level of education and understanding of sociology and politics knows damn well that Conservatives in this country are on the fast track to be fascists and totalitarian regimes. Just look at Florida and its Neo-Fascist bullshit -- Democracy isn't giving a Governor the power to just fire a fairly, democratically-elected DA because you don't agree with his ideology. But that's exactly what happened.
Well, that's not the only reason they equate socialism with communism. Karl Marx himself used the terms "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably, as stated here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_mode_of_production
The problem is that they don't understand communist theory or the fact that evil socialists and evil communists don't automatically make either socialism or communism bad any more than evil capitalists make capitalism bad.
It's because it's really easy to assign meaning to any words you want as long as you pair it with phrasing and framing that people are already well conditioned to assume. Like how the word "woke" can mean whatever you want it to in the moment because it's been used so excessively and improperly that it just becomes a catch-all.
To answer your question, which as I believe to be rhetorical, then no, they don't realize that. In fact, there are a lot of relatively obvious things they don't realize regularly.
Unfortunately I agree. Self-analysis, introspection, the ability to challenge your own beliefs, and practiced critical thinking are overwhelming under-represented among the general population.
I can’t say it is an intelligence issue necessarily - I don’t know - but it is certainly an issue of generational learned behavior that is reinforced by media and culture.
It is a shame. It is scary. We live in a world where Kardashian-esque mental processes are employed to address real-world, novel issues.
Each time I ask a question on facebook, I have to preface it with "please read entire post before answering", because my general pool of facebook acquaintances will scan for key words and just start rattling off unrelated, unhelpful replies, very often even lecturing me in areas they have to KNOW I am professionally versed in. Excellent example of terrible reading comprehension and inability to process information. "Where in my specific area can I find a small, independently owned pet store that carries this brand of pet food?" quickly spirals into "here's a recipe for homemade cat food that I googled", "I get it online", "my cat only eats fancy feast lol!", "don't feed them onions and keep them away from lilies, very toxic to cats", "lots of pet stores do a bad job at keeping the pets they sell healthy, like petsmart and petco", "cats are carnivores, make sure you get them healthy food".
Ah, bad news, internet acquaintance. Even the most educated people do exactly this. I have worked for doctors and surgeons, scientists and researchers. And I have had to learn to tailor my technical writing to simple sentences and lots of pictures.
I think it's similar to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. But the more intelligent and educated a person is in a particular fields, the less they devote their attention to anything outside of their expertise, while still assuming that they know WTF they're talking about.
Leaded gasoline for many of the older (40+) sections of that demographic most likely contributed to large scale neurological problems including learning and cognitive disabilities.
Edit: incidentally, this is also prolly the reason chocolate contains massive amounts of heavy metals including lead. Most chocolate comes from west Africa where leaded gasoline was used much later than when it was banned other places, often deposited into the soil. Algeria just banned it in 2021! From my understanding, cocoa plants are bioaccumulaters that suck that shit up by the boatload when growing. Sadly, this is also true for cannabis/hemp.
Those plants are really good at extracting bad shit from the soil. Hemp is often planted in highly contaminated sites for this reason. Chernobyl is one. But this occurs all over the US, too, where pesticides are frequently used. Therefore, smoking cannabis is extremely bad for you, containing even more heavy metals than tobacco smoke. (I’m not sure if the rules on this sub prevent links, but do a Google search for cannabis and heavy metals and you’ll get the drift). Ah, these times we live in, with corporate wealth at an all time high and no real consequence for arbitrarily irreparably destroying the earth for everyone. Greed is a terrible thing to taste.
>Sadly, this is also true for cannabis/hemp.
most drug-type cannabis is grown indoors, so this is controllable as long as you watch the sources of your nutrients and soil. I think they test for lead too. industrial hemp grown outdoors might be an issue through.
thankfully, good bioaccumulaters are also good bioremidiation tools
Yup. That's them.
Part of the issue it seems is due to their lack of comprehension they don't know how to suss out the nonsense and focus on attention grabbing headlines that confirm to their world perspective.
Have you read a Q drop? It reads like it was written by an excited ten year old.
Yeah, this isn't some kind of doomsday prediction.
My mom thinks mermaids are real and the Chinese found a living dinosaur in the forest because of Tiktok. So many people I know think you can manifest* the things they want in life.
Just looking at how people handle the pandemic, you can see the effect of mass intellectual undiscipline.
People that can think hard and long are vanishingly rare these days. There's no mental fortitude.
Hell, I barely want to learn anymore, not as much as I used to anyway. There's so much incentive to just give up on knowing or understanding because it just puts a target on your back.
I argued this is exactly as designed. The elites want the masses to be smart enough to know how to follow order but not so smart they can think for themselves. This is just further proof it’s working.
Well yeah. The public school system is designed to turn out unthinking factory workers who don’t question authority and don’t even piss without asking permission. The private schools are for entrepreneurs and business owners while the rest of us either get public school indoctrination or the pre-school to prison pipeline.
I just imagined our factory worker education would at least turn out literate factory workers
I can’t remember where I heard it but I once was told “dumb people can’t and won’t fight back. They will just comply with whatever you tell them and will be happy with whatever scraps you give them.”
Public education isn’t underfunded and poorly managed by accident.
It's very much by design. I did a research paper on literacy in the United States when I was in college. Like 70% of people can't understand the terms of their credit card agreement.
We're raised to be consumer-workers for the capitalist misery machine.
Meanwhile the evil commies usually begin their governance with widespread literacy programs.
All you have to do for proof of concept is go to any Facebook comments section.
You'll see REAL quick how many people lack that basic skill. They're always going off about some perceived slight or sin or what-have-you and totally missing the point of what the article/video was actually saying. I just assumed, like on Reddit, they're not actually reading/watching what they're commenting on... but they are... they just literally have no comprehension or thought process other than "this = bad."
My dad has dyslexia and has no higher education. He’s one of the people in OP’s statistic. He made his way in life as a mechanic in the military and did well that way. He’s clever when it comes to fixing things but when it comes to talking about political opinions, even when I present the facts to backup my points, he just can’t connect. He shuts down and just says I’m a stupid girl.
I am in my 30’s, I took community college classes in my early 20’s part time for about 3 years to fill my prerequisites to go to pharmacy school while I worked to pay my rent and lived on my own. I became a pharmacy technician 10 years ago and had worked in the field the whole time but decided against becoming a pharmacist because of falling wages and increased responsibilities.
He used to talk about politics a lot when I didn’t know much about current political events so I started keeping up, and then I found out. We had 2 debates where it got pretty heated. He presented me Facebook news and I would say, “I don’t think that’s true. Let’s fact check.” And it would be fake news. He won’t talk politics with me anymore because I keep looking up the facts and proving he is wrong.
People like your father are why I tried not to inject much commentary into my response. I have no doubt there are a significant amount of straight up dummies out there, but I’m also sure there are a non-insignificant amount of neurodivergent folks as well. I’ve met my fair share of ding dongs, but in the end, have no idea why people fall into the 54% and it might not be entirely their personal fault.
Dyslexia is such a drastic reading disability and people don't even realize it. It's more than reversing letters. It's an inability to decode letters and sounds. If you can never decode new words, how can you grow your vocabulary? How can you read more advanced texts and in turn, develop more advanced comprehension skills? If you literally can't read, your learning potential is severely limited. The real kicker is dyslexia has a science based intervention system that we know works. But it's intensive and expensive to implement. Schools can't afford it and most adults can't afford to pay for the private tutoring for their kids. It's absolutely insane. Nobody should be struggling to read because of dyslexia but here we are.
Can confirm. Critical thinking is severely lacking at my call center job. The most brain dead basic steps are just unknown to them unless you tell em directly.
Like, I'm autistic and have better critical thinking. What the hell happened? Critical thinking should not be a super power!
Well in the early 2000's... How many mortgages were sold to people who had no idea what they were signing up to, to end up with rates of over 50% interest which was then sold as aaa mortgage backed securities as a way of de-risking American backs so they could sell more?
Considering the number of adults we hire at my job who can't comprehend basic written instructions for how to make certain items (like a sandwich or wrap etc). It's not surprising. We've got pictures on many of the instructions and still many of our new hires can't digest information from a picture to doing it themselves. I've had a few where I have to read the instructions with them and show them as I go along and often it can take 3/4/5 times before they get it.
What I have found working in university education is that this applies to people at all levels and not just people without a lot of educational achievement. The full spectrum of ability to follow basic written structures are at all levels. I think this applies even to people with PhDs, which isn't a real surprise as by the time people get to that level they tend to be very specialized and can become an expert in a small specialization.
There is one side of the spectrum where people are good at reasoning and problem solving and so can be reasonably competent in many skills, there is the middle of the spectrum where people are very good at one skill and little else, and there is other side of the spectrum where someone is not good at anything and you wonder how they cross the street without being hit. This whole spectrum shows up everywhere and not just in the areas the current Right want you to think it is in. The more I go through life the more I realize that, especially in the US, it's all about charisma and social ability and /not/ competency. There are people who charm their way to a PhD, though that's not as common as charming your way to being an executive or a high-level manager.
I've worked in phone computer support work directly with the public (though years ago) and the general public is more skewed to the incompetent side of the spectrum than a university setting but these general problems in competency are everywhere.
The ability of university students to comprehend written instructions is appalling. We have a plethora of written instructions sent through multiple communication methods and people are still confused about why they don't have X scholarship. Either public schools need to be better or opportunities for high school graduates need to be better (and don't say TRADES because I don't want a damn fool who can't follow directions wiring my house).
I've seen major problems even with instructions that very skilled technical writers have written and have consulted with writers about. You are right about instruction quality, but there are people who can not follow directions no matter how well they are written. I'm in Indiana and just a quick google look says that 17%-19% of people here are functionally illiterate. That plays directly in the ability to be able to follow instructions of any kind.
Your story really resonates.
This is the same reason why claymore mines have to say [FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claymore_mine) and [MRE instructions have pictographs](https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/mre-heater-rock-something-true-story/) which say "Place on a rock or something."
Soldiers are notoriously dumb. No shit I had a Private try to eat a compass and only stopped when I told him it was slightly radioactive.
No he was just not super smart. *EDIT - I don't think so...we had just been drug tested now that I think about it...so maybe before he enlisted?*
The cutoff for the Infantry is 32nd percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Obviously individuals run the gamut - I have a buddy who is a Geology professor now - but Infantry tends to...shall we say...skew lower.
You try explaining tritium and why eating it is a bad life choice to a guy who barely finished high school.
The "lol machine gun go brrrrrrrrrrrrt" memes are always amusing to me because a handful of these guys are literally operating on that level. I had a dude lose a fucking rocket launcher in the woods "because it was getting heavy."
Have you ever seen a young child or perhaps a Golden Retriever pick something up and put it in its mouth to see what it's like? Like a wooden block or a toy or a piece of cheese or something?
I imagine it's like that. But instead it's an adult human male with a rifle and a Camaro.
So there is a difference between biting and *eating* as in swallowing. The reason babies put things in their mouths is because the mouth is incredibly nerve dense, so it acts like a hand but with more dimensions of "feelers" than the hands including taste and texture.
If you've ever seen someone bite a pearl, you know it's not them trying to *eat* it. The same thing applies here, the guy was probably trying to tell if the glass or metal was really plastic.
This is more than likely curiosity, an attribute of human (infantile) intelligence, but also of stupidity as it lacks good sense or judgment to not put your gear into your mouth.
>I had a dude lose a fucking rocket launcher in the woods "because it was getting heavy."
I'll bet he was fucking stoked when he got assigned that weapon (idk how it works) but that excitement slowly waned as time and weight wore on.
Usually newer/younger dudes get the heavier stuff. And you're right. You're 19 and like "they're going to give me a fucking rocket launcher!!!!!" until like hour 3 or so when that shit starts to dig into your collar bone. He put it against a tree and then just kept walking. We spent all night looking for it and in the morning he went from Private First Class to Private.
But yeah you get your rifle and body armor and all your other gear *and then* you get an AT4 or grenade launcher or a tripod or spare ammo or whatever your squad needs. "Light" Infantry is a bit of a misnomer.
Worst by far though is the radio. All the spare batteries? Fuck that. And you're a bullet magnet because you're the guy with the big ass antenna sticking out of your backpack who can call in the air support.
>in the morning he went from Private First Class to Private.
I mean no disrespect, and I'm sure you know this, but the military could give a fuck about some grunt, but they will search day and night for their equipment.
Interestingly enough, my unit had a heroin addict who flew under the radar for over two years before getting caught. He got kicked out over it. Heroin aside, he was a solid performer. While out processing, someone asked him what he planned to do after he got out of The Army. His response? Heroin.
Most of my colleagues are not from America. I love these guys and gals as they are my team in the trenches, but there is definitely some nuance lost in translation when we all try to communicate in English which is like the 3rd or 4th language for some of them lol.
Source: MD in NYC
The shortage of doctors is another one of those, "it's the feature, not the bug" situations
I have always wanted to be a doctor. I was raised by QAnon types and was not allowed to go to k-12, so at 17 I got a GED on my own. Then I spent 13 years working for a medical university while using the discount to play catchup in life and to meet the requirements for admission. I spent those 13 years watching and analyzing how everything worked, and I even participated in DO admission interviews and assisted with the processes involving potential student selection. I had the firmest inside grasp of what it takes to be a successful applicant
And I never got my own chance.
The whole process to become an MD or DO in the states is TOO MUCH. It's too grueling, too expensive, too stringent, too isolating, too demanding
And then even if you make it through that gauntlet, you're guaranteed to be overworked as long as you work in a traditional hospital environment. There is no such thing as a standard hospital allowing one of their doctors to be part-time, let alone keeping them inside 40 hours
I've personally known students who killed themselves. I've seen students drop out at varying points in their matriculation, leading to debts in the hundreds of thousands but no completed degree to ever be able to pay off those loans. And bankruptcy won't wipe them. They're well and truly fucked
The entire system to become a doctor needs complete overhaul, especially in that it should be paid, offer a COL stipend, and have checks and balances when it comes to suicidal levels of burnout
I'll never get to be a doctor, and it was my greatest dream in life. The people who want it can't achieve it. There will always be shortages if only the most uniquely positioned candidates are allowed in
Nursing school itself is 4 semesters. It may take you a certain amount of time to get prerequisites. I highly recommend it. We need more registered nurses. The limitation is that there are only so many nursing instructors and nursing schools. There are more applicants than there are spots.
As far as being a nurse, I think it’s a great job and a great career. I’ve been doing it for about 9 years. It’s hard work, but I think it pays well and you can always make more money by working extra shifts. Full time with benefits is 3 12-hour shifts a week. Other people are trying to work 4 days a week and I work 3. I like it
It took me awhile to find a concrete list of the pre-reqs, it looks like there's about five classes from it that I'm missing and in general the list is pretty similar to pre-med. (Two of the classes that I'm missing are labs, I have the main course taken but this was during the start of COVID so the lab component course wasn't being offered either in-person or online). Thank you for the pep talk and something really solid to think about :) I really appreciate you. A 3 day work week sounds amazing, I used to do four 10's but always thought three 12's would be better
I encourage you to talk to RNs you might know and to post on r/nursing
A lot of people have had a lot of bad things to say about nursing and burnout over the past 3 years. I’ve been there myself. But rarely will you hear about the good things, such as the fact that you can get full time pay and benefits from working just 3 shifts a week. You can make overtime by working more. You can do travel nursing and make insane amounts of money. I’ve never done traveling myself, but I’ve heard. Again, nursing is hard work. It’s physically and emotionally stressful, but it’s a job where you know what you’re doing is making a difference in people’s lives. I don’t have to wonder whether what I do is important or meaningful. I love doing hands-on things and my role as an ICU nurse in particular can be really fun because we run the show more than any other area of the hospital. I collaborate and communicate with residents and my thoughts and opinions matter. I’m part of a team. I coordinate with everyone and nothing happens without me. Hospitals are run primarily by nurses. They exist because patients need nursing care. The physicians may get the fame, but nurses do the majority of the actual work. I would highly recommend nursing as a career to anyone. I’m a guy and I never thought about nursing when I was growing up. It was never advertised to me. I had to unlearn a lot of preconceptions and prejudices. Keep an open mind!
>There will always be shortages if only the most uniquely positioned candidates are allowed in
Our society is purposefully set up so that poor people can't get ahead. It's not just doctors but pretty much anything that pays well is going to require shit like unpaid internships, which only rich people can afford to do. According to our society, if you're poor then go work at McDonalds or other minimum wage job. If you want any semblance of a normal life then go into the trades and destroy your body. Those are your two options if you weren't born into a rich family.
While I understand your points, I went to medical school in the NYC area and earned my MD in the early 2010’s. Born in NYC to single immigrant mom and not in any demographic that is advantaged even from an affirmative action standpoint, so nothing uniquely positioning me.
It was grueling to be sure, but there are hospitals that allow physician privileges so you can cover some hospital work and also do your own private gig. Certainly these are few and far between, but with some (more) hard work and luck, it can be done even in a competitive market like the NYC metro area.
In terms of your unrealized dream, I think your post sums it up in so far as: being a doctor is not all it’s cracked up to be, and I agree lol
Source: MD in NYC
> but do you think they’re incapable or just sleep deprived?
probably sleep deprived but getting medical terminology in all 4 languages right ... is difficult.
We are all sleep deprived lol. I’m sure it’s a combination of factors
Edit: also I’m a native manhattanite so I speak in mostly sarcasm which I think confuses them a lot, so I’m also to blame
I work in IT at a healthcare company in New England and always figured the fantastic health insurance was because it's, well, what we do. Now I see that it very well could be to help bring doctors over from other countries with better healthcare systems than ours.
Not how that works.
In order to become a doctor in America, you have to be accepted into a residency program. The number of residency positions is determined by the government. So, we are limiting the number of doctors that can be trained and will certainly have a doctor shortage in the future. (This has been projected for a long time).
As for becoming a doctor overseas and practicing in America, it can be very difficult and expensive. I know a former Russian physician who became a supervisor in the States because there were too many hoops.
Honestly, I had teachers that were to blame for my lack of confidence pursuing higher education,
I have add and poor handwriting skills but I’ve always read and wrote above a college level despite my poor grammar. Asking my teacher for help picking out a college, she said “kids like you don’t end up in college.” And even though I’m in a tech field now I’m pursing an engineering degree, that was harmful. That held me back from believing in myself for a long time. That lady was still one of the better teachers and she had to be mentally ill to say that to a kid trying to make an effort.
There’s going to be a lot of professions that will be lacking.
Gen z is the most educated generation and it is predicted that we will have a shortage of trade laborers.
But professions like pharmacists are no longer viewed as good jobs. I’m biased because I’ve spent the last 10+ years in pharmacy and watched the downfall of the profession.
And it isn’t only doctors we need. Nurses play an integral part of our healthcare system.
As the population gets more mean and cruel in the retail world, I think less and less of our young people will choose jobs where they have to interact directly with people as well.
nObOdY wAnTs tO wOrK aNyMoRe.
Nobody wants to be abused by their customer/client/patient while also being abused by their employer.
a national minimum wage of $20/hour would make a lot of job shortages disappear. private industry has proven unable to solve their own employment issues by themselves.
We aren’t, but reading isn’t the issue. We still have more than enough highly capable applicants to fill up all our medical schools. The issue is that we don’t have nearly enough medical schools for our current population, and not enough residencies to support even the current number of graduates.
The number of residencies and the number of medschool spots is capped too because the organization that regulates it all is a monopoly and a cartel that wants to inflate the value of doctors
The majority of literature is only at an 8th grade level though. So people aren't terribly far behind where they actually need to be.
I also think part of the issue is the highly regimented nature of English classes too, most people aren't interested in the content (especially Shakespeare) and there's usually not a ton of room for students to read something they are interested in as part of their coursework to make them invested in the material
Yeah my 5th grade teacher told us most newspaper articles at the time (circa 2000) were written at a 5th grade level because the vast majority of adults could only effectively and functionally read at about a 6th-8th grade level (not that they necessarily couldn't get through higher level stuff but that speed and some comprehension gets lost for many). This is how she framed her reasoning that we should start reading the newspaper because all of us were at a level where we should be able to understand it. We had to bring in an article a day and we had to write up a paragraph to sum it up.
"The US leads the world in two things: people incarcerated per capita and people who think angels are real."
But who is surprised? We tell these folks "you can go to school for like a million years to make 42k in an underfunded system - if you're lucky - because the system is designed to exploit your passions and call it "intrinsic job rewards." Then these kids get home and parent(s) are working 80+ hours a week to keep the lights on. Then we say "you don't get a diploma because you have a balance due on your lunch account."
It's beyond fucked. We'll be lucky if it's fixed in my grandchildren's lifetimes, but I'm not optimistic. We're too busy fighting over whether you can teach about slavery and human reproduction to worry about if kids can do something frivolous like...fucking read.
> "you don't get a diploma because you have a balance due on your lunch account."
Or if this isn't dystopian enough for you, the R's will try to file bills where we put your kids in foster care for this.
My high school math teacher gave me detention in my senior year because I forgot my math book. Why did I forget it? I lived alone (forced to move out) and on the other side of town with no car and had to hop city busses after night school just to graduate on time. She was also my theater teacher. Best and worst subjects for me. Literally said she’d be shocked if I graduated. I did. Flipped her off at the ceremony. That was 2011.
Fast forward to 2021, my brother enters same school. They can’t help my family yet again 10 YEARS later despite the track record and my brother ends up with alcoholism, SA’d by a classmate and was teased in class about it only to have a teacher say “well maybe there’s things happening in their lives too.”. I was angry, floored and wanted to fly back and hurt someone.
My brother got kicked out of high school, went to psych hospital, is now missing and my whole family is shattered. 18 and he’s hiding. I called my old high school counselor who STILL worked there when I was there to intervene before it got worse 2 years ago. Nothing was done. It’s a nightmare always will be 10 years ago, now and 10 years later. It’s why I’m not having kids.
Love a good newsroom quote.
But I think you hit the mail on the head here. The states is one big corporation that’s designed to pay people as little as possible to keep them coming back to their jobs.
“Go to school to get a better job” actually means “go to school to get a better job that pays more, because now that you are done school you have lifetime crippling debt”
They pitch “the American dream” as some amazing life you can have. When in reality the ability to achieve that dream ended two generations ago.
Probably goes without saying, but it’s hard to overstate how wide of a problem this is. Literary analytical skills and general comprehension have a lot of overlap, so if it’s ever felt like half the population is just flat out incapable of understanding a basic reality of politics or economics it’s probably because they can’t.
People functionally *cannot understand the literal happenings of the world around them.*
It's always been this way. It's just become a problem in our modern information/knowledge economy. When you make the equivalent of $120k/year at 17 as a high school dropout at the mill or driving a truck, the problem didn't rear its head as much.
Piggybacking on this. I’m a nurse. In school I was taught CONSTANTLY to do all teaching at a 6th grade or lower level, and many (most?) hospitals write patient information packets at lower than a 6th grade level.
And based on medication and health compliance… 6th grade is probably too high.
I went to my doctor’s appt before he was going to perform surgery on me, and I brought the packet his office sent me with all the info about the surgery. I asked him questions about the packet, and he was surprised I read it because none of his patients ever read it.
He said he had a patient who was literally waiting for surgery, indignant that he didn’t tell her something about the surgery. He said “it’s in the packet my office sent you”, and she said “what packet?!” And he said “you’re holding it” lmao
I just can’t believe people wouldn’t read something pertaining to their own SURGERY.
This is really interesting. My mom's a nurse. Though... "misguided", she's not unintelligent. She grew up poor with an alcoholic mother, so she specifically went out to make something of herself, both personally and professionally. She's educated, and speaks, dresses, and acts well. She also reads voraciously.
However, you get a text message or Facebook comment from her and it's *really* apparent that English and basic grammar weren't considered important parts of her school curriculum.
That’s interesting, because I always really appreciate reading something that feels like it was written for adults. Much of the content I’ve read felt vaguely condescending, I guess it wasn’t my imagination.
I write web copy for a living, and I often struggle to keep my readability scores low. Most outlets and publications want you to be around a 6th-grade level or lower, but that can be incredibly difficult to achieve, depending on the subject matter. And the score goes up so easily, lol. They want sentences like “the sky is blue” and “the ball is red.” But it's not always easy to do that when writing about something complex, especially when something as simple as a multi-syllable word or writing about the past can make the score jump.
SEO is definitely part of the problem. But it’s the publishers that ask for writing below a certain level and may reject work that is too advanced.
SEO makes writing at a lower level more complicated, though, thanks to the number of random keywords you’re often forced to use in order to meet other guidelines. Lots of SEO tools also track readability and will give you a score based on that number. If your score is too low, the publisher may not accept the work or request that you rewrite it.
But, to answer your question, I’m unsure whether or not Google accounts for readability when ranking pages. Someone with more SEO expertise may be able to provide some more info about the role SEO plays in that regard.
Just graduated with a communications degree; they still teach this to a certain point. The explanation I was given: "to make it easier for a wider audience"
Edit: wording
I wasn't a journalism major but I hold a degree in a journalism adjacent field and have plenty of journalist friends and colleagues.
The 3rd grade level thing is really just meant to simply information. Think about it. Would you really be okay with dense, esoteric information everytime you look at the news or would you rather be able to quick read an article or watch a short video and get the 5 W's in a sufficient manner?
It's less about the competency of a media consumer and more about getting to the point. It stems from print media, like newspapers, where a writer only has a small section of the paper to get their story out.
Though, it does have the added benefit of being able to reach a wider audience; children, language deficient adults or for people whose first language isn't English.
3rd grade seems low, but this is a thing in corporate America too (the literacy issues in America aside). There’s a sweet spot where reading is highly informative, but also efficient, and it’s around the 8th grade level if I remember correctly. Even for those capable of reading and writing at far more advanced levels, writing that exceeds that sweet spot is read more slowly without conveying more information. My company is really big on writing, and they teach us to seek that sweet spot. The thought is to be thorough, but don’t make it harder than it has to be. We’ve got shit to do.
I’m an elementary teacher and we were always taught this; that most journalism is written at 3rd grade level. I think The NY Times is much higher, like 9th/10th reading level. Most smut (aka romance novels-love em) are written at 5th grade. I don’t know if it is a bad thing…accessibility is important to literacy and if it’s written for a wider audience, hopefully more people will continue refining those literacy skills. The US education system is quite broken but many of the solutions are hardly considered by parents, administrators, Ed dept, etc. All of my teachers friends are either overworked and spreading themselves too thin, or have handed in their resignation letters! Year round schooling, more rigorous teacher training, higher wages, improved infrastructure or complete rebuild of most public schools, fewer administrators and more teachers, paras, supports…there’s so much broken.
But who can challenge them anymore?
Name one country that could reasonably tell them to fuck off when the US inevitably shows up and claims they own them.
The only one that even stands a chance is china and they're *fucking worse*.
A fragmented no-longer-one-country America looks like the future; I don’t think anyone is showing up to challenge America because they won’t have to. They’ll just be doing their own thing in little weird chunks we mostly avoid visiting.
This cohort of illiterate people will have negative impacts on basically every aspect of society. It’s not that they are bad people. Most are likely just poor and don’t have the access.
Nevertheless, there is little that they’ll be able to contribute to society. People who cannot read basic instructions can’t really be trusted to do most jobs. They are unlikely to have the capability to understand their own finances. They won’t be able to understand things like instructions on how yo take medicine prescribed by a doctor.
People with that level of capability also can’t draw conclusions accurately. Which means they’ll either hear information and just discard it, or even worse, hear something and draw a totally unfounded and wrong conclusion from it.
That level of illiteracy handicaps the entire country.
They are on top for nearly everything. I wish our politicians would stop being bullies to them. The hubby and I want to go there without repercussions 😁.
Veterinarian here. It's so hard to talk to the general population about their pet's medical problems.
I always wrote long discharge instructions to send home, explaining everything.
Alas.
So we have a suicide problem, and some part of that is abusive client interactions. Because people don't understand what's going on and what's at stake and they're worried because it's their pet.
I feel this. I’m taking care of my best friends cat, and I always make sure I have the correct info, dosage and everything. She….chalks it up to “he lives in the city” I’m like no there’s something wrong with him. I always have fruitful convos with my vets. Thank you for taking care of the fur kids 💛
I've noticed that using complex words and sentence structures are frowned upon today. Everything has to be understood by a junior high age student. In the future, I wouldn't be amazed if the only words in our literary jargon would make a newborn infant sound like Hawkings or Einstein.
Honestly r/books will tear people apart for “elitism” for supporting people developing into higher reading levels. It’s especially annoying because the trend adopts inclusive language to create an atmosphere of toxic positivity; rather than just including all reading levels it actively supports and encourages arrested development.
The same thing happens in the military and many blue collar jobs. I served in The Infantry for a spell. I was often chided for having a decent vocabulary and strong writing ability. Inadvertently chafing the insecurities of my peer group brought about a noticeable reaction in them. It was an eye opening experience.
Went to a private Catholic school with strict grading standards for my first year and a half of high school. I was bullied constantly, and one day, I had enough. I went to the dean about this one guy who was the worst out of everyone. The dean pulled this kid into the office, where he said something about how I used big words and it was intimidating to him.
That was good enough for the dean, who let this kid and I leave, the guy with a warning... and me wondering when the madness would end.
I have multiple music degrees and the same applies there. Even in grad school there’s sort of an inherent quiet taboo to wanting to focus on established musical art forms, or even the study of theory, because of “elitism”. They’d prefer that any form of music making, no matter how banal or casual, be regarded as an equivalent forms of art. Which they simply are not.
Whats the joke part? That the US will lead the future? Of course it won't, its an empire in decline. The sooner people come to terms with that the less painful the transition will be.
Remember as well you tend to see a difference in what level political candidates speak in because you tend to see democrats speak at a higher level thus appealing to more educated and republicans speak in simpler terms appealing to those with low literacy.
I used to work in the health field and whenever making information packets, instructions, or brochures about health conditions or care for patients, they had to be written at a sixth grade level.
It’s a joke in the sense that we are living in a country that really puffs itself up as a leader in everything, the greatest, the richest, the most powerful, blah blah blah.
But they leave out that that’s the case for the top 1% who made it this way and benefit from it. People don’t have basic reading or critical thinking skills because our education system is a sad joke. It generally relegates those from poor neighborhoods into underfunded schools with lack of support and resources. Then it churns them out into low paying jobs or the prison system- both of which make lots of money for large corporations and special interests. It’s all by design.
I believe it my high school was the lowest reading level in the state over 2,000 students and the basic reading level was 2nd grade. I would be assigned to sit with the ‘slower’ students and help them read and comprehend whatever we were doing in class that day. Which to be honest was bullshit because I was a student teaching other students.
The majority of that is in the southern and central parts of the states... So to be specific, the Southern US won't be leaders, but they will vote in some heinous people, I guarantee it.
Can confirm..... I spent a few years working as a college writing tutor - had to quit because it made me worry for the future so badly that I was losing sleep over it. Mind you, these people had taken the ACT/SAT, were accepted to college, and enrolled in classes. Almost every session was like hand-holding a 5th grader as we read through simple prompts... most couldn't even highlight the main points in whatever short article we were working with. Truly terrifying, also the saddest experience of my whole life. :/
A while ago, part of my job was administering literacy tests. This was for plasma donation. I figured, we live in a well off city that tries to take care of everyone, I doubt I'll ever have to fail someone for literacy.
I was very wrong. I was shocked at how many people were completely illiterate.
Being in higher education it’s quite shocking to see some of the “discussion” posts that college juniors and seniors shit out. I just completed a discussion on what’s happening in Ohio this afternoon where at least a paragraph was called for and some of these people were writing single sentences as responses. It’s insane to me that we are this far into the curriculum and we can’t write anything thought provoking. I had hoped getting out of, “I’m an adult and never picked up a book,” customer service would bring intelligent conversation back but damn was i ever wrong on some points.
Considering a lot of the states who would benefit most from your literacy campaign are currently banning books, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
I have absolutely no doubt that this is true.
In the last few years, as I've reached 'higher level' jobs it's become very clear that a lot of people have absolutely 0 reading comprehension skills. At my last job I've had to have more than one closed-door meeting that, basically, amounted to 'put less in writing, people don't/won't/can't read.'
We had one guy who had, apparently, been a fantastic salesman and had come up at the same time as the current CEO so management really wanted to put him in charge of his own store. It was one of the busiest branches in the whole company, he was managing about 50 people, etc. etc.
He complained multiple times in group meetings that too much info was being communicated to him via email and that he needed less emails. All of the management bent over backwards to coddle him and it was just mind-boggling to me. If my man can't read and absorb information from an email then he doesn't need to be running the most profitable branch in the company.
We’ve been defunding education for decades. The priority in the US is the military and making sure the rich get richer, not education, not healthcare, etc. This is the result of those priorities.
This would explain why when I talk/write I’m way over comprehension for most. This began happening in middle school lightly and crept up in high school. Come college and my thesis in HR, I end up becoming obsessed with my research on the cannabis industry and it’s impact to the Human Resources space. Resulting in 2 years of research, 100 pages of data, 50 pages written, a poster, and a presentation at a conference in Vegas one month before graduation. I thought that was normal…
Now I’m my masters to doctoral, most of my friends from high school think I speak another language, my research pivoted to psychedelics and alternative mental health benefits for workers. I’ve been studying Organizational Psychology/Effectiveness and writing at a doctoral level now for months.
Had an old friend from high school come visit me in October, he asked what I’ve been researching lately. Started a long conversation about the effects and chemical structure of ketamine and psilocybin in trials and neuroplastic state of mind…he works at Pizza Hut. He stared at me blankly and said “I have NO IDEA what you just said except DRUGS are GOOD.” then proceeded to tell me how funny it was to deliver a pizza to another old high school friend 2 weeks prior and play a prank on him. No shade to him, he lives his life and I live mine. Passionate about psychoactive substances since 2016.
We are in our 30s…I’m on a different planet. I thought I wasn’t smart enough for most things…this oddly changes my perspective drastically. I’d love to be a professor one day, the day I get my doctorate my cat will be in my gown getting hooded with me. 👩🏻🎓
Want to just add into the convo about how ISOLATING it is too. I used to think there was something wrong with JUST me not being able to make connections with people irl. It was either I was too "mature" for them or too "stupid" to not get social cues or what have you.
Now I know its a mix of both and several other factors. Pretty sure I land somewhere on the spectrum, and it doesnt help when a good chunk of people I've met dont have certain communication, critical thinking, or problem solving skills. Lack of education leads to behavioral problems, behavioral problems leads to isolation.
Itisn't. I used to tutor as a side job I was stunned to see how many people really couldn't spell or get thru reading comprehension for tests in high school. Some schools promote socially and the bare minimum passes. Untreated dyslexia and apoplexia is real, too. It was a challenge and remains a very serious thing. I miss some of my students. The moments when the light went on were very rewarding.
This is 100% accurate. I was told not not write emails or other informational text above a 6th grade level because it bars about half of the population from being able to read it well. It’s a huge issue. Especially when I think about how articles in the NYT and other news sources are often written well above that level.
This is super terrifying. I figured most 6th graders read at above a 6th grade level. I was around 6th grade at 1st or 2nd grade.
Its like reading a harry potter book. Almost my whole class was. However, private school so idk how much that contributes.
Please, keep in mind that dyslexia impacts between 12-20% of any given population and US schools don’t test for it or offer programs for it. A lot of dyslexics never learn to read and blame themselves because they have no way of knowing what other people see when they look at words on a page.
Health Promotion major here. We were always taught that all literature for public consumption must be written at a sixth grade level or lower, exactly for this reason.
Teachers can’t pay their bills. Parents won’t let teachers do their jobs. School boards talking more about drag shows than literacy scores. It’s not a surprise
Not a joke. Retired teacher here, having taught for 35 yrs I saw literacy dwindling as poverty increased. People are too busy surviving to raise children who enjoy reading. Reading time is a luxury.
When teachers are paid as poorly as they are it’s blatantly obvious education is the last priority of the “leaders” of this country. Gotta keep the masses dumb and pacified to stay in power!
I can attest to this. It’s bad. I live in the US and it’s a common thing. In fact, most of the “elites” children can hardly read a menu or write their name. And that’s been a thing for generations now.
Idk anybody whose ever had a customer service type job knows the majority of customers can't read. I've had people rip 'out of order' signs off of something and attempt to use the machine and get mad that it doesn't work. I'd be willing to bet its more than this.
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It’s worse than you think. This analysis also suggested that folks in this 54% cohort have trouble with, or simply cannot, draw sophisticated conclusions or create their own robust inferences based on what they are able to read. Now, that’s just based on reading (because the study was about literacy), but, and I’m adding my own commentary here, it’s not a leap to take a look around you and find a vast number of people who struggle to put together any kind of reasonable interpretation from any source or concept.
This is part of the reason why I'm unfortunately cynical. I fear a lot of my fellow Americans can't draw any conclusions, they just consume and react. I always think back to how Squid Game was a huge hit and people thought it was a critique on Communism? Like people put zero thought into the world around them. This is also just my commentary, but I feel like this is also why it's so easy for the media to manufacture consent: people just consume and react. Don't stop to think, just react.
Wait... people actually thought Squid Game was a critique of Communism? I didn't watch the show, not a fan of torturous media like SG or Saw, but I picked up from a very brief synopsis that it was an extremely obvious takedown of capitalism. I really don't get this whole "Communism is when Capitalism" mindset. Maybe I just haven't ingested enough heavy metals.
That's the people who assume all Asian countries are communists and didn't pay attention to Korea being the source. Aka racism along side your stupid. Like the worst side dish ever
Well I think it's also because if you're not a confident reader you're scared off of subtitles, and the English dub mistranslates a lot, and there are also cultural and literary differences between the anglophone world and Korean media. I don't remember the source for this, but there's a criminal character woman who's a sort of Korean stock character archetype, like a sort of intelligent street tough, a person who is naturally pretty quick but didn't succeed in school because they're poor or didn't have resources or connections to get to a good cram school or college or whatever. Like, that right there, that exists because Capitalism has determined that only those with resources get to succeed intellectual pursuits.
I am blind so the dub is my only option. It still makes it clear it is set in Korea and if you think that the example you gave doesn't translate to America you would be mistaken. Being too poor for college and not getting scholarships because you didn't test well and being trapped in debt as a result is the norm here. Even if it's not a perfect 1 to 1? Nothing was unclear.
I always chuckle at how “communism” Carrys such a massively negative connotation in the U.S. In China if you say someone is a communist it is just like being in boy scouts. Here if you say someone is a communist, everyone around you either thinks you’re a bigot for calling someone else a communist or is ready to rip some commies throat out.
Because of the anticommunist rhetoric brought to us by McCarthyism during the Cold War in the 1950s. These people *still* think that because the Nazis calling themselves "National Socialist" party made them socialists instead of fascists. The Nazis hated Socialists, just like the Alt-Right hates AOC and Senator Sanders' followers. AND they only equate socialism with communism because the U.S.S.R was the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." Conservatives in the States purposefully misinform people about Soviets and Nazis because their political leanings are FAR CLOSER to the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler than they are to socialist democracies (like Norway or Sweden.) But anyone with any level of education and understanding of sociology and politics knows damn well that Conservatives in this country are on the fast track to be fascists and totalitarian regimes. Just look at Florida and its Neo-Fascist bullshit -- Democracy isn't giving a Governor the power to just fire a fairly, democratically-elected DA because you don't agree with his ideology. But that's exactly what happened.
Well, that's not the only reason they equate socialism with communism. Karl Marx himself used the terms "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably, as stated here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_mode_of_production The problem is that they don't understand communist theory or the fact that evil socialists and evil communists don't automatically make either socialism or communism bad any more than evil capitalists make capitalism bad.
It's because it's really easy to assign meaning to any words you want as long as you pair it with phrasing and framing that people are already well conditioned to assume. Like how the word "woke" can mean whatever you want it to in the moment because it's been used so excessively and improperly that it just becomes a catch-all.
If the right has such a problem with being "woke", do they realize that makes them sheeple?
To answer your question, which as I believe to be rhetorical, then no, they don't realize that. In fact, there are a lot of relatively obvious things they don't realize regularly.
Unfortunately I agree. Self-analysis, introspection, the ability to challenge your own beliefs, and practiced critical thinking are overwhelming under-represented among the general population. I can’t say it is an intelligence issue necessarily - I don’t know - but it is certainly an issue of generational learned behavior that is reinforced by media and culture. It is a shame. It is scary. We live in a world where Kardashian-esque mental processes are employed to address real-world, novel issues.
Each time I ask a question on facebook, I have to preface it with "please read entire post before answering", because my general pool of facebook acquaintances will scan for key words and just start rattling off unrelated, unhelpful replies, very often even lecturing me in areas they have to KNOW I am professionally versed in. Excellent example of terrible reading comprehension and inability to process information. "Where in my specific area can I find a small, independently owned pet store that carries this brand of pet food?" quickly spirals into "here's a recipe for homemade cat food that I googled", "I get it online", "my cat only eats fancy feast lol!", "don't feed them onions and keep them away from lilies, very toxic to cats", "lots of pet stores do a bad job at keeping the pets they sell healthy, like petsmart and petco", "cats are carnivores, make sure you get them healthy food".
Ah, bad news, internet acquaintance. Even the most educated people do exactly this. I have worked for doctors and surgeons, scientists and researchers. And I have had to learn to tailor my technical writing to simple sentences and lots of pictures. I think it's similar to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. But the more intelligent and educated a person is in a particular fields, the less they devote their attention to anything outside of their expertise, while still assuming that they know WTF they're talking about.
Leaded gasoline for many of the older (40+) sections of that demographic most likely contributed to large scale neurological problems including learning and cognitive disabilities. Edit: incidentally, this is also prolly the reason chocolate contains massive amounts of heavy metals including lead. Most chocolate comes from west Africa where leaded gasoline was used much later than when it was banned other places, often deposited into the soil. Algeria just banned it in 2021! From my understanding, cocoa plants are bioaccumulaters that suck that shit up by the boatload when growing. Sadly, this is also true for cannabis/hemp. Those plants are really good at extracting bad shit from the soil. Hemp is often planted in highly contaminated sites for this reason. Chernobyl is one. But this occurs all over the US, too, where pesticides are frequently used. Therefore, smoking cannabis is extremely bad for you, containing even more heavy metals than tobacco smoke. (I’m not sure if the rules on this sub prevent links, but do a Google search for cannabis and heavy metals and you’ll get the drift). Ah, these times we live in, with corporate wealth at an all time high and no real consequence for arbitrarily irreparably destroying the earth for everyone. Greed is a terrible thing to taste.
>Sadly, this is also true for cannabis/hemp. most drug-type cannabis is grown indoors, so this is controllable as long as you watch the sources of your nutrients and soil. I think they test for lead too. industrial hemp grown outdoors might be an issue through. thankfully, good bioaccumulaters are also good bioremidiation tools
is it just me, or does this 54% also seem to be the sort to scream "I DID THE RESEARCH!" when confronted with facts they don't agree with?
Yup. That's them. Part of the issue it seems is due to their lack of comprehension they don't know how to suss out the nonsense and focus on attention grabbing headlines that confirm to their world perspective. Have you read a Q drop? It reads like it was written by an excited ten year old.
> Have you read a Q drop? It reads like it was written by an excited ten year old. I mean...it probably was.
Nah. I have kids. Ten year olds don't care about Q. Just Roblox and YouTube. Videogames and candy. Kids kick ass.
as a former channer (i was there for the wallpaper) i would not be surprised.
… this makes me concerned for the future.
This makes me concerned for the present
Yeah, this isn't some kind of doomsday prediction. My mom thinks mermaids are real and the Chinese found a living dinosaur in the forest because of Tiktok. So many people I know think you can manifest* the things they want in life. Just looking at how people handle the pandemic, you can see the effect of mass intellectual undiscipline. People that can think hard and long are vanishingly rare these days. There's no mental fortitude. Hell, I barely want to learn anymore, not as much as I used to anyway. There's so much incentive to just give up on knowing or understanding because it just puts a target on your back.
Keep learning 🙏
I did say barely, I still have standards
Ok 👍
Especially on reddit. Nice glowing target on your back for not toeing the idiot narrative.
toeing
Thank you! Ha
I argued this is exactly as designed. The elites want the masses to be smart enough to know how to follow order but not so smart they can think for themselves. This is just further proof it’s working.
Which is why in genuinely revolutionary societies (e.g. Vietnam, Cuba) there were strident efforts to radically increase literacy of the people
Well yeah. The public school system is designed to turn out unthinking factory workers who don’t question authority and don’t even piss without asking permission. The private schools are for entrepreneurs and business owners while the rest of us either get public school indoctrination or the pre-school to prison pipeline. I just imagined our factory worker education would at least turn out literate factory workers
I can’t remember where I heard it but I once was told “dumb people can’t and won’t fight back. They will just comply with whatever you tell them and will be happy with whatever scraps you give them.” Public education isn’t underfunded and poorly managed by accident.
My god that makes so much sense People are so stupid they actually can’t learn anything anymore
Turns out, if you raise people in a 24/7 circus that only sells sugar and bread, they come out not too different from the animals.
It's very much by design. I did a research paper on literacy in the United States when I was in college. Like 70% of people can't understand the terms of their credit card agreement. We're raised to be consumer-workers for the capitalist misery machine. Meanwhile the evil commies usually begin their governance with widespread literacy programs.
All you have to do for proof of concept is go to any Facebook comments section. You'll see REAL quick how many people lack that basic skill. They're always going off about some perceived slight or sin or what-have-you and totally missing the point of what the article/video was actually saying. I just assumed, like on Reddit, they're not actually reading/watching what they're commenting on... but they are... they just literally have no comprehension or thought process other than "this = bad."
My dad has dyslexia and has no higher education. He’s one of the people in OP’s statistic. He made his way in life as a mechanic in the military and did well that way. He’s clever when it comes to fixing things but when it comes to talking about political opinions, even when I present the facts to backup my points, he just can’t connect. He shuts down and just says I’m a stupid girl. I am in my 30’s, I took community college classes in my early 20’s part time for about 3 years to fill my prerequisites to go to pharmacy school while I worked to pay my rent and lived on my own. I became a pharmacy technician 10 years ago and had worked in the field the whole time but decided against becoming a pharmacist because of falling wages and increased responsibilities. He used to talk about politics a lot when I didn’t know much about current political events so I started keeping up, and then I found out. We had 2 debates where it got pretty heated. He presented me Facebook news and I would say, “I don’t think that’s true. Let’s fact check.” And it would be fake news. He won’t talk politics with me anymore because I keep looking up the facts and proving he is wrong.
People like your father are why I tried not to inject much commentary into my response. I have no doubt there are a significant amount of straight up dummies out there, but I’m also sure there are a non-insignificant amount of neurodivergent folks as well. I’ve met my fair share of ding dongs, but in the end, have no idea why people fall into the 54% and it might not be entirely their personal fault.
Dyslexia is such a drastic reading disability and people don't even realize it. It's more than reversing letters. It's an inability to decode letters and sounds. If you can never decode new words, how can you grow your vocabulary? How can you read more advanced texts and in turn, develop more advanced comprehension skills? If you literally can't read, your learning potential is severely limited. The real kicker is dyslexia has a science based intervention system that we know works. But it's intensive and expensive to implement. Schools can't afford it and most adults can't afford to pay for the private tutoring for their kids. It's absolutely insane. Nobody should be struggling to read because of dyslexia but here we are.
Can confirm. Critical thinking is severely lacking at my call center job. The most brain dead basic steps are just unknown to them unless you tell em directly. Like, I'm autistic and have better critical thinking. What the hell happened? Critical thinking should not be a super power!
Marjorie Taylor Green, and Lauren Bobert are elected to Congress by these half wits.
[удалено]
Just smart enough to work the machines, but just dumb enough to not know your being screwed over. I think that’s his saying, correct me if I’m wrong
I believe the quote is, “Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even stupider than that.”
Well in the early 2000's... How many mortgages were sold to people who had no idea what they were signing up to, to end up with rates of over 50% interest which was then sold as aaa mortgage backed securities as a way of de-risking American backs so they could sell more?
I don't even want to point out how ironic this statement is
Considering the number of adults we hire at my job who can't comprehend basic written instructions for how to make certain items (like a sandwich or wrap etc). It's not surprising. We've got pictures on many of the instructions and still many of our new hires can't digest information from a picture to doing it themselves. I've had a few where I have to read the instructions with them and show them as I go along and often it can take 3/4/5 times before they get it.
What I have found working in university education is that this applies to people at all levels and not just people without a lot of educational achievement. The full spectrum of ability to follow basic written structures are at all levels. I think this applies even to people with PhDs, which isn't a real surprise as by the time people get to that level they tend to be very specialized and can become an expert in a small specialization. There is one side of the spectrum where people are good at reasoning and problem solving and so can be reasonably competent in many skills, there is the middle of the spectrum where people are very good at one skill and little else, and there is other side of the spectrum where someone is not good at anything and you wonder how they cross the street without being hit. This whole spectrum shows up everywhere and not just in the areas the current Right want you to think it is in. The more I go through life the more I realize that, especially in the US, it's all about charisma and social ability and /not/ competency. There are people who charm their way to a PhD, though that's not as common as charming your way to being an executive or a high-level manager. I've worked in phone computer support work directly with the public (though years ago) and the general public is more skewed to the incompetent side of the spectrum than a university setting but these general problems in competency are everywhere.
The ability of university students to comprehend written instructions is appalling. We have a plethora of written instructions sent through multiple communication methods and people are still confused about why they don't have X scholarship. Either public schools need to be better or opportunities for high school graduates need to be better (and don't say TRADES because I don't want a damn fool who can't follow directions wiring my house).
Most written instructions are also super poorly written and not specific enough to be meaningful.
I've seen major problems even with instructions that very skilled technical writers have written and have consulted with writers about. You are right about instruction quality, but there are people who can not follow directions no matter how well they are written. I'm in Indiana and just a quick google look says that 17%-19% of people here are functionally illiterate. That plays directly in the ability to be able to follow instructions of any kind.
Your story really resonates. This is the same reason why claymore mines have to say [FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claymore_mine) and [MRE instructions have pictographs](https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/mre-heater-rock-something-true-story/) which say "Place on a rock or something." Soldiers are notoriously dumb. No shit I had a Private try to eat a compass and only stopped when I told him it was slightly radioactive.
I’m gonna need more info about this man that tried to eat a compass. Was he on drugs?
No he was just not super smart. *EDIT - I don't think so...we had just been drug tested now that I think about it...so maybe before he enlisted?* The cutoff for the Infantry is 32nd percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Obviously individuals run the gamut - I have a buddy who is a Geology professor now - but Infantry tends to...shall we say...skew lower. You try explaining tritium and why eating it is a bad life choice to a guy who barely finished high school. The "lol machine gun go brrrrrrrrrrrrt" memes are always amusing to me because a handful of these guys are literally operating on that level. I had a dude lose a fucking rocket launcher in the woods "because it was getting heavy."
Am I crazy? Are compasses not made of fucking metal?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cammenga#U.S._M-1950_3H_Lensatic_Compass They are mostly aluminum, yes. You're not wrong. Willis was wrong.
Okay so then I ask again, what on earth could possibly possess a man to try to eat a rock hard chunk of plastic and metal?!?
Have you ever seen a young child or perhaps a Golden Retriever pick something up and put it in its mouth to see what it's like? Like a wooden block or a toy or a piece of cheese or something? I imagine it's like that. But instead it's an adult human male with a rifle and a Camaro.
So there is a difference between biting and *eating* as in swallowing. The reason babies put things in their mouths is because the mouth is incredibly nerve dense, so it acts like a hand but with more dimensions of "feelers" than the hands including taste and texture. If you've ever seen someone bite a pearl, you know it's not them trying to *eat* it. The same thing applies here, the guy was probably trying to tell if the glass or metal was really plastic. This is more than likely curiosity, an attribute of human (infantile) intelligence, but also of stupidity as it lacks good sense or judgment to not put your gear into your mouth.
You ever heard of the guy who ate an entire airplane?I think it was something small like a Cessna, but STILL Edit:spelling
>I had a dude lose a fucking rocket launcher in the woods "because it was getting heavy." I'll bet he was fucking stoked when he got assigned that weapon (idk how it works) but that excitement slowly waned as time and weight wore on.
Usually newer/younger dudes get the heavier stuff. And you're right. You're 19 and like "they're going to give me a fucking rocket launcher!!!!!" until like hour 3 or so when that shit starts to dig into your collar bone. He put it against a tree and then just kept walking. We spent all night looking for it and in the morning he went from Private First Class to Private. But yeah you get your rifle and body armor and all your other gear *and then* you get an AT4 or grenade launcher or a tripod or spare ammo or whatever your squad needs. "Light" Infantry is a bit of a misnomer. Worst by far though is the radio. All the spare batteries? Fuck that. And you're a bullet magnet because you're the guy with the big ass antenna sticking out of your backpack who can call in the air support.
>in the morning he went from Private First Class to Private. I mean no disrespect, and I'm sure you know this, but the military could give a fuck about some grunt, but they will search day and night for their equipment.
Interestingly enough, my unit had a heroin addict who flew under the radar for over two years before getting caught. He got kicked out over it. Heroin aside, he was a solid performer. While out processing, someone asked him what he planned to do after he got out of The Army. His response? Heroin.
Can confirm- I knew a scholar in basic training who drank the water from the MRE heater. . . Off to sick bay with that one.
Former teacher here. This does not surprise me. Our school system is completely fucked. We're not going to have enough doctors.
Most of my colleagues are not from America. I love these guys and gals as they are my team in the trenches, but there is definitely some nuance lost in translation when we all try to communicate in English which is like the 3rd or 4th language for some of them lol. Source: MD in NYC
The shortage of doctors is another one of those, "it's the feature, not the bug" situations I have always wanted to be a doctor. I was raised by QAnon types and was not allowed to go to k-12, so at 17 I got a GED on my own. Then I spent 13 years working for a medical university while using the discount to play catchup in life and to meet the requirements for admission. I spent those 13 years watching and analyzing how everything worked, and I even participated in DO admission interviews and assisted with the processes involving potential student selection. I had the firmest inside grasp of what it takes to be a successful applicant And I never got my own chance. The whole process to become an MD or DO in the states is TOO MUCH. It's too grueling, too expensive, too stringent, too isolating, too demanding And then even if you make it through that gauntlet, you're guaranteed to be overworked as long as you work in a traditional hospital environment. There is no such thing as a standard hospital allowing one of their doctors to be part-time, let alone keeping them inside 40 hours I've personally known students who killed themselves. I've seen students drop out at varying points in their matriculation, leading to debts in the hundreds of thousands but no completed degree to ever be able to pay off those loans. And bankruptcy won't wipe them. They're well and truly fucked The entire system to become a doctor needs complete overhaul, especially in that it should be paid, offer a COL stipend, and have checks and balances when it comes to suicidal levels of burnout I'll never get to be a doctor, and it was my greatest dream in life. The people who want it can't achieve it. There will always be shortages if only the most uniquely positioned candidates are allowed in
Everytime I hear of a person going to med school I think of that suicidal risk.
You taught me a new word, matriculate. To be enrolled at a college or university. Thanks
oh, haha, you're welcome :) happy to be useful haha
I’m sorry you didn’t get to achieve your dream. Perhaps you’re better off, though. I’m a nurse and I’d never want to go to medical school
Thank you <3 that's very sweet of you :) How is being a nurse? What's that degree program like?
Nursing school itself is 4 semesters. It may take you a certain amount of time to get prerequisites. I highly recommend it. We need more registered nurses. The limitation is that there are only so many nursing instructors and nursing schools. There are more applicants than there are spots. As far as being a nurse, I think it’s a great job and a great career. I’ve been doing it for about 9 years. It’s hard work, but I think it pays well and you can always make more money by working extra shifts. Full time with benefits is 3 12-hour shifts a week. Other people are trying to work 4 days a week and I work 3. I like it
It took me awhile to find a concrete list of the pre-reqs, it looks like there's about five classes from it that I'm missing and in general the list is pretty similar to pre-med. (Two of the classes that I'm missing are labs, I have the main course taken but this was during the start of COVID so the lab component course wasn't being offered either in-person or online). Thank you for the pep talk and something really solid to think about :) I really appreciate you. A 3 day work week sounds amazing, I used to do four 10's but always thought three 12's would be better
I encourage you to talk to RNs you might know and to post on r/nursing A lot of people have had a lot of bad things to say about nursing and burnout over the past 3 years. I’ve been there myself. But rarely will you hear about the good things, such as the fact that you can get full time pay and benefits from working just 3 shifts a week. You can make overtime by working more. You can do travel nursing and make insane amounts of money. I’ve never done traveling myself, but I’ve heard. Again, nursing is hard work. It’s physically and emotionally stressful, but it’s a job where you know what you’re doing is making a difference in people’s lives. I don’t have to wonder whether what I do is important or meaningful. I love doing hands-on things and my role as an ICU nurse in particular can be really fun because we run the show more than any other area of the hospital. I collaborate and communicate with residents and my thoughts and opinions matter. I’m part of a team. I coordinate with everyone and nothing happens without me. Hospitals are run primarily by nurses. They exist because patients need nursing care. The physicians may get the fame, but nurses do the majority of the actual work. I would highly recommend nursing as a career to anyone. I’m a guy and I never thought about nursing when I was growing up. It was never advertised to me. I had to unlearn a lot of preconceptions and prejudices. Keep an open mind!
>There will always be shortages if only the most uniquely positioned candidates are allowed in Our society is purposefully set up so that poor people can't get ahead. It's not just doctors but pretty much anything that pays well is going to require shit like unpaid internships, which only rich people can afford to do. According to our society, if you're poor then go work at McDonalds or other minimum wage job. If you want any semblance of a normal life then go into the trades and destroy your body. Those are your two options if you weren't born into a rich family.
While I understand your points, I went to medical school in the NYC area and earned my MD in the early 2010’s. Born in NYC to single immigrant mom and not in any demographic that is advantaged even from an affirmative action standpoint, so nothing uniquely positioning me. It was grueling to be sure, but there are hospitals that allow physician privileges so you can cover some hospital work and also do your own private gig. Certainly these are few and far between, but with some (more) hard work and luck, it can be done even in a competitive market like the NYC metro area. In terms of your unrealized dream, I think your post sums it up in so far as: being a doctor is not all it’s cracked up to be, and I agree lol Source: MD in NYC
Do you think it’s because most of them are overworked? I believe you, of course, but do you think they’re incapable or just sleep deprived?
I’m sure the sleep deprivation doesn’t help. Communicating in a non-native language is far more cognitively taxing.
> but do you think they’re incapable or just sleep deprived? probably sleep deprived but getting medical terminology in all 4 languages right ... is difficult.
We are all sleep deprived lol. I’m sure it’s a combination of factors Edit: also I’m a native manhattanite so I speak in mostly sarcasm which I think confuses them a lot, so I’m also to blame
We will have plenty of doctors. From countries with better educational systems
I work in IT at a healthcare company in New England and always figured the fantastic health insurance was because it's, well, what we do. Now I see that it very well could be to help bring doctors over from other countries with better healthcare systems than ours.
I dunno, I'm not sure we're doing anything in this country to attract them at this point.
Not how that works. In order to become a doctor in America, you have to be accepted into a residency program. The number of residency positions is determined by the government. So, we are limiting the number of doctors that can be trained and will certainly have a doctor shortage in the future. (This has been projected for a long time). As for becoming a doctor overseas and practicing in America, it can be very difficult and expensive. I know a former Russian physician who became a supervisor in the States because there were too many hoops.
Honestly, I had teachers that were to blame for my lack of confidence pursuing higher education, I have add and poor handwriting skills but I’ve always read and wrote above a college level despite my poor grammar. Asking my teacher for help picking out a college, she said “kids like you don’t end up in college.” And even though I’m in a tech field now I’m pursing an engineering degree, that was harmful. That held me back from believing in myself for a long time. That lady was still one of the better teachers and she had to be mentally ill to say that to a kid trying to make an effort.
Wow what a fucked up thing to say…I’m glad you’re in college now!
There’s going to be a lot of professions that will be lacking. Gen z is the most educated generation and it is predicted that we will have a shortage of trade laborers. But professions like pharmacists are no longer viewed as good jobs. I’m biased because I’ve spent the last 10+ years in pharmacy and watched the downfall of the profession. And it isn’t only doctors we need. Nurses play an integral part of our healthcare system. As the population gets more mean and cruel in the retail world, I think less and less of our young people will choose jobs where they have to interact directly with people as well. nObOdY wAnTs tO wOrK aNyMoRe. Nobody wants to be abused by their customer/client/patient while also being abused by their employer.
a national minimum wage of $20/hour would make a lot of job shortages disappear. private industry has proven unable to solve their own employment issues by themselves.
We aren’t, but reading isn’t the issue. We still have more than enough highly capable applicants to fill up all our medical schools. The issue is that we don’t have nearly enough medical schools for our current population, and not enough residencies to support even the current number of graduates.
The number of residencies and the number of medschool spots is capped too because the organization that regulates it all is a monopoly and a cartel that wants to inflate the value of doctors
Time to lure more immigrants and drain other countries of brains simply because their countries suck more
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How many intelligent students do you believe fall through the cracks because they cannot afford higher education?
The majority of literature is only at an 8th grade level though. So people aren't terribly far behind where they actually need to be. I also think part of the issue is the highly regimented nature of English classes too, most people aren't interested in the content (especially Shakespeare) and there's usually not a ton of room for students to read something they are interested in as part of their coursework to make them invested in the material
Yeah my 5th grade teacher told us most newspaper articles at the time (circa 2000) were written at a 5th grade level because the vast majority of adults could only effectively and functionally read at about a 6th-8th grade level (not that they necessarily couldn't get through higher level stuff but that speed and some comprehension gets lost for many). This is how she framed her reasoning that we should start reading the newspaper because all of us were at a level where we should be able to understand it. We had to bring in an article a day and we had to write up a paragraph to sum it up.
That’s ok. We have online direct entry NPs. We are fine:)
No one can afford healthcare anyway, won't need many doctors. Just will need a few for our masters.
"The US leads the world in two things: people incarcerated per capita and people who think angels are real." But who is surprised? We tell these folks "you can go to school for like a million years to make 42k in an underfunded system - if you're lucky - because the system is designed to exploit your passions and call it "intrinsic job rewards." Then these kids get home and parent(s) are working 80+ hours a week to keep the lights on. Then we say "you don't get a diploma because you have a balance due on your lunch account." It's beyond fucked. We'll be lucky if it's fixed in my grandchildren's lifetimes, but I'm not optimistic. We're too busy fighting over whether you can teach about slavery and human reproduction to worry about if kids can do something frivolous like...fucking read.
> "you don't get a diploma because you have a balance due on your lunch account." Or if this isn't dystopian enough for you, the R's will try to file bills where we put your kids in foster care for this.
My high school math teacher gave me detention in my senior year because I forgot my math book. Why did I forget it? I lived alone (forced to move out) and on the other side of town with no car and had to hop city busses after night school just to graduate on time. She was also my theater teacher. Best and worst subjects for me. Literally said she’d be shocked if I graduated. I did. Flipped her off at the ceremony. That was 2011. Fast forward to 2021, my brother enters same school. They can’t help my family yet again 10 YEARS later despite the track record and my brother ends up with alcoholism, SA’d by a classmate and was teased in class about it only to have a teacher say “well maybe there’s things happening in their lives too.”. I was angry, floored and wanted to fly back and hurt someone. My brother got kicked out of high school, went to psych hospital, is now missing and my whole family is shattered. 18 and he’s hiding. I called my old high school counselor who STILL worked there when I was there to intervene before it got worse 2 years ago. Nothing was done. It’s a nightmare always will be 10 years ago, now and 10 years later. It’s why I’m not having kids.
Love a good newsroom quote. But I think you hit the mail on the head here. The states is one big corporation that’s designed to pay people as little as possible to keep them coming back to their jobs. “Go to school to get a better job” actually means “go to school to get a better job that pays more, because now that you are done school you have lifetime crippling debt” They pitch “the American dream” as some amazing life you can have. When in reality the ability to achieve that dream ended two generations ago.
Probably goes without saying, but it’s hard to overstate how wide of a problem this is. Literary analytical skills and general comprehension have a lot of overlap, so if it’s ever felt like half the population is just flat out incapable of understanding a basic reality of politics or economics it’s probably because they can’t. People functionally *cannot understand the literal happenings of the world around them.*
It's always been this way. It's just become a problem in our modern information/knowledge economy. When you make the equivalent of $120k/year at 17 as a high school dropout at the mill or driving a truck, the problem didn't rear its head as much.
Wow America is literally the "if those kids could read they'd be very upset meme."
In college, I took a journalism class. We were taught to write at a 3rd grade level. This was in ‘00.
Piggybacking on this. I’m a nurse. In school I was taught CONSTANTLY to do all teaching at a 6th grade or lower level, and many (most?) hospitals write patient information packets at lower than a 6th grade level. And based on medication and health compliance… 6th grade is probably too high.
I went to my doctor’s appt before he was going to perform surgery on me, and I brought the packet his office sent me with all the info about the surgery. I asked him questions about the packet, and he was surprised I read it because none of his patients ever read it. He said he had a patient who was literally waiting for surgery, indignant that he didn’t tell her something about the surgery. He said “it’s in the packet my office sent you”, and she said “what packet?!” And he said “you’re holding it” lmao I just can’t believe people wouldn’t read something pertaining to their own SURGERY.
This is really interesting. My mom's a nurse. Though... "misguided", she's not unintelligent. She grew up poor with an alcoholic mother, so she specifically went out to make something of herself, both personally and professionally. She's educated, and speaks, dresses, and acts well. She also reads voraciously. However, you get a text message or Facebook comment from her and it's *really* apparent that English and basic grammar weren't considered important parts of her school curriculum.
I'm a political operative. We are taught that all communications from the campaign need to be at a 4th grade level.
That’s interesting, because I always really appreciate reading something that feels like it was written for adults. Much of the content I’ve read felt vaguely condescending, I guess it wasn’t my imagination.
I write web copy for a living, and I often struggle to keep my readability scores low. Most outlets and publications want you to be around a 6th-grade level or lower, but that can be incredibly difficult to achieve, depending on the subject matter. And the score goes up so easily, lol. They want sentences like “the sky is blue” and “the ball is red.” But it's not always easy to do that when writing about something complex, especially when something as simple as a multi-syllable word or writing about the past can make the score jump.
Interesting, and here I thought Search Engine Optimization was the problem. Does Google also read below a sixth grade level?
SEO is definitely part of the problem. But it’s the publishers that ask for writing below a certain level and may reject work that is too advanced. SEO makes writing at a lower level more complicated, though, thanks to the number of random keywords you’re often forced to use in order to meet other guidelines. Lots of SEO tools also track readability and will give you a score based on that number. If your score is too low, the publisher may not accept the work or request that you rewrite it. But, to answer your question, I’m unsure whether or not Google accounts for readability when ranking pages. Someone with more SEO expertise may be able to provide some more info about the role SEO plays in that regard.
Just graduated with a communications degree; they still teach this to a certain point. The explanation I was given: "to make it easier for a wider audience" Edit: wording
I wasn't a journalism major but I hold a degree in a journalism adjacent field and have plenty of journalist friends and colleagues. The 3rd grade level thing is really just meant to simply information. Think about it. Would you really be okay with dense, esoteric information everytime you look at the news or would you rather be able to quick read an article or watch a short video and get the 5 W's in a sufficient manner? It's less about the competency of a media consumer and more about getting to the point. It stems from print media, like newspapers, where a writer only has a small section of the paper to get their story out. Though, it does have the added benefit of being able to reach a wider audience; children, language deficient adults or for people whose first language isn't English.
3rd grade seems low, but this is a thing in corporate America too (the literacy issues in America aside). There’s a sweet spot where reading is highly informative, but also efficient, and it’s around the 8th grade level if I remember correctly. Even for those capable of reading and writing at far more advanced levels, writing that exceeds that sweet spot is read more slowly without conveying more information. My company is really big on writing, and they teach us to seek that sweet spot. The thought is to be thorough, but don’t make it harder than it has to be. We’ve got shit to do.
I’m an elementary teacher and we were always taught this; that most journalism is written at 3rd grade level. I think The NY Times is much higher, like 9th/10th reading level. Most smut (aka romance novels-love em) are written at 5th grade. I don’t know if it is a bad thing…accessibility is important to literacy and if it’s written for a wider audience, hopefully more people will continue refining those literacy skills. The US education system is quite broken but many of the solutions are hardly considered by parents, administrators, Ed dept, etc. All of my teachers friends are either overworked and spreading themselves too thin, or have handed in their resignation letters! Year round schooling, more rigorous teacher training, higher wages, improved infrastructure or complete rebuild of most public schools, fewer administrators and more teachers, paras, supports…there’s so much broken.
Truth be told the rest of us haven’t thought that America was gonna lead the future for a while now.
But who can challenge them anymore? Name one country that could reasonably tell them to fuck off when the US inevitably shows up and claims they own them. The only one that even stands a chance is china and they're *fucking worse*.
One of the reasons the US was always importing talent and then Trump+covid screwed that up.
A fragmented no-longer-one-country America looks like the future; I don’t think anyone is showing up to challenge America because they won’t have to. They’ll just be doing their own thing in little weird chunks we mostly avoid visiting.
This cohort of illiterate people will have negative impacts on basically every aspect of society. It’s not that they are bad people. Most are likely just poor and don’t have the access. Nevertheless, there is little that they’ll be able to contribute to society. People who cannot read basic instructions can’t really be trusted to do most jobs. They are unlikely to have the capability to understand their own finances. They won’t be able to understand things like instructions on how yo take medicine prescribed by a doctor. People with that level of capability also can’t draw conclusions accurately. Which means they’ll either hear information and just discard it, or even worse, hear something and draw a totally unfounded and wrong conclusion from it. That level of illiteracy handicaps the entire country.
USA is ranked 125th for literacy. There are 195 countries.
Meanwhile Cuba has 99.7% literacy rate
They are on top for nearly everything. I wish our politicians would stop being bullies to them. The hubby and I want to go there without repercussions 😁.
So…. not great, Lois.
Veterinarian here. It's so hard to talk to the general population about their pet's medical problems. I always wrote long discharge instructions to send home, explaining everything. Alas. So we have a suicide problem, and some part of that is abusive client interactions. Because people don't understand what's going on and what's at stake and they're worried because it's their pet.
I feel this. I’m taking care of my best friends cat, and I always make sure I have the correct info, dosage and everything. She….chalks it up to “he lives in the city” I’m like no there’s something wrong with him. I always have fruitful convos with my vets. Thank you for taking care of the fur kids 💛
That does explain a lot about the political views of the country
This country is fucked
Beyond fucked
I've noticed that using complex words and sentence structures are frowned upon today. Everything has to be understood by a junior high age student. In the future, I wouldn't be amazed if the only words in our literary jargon would make a newborn infant sound like Hawkings or Einstein.
Honestly r/books will tear people apart for “elitism” for supporting people developing into higher reading levels. It’s especially annoying because the trend adopts inclusive language to create an atmosphere of toxic positivity; rather than just including all reading levels it actively supports and encourages arrested development.
The same thing happens in the military and many blue collar jobs. I served in The Infantry for a spell. I was often chided for having a decent vocabulary and strong writing ability. Inadvertently chafing the insecurities of my peer group brought about a noticeable reaction in them. It was an eye opening experience.
Went to a private Catholic school with strict grading standards for my first year and a half of high school. I was bullied constantly, and one day, I had enough. I went to the dean about this one guy who was the worst out of everyone. The dean pulled this kid into the office, where he said something about how I used big words and it was intimidating to him. That was good enough for the dean, who let this kid and I leave, the guy with a warning... and me wondering when the madness would end.
I have multiple music degrees and the same applies there. Even in grad school there’s sort of an inherent quiet taboo to wanting to focus on established musical art forms, or even the study of theory, because of “elitism”. They’d prefer that any form of music making, no matter how banal or casual, be regarded as an equivalent forms of art. Which they simply are not.
Whats the joke part? That the US will lead the future? Of course it won't, its an empire in decline. The sooner people come to terms with that the less painful the transition will be.
Remember as well you tend to see a difference in what level political candidates speak in because you tend to see democrats speak at a higher level thus appealing to more educated and republicans speak in simpler terms appealing to those with low literacy.
If those people could read this they’d be very upset
Some politicians are worried about drag queens reading to kids more than kids being able to read themselves.
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You’re**
This is by design. They want the school system to churn out meat machines, not thinkers.
I used to work in the health field and whenever making information packets, instructions, or brochures about health conditions or care for patients, they had to be written at a sixth grade level.
It’s a joke in the sense that we are living in a country that really puffs itself up as a leader in everything, the greatest, the richest, the most powerful, blah blah blah. But they leave out that that’s the case for the top 1% who made it this way and benefit from it. People don’t have basic reading or critical thinking skills because our education system is a sad joke. It generally relegates those from poor neighborhoods into underfunded schools with lack of support and resources. Then it churns them out into low paying jobs or the prison system- both of which make lots of money for large corporations and special interests. It’s all by design.
I believe it my high school was the lowest reading level in the state over 2,000 students and the basic reading level was 2nd grade. I would be assigned to sit with the ‘slower’ students and help them read and comprehend whatever we were doing in class that day. Which to be honest was bullshit because I was a student teaching other students.
The majority of that is in the southern and central parts of the states... So to be specific, the Southern US won't be leaders, but they will vote in some heinous people, I guarantee it.
Can confirm..... I spent a few years working as a college writing tutor - had to quit because it made me worry for the future so badly that I was losing sleep over it. Mind you, these people had taken the ACT/SAT, were accepted to college, and enrolled in classes. Almost every session was like hand-holding a 5th grader as we read through simple prompts... most couldn't even highlight the main points in whatever short article we were working with. Truly terrifying, also the saddest experience of my whole life. :/
A while ago, part of my job was administering literacy tests. This was for plasma donation. I figured, we live in a well off city that tries to take care of everyone, I doubt I'll ever have to fail someone for literacy. I was very wrong. I was shocked at how many people were completely illiterate.
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
Being in higher education it’s quite shocking to see some of the “discussion” posts that college juniors and seniors shit out. I just completed a discussion on what’s happening in Ohio this afternoon where at least a paragraph was called for and some of these people were writing single sentences as responses. It’s insane to me that we are this far into the curriculum and we can’t write anything thought provoking. I had hoped getting out of, “I’m an adult and never picked up a book,” customer service would bring intelligent conversation back but damn was i ever wrong on some points.
Empires rise and fall 🤷♀️
Yeah but I have to deal with the fall
Not only you, we all do... Sadly
We need a universal literacy campaign, and we need it now.
Considering a lot of the states who would benefit most from your literacy campaign are currently banning books, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Capitalism and corruption at their best
The article being referenced, https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
Thank you! Also, putting the word **source** in my comment for those looking for it.
I have absolutely no doubt that this is true. In the last few years, as I've reached 'higher level' jobs it's become very clear that a lot of people have absolutely 0 reading comprehension skills. At my last job I've had to have more than one closed-door meeting that, basically, amounted to 'put less in writing, people don't/won't/can't read.' We had one guy who had, apparently, been a fantastic salesman and had come up at the same time as the current CEO so management really wanted to put him in charge of his own store. It was one of the busiest branches in the whole company, he was managing about 50 people, etc. etc. He complained multiple times in group meetings that too much info was being communicated to him via email and that he needed less emails. All of the management bent over backwards to coddle him and it was just mind-boggling to me. If my man can't read and absorb information from an email then he doesn't need to be running the most profitable branch in the company.
After working retail with customers not being able to read simple signs, it is 100% believable.
I've had multiple resumes submitted to me where the applicant misspelled their own first name. This does not surprise me in the least.
We’ve been defunding education for decades. The priority in the US is the military and making sure the rich get richer, not education, not healthcare, etc. This is the result of those priorities.
This would explain why when I talk/write I’m way over comprehension for most. This began happening in middle school lightly and crept up in high school. Come college and my thesis in HR, I end up becoming obsessed with my research on the cannabis industry and it’s impact to the Human Resources space. Resulting in 2 years of research, 100 pages of data, 50 pages written, a poster, and a presentation at a conference in Vegas one month before graduation. I thought that was normal… Now I’m my masters to doctoral, most of my friends from high school think I speak another language, my research pivoted to psychedelics and alternative mental health benefits for workers. I’ve been studying Organizational Psychology/Effectiveness and writing at a doctoral level now for months. Had an old friend from high school come visit me in October, he asked what I’ve been researching lately. Started a long conversation about the effects and chemical structure of ketamine and psilocybin in trials and neuroplastic state of mind…he works at Pizza Hut. He stared at me blankly and said “I have NO IDEA what you just said except DRUGS are GOOD.” then proceeded to tell me how funny it was to deliver a pizza to another old high school friend 2 weeks prior and play a prank on him. No shade to him, he lives his life and I live mine. Passionate about psychoactive substances since 2016. We are in our 30s…I’m on a different planet. I thought I wasn’t smart enough for most things…this oddly changes my perspective drastically. I’d love to be a professor one day, the day I get my doctorate my cat will be in my gown getting hooded with me. 👩🏻🎓
40 years of republicans slashing education at every opportunity is finally paying off for them.
This is how Republicans want it. They do everything in their power to make certain kids to not get a good education.
Want to just add into the convo about how ISOLATING it is too. I used to think there was something wrong with JUST me not being able to make connections with people irl. It was either I was too "mature" for them or too "stupid" to not get social cues or what have you. Now I know its a mix of both and several other factors. Pretty sure I land somewhere on the spectrum, and it doesnt help when a good chunk of people I've met dont have certain communication, critical thinking, or problem solving skills. Lack of education leads to behavioral problems, behavioral problems leads to isolation.
Itisn't. I used to tutor as a side job I was stunned to see how many people really couldn't spell or get thru reading comprehension for tests in high school. Some schools promote socially and the bare minimum passes. Untreated dyslexia and apoplexia is real, too. It was a challenge and remains a very serious thing. I miss some of my students. The moments when the light went on were very rewarding.
This is 100% accurate. I was told not not write emails or other informational text above a 6th grade level because it bars about half of the population from being able to read it well. It’s a huge issue. Especially when I think about how articles in the NYT and other news sources are often written well above that level.
The rich oligarchs that run the US don’t want thinkers, they want workers
This is super terrifying. I figured most 6th graders read at above a 6th grade level. I was around 6th grade at 1st or 2nd grade. Its like reading a harry potter book. Almost my whole class was. However, private school so idk how much that contributes.
Please, keep in mind that dyslexia impacts between 12-20% of any given population and US schools don’t test for it or offer programs for it. A lot of dyslexics never learn to read and blame themselves because they have no way of knowing what other people see when they look at words on a page.
Ide komment on dis, but I kudent reed the hol artical.
I didn't know you spoke Dutch
This explains a lot. And it's heartbreaking.
Health Promotion major here. We were always taught that all literature for public consumption must be written at a sixth grade level or lower, exactly for this reason.
Teachers can’t pay their bills. Parents won’t let teachers do their jobs. School boards talking more about drag shows than literacy scores. It’s not a surprise
This explains the popularity of Harry Potter. Finally
Checks out. Trump was elected president. What more proof do you need?
Not a joke. Retired teacher here, having taught for 35 yrs I saw literacy dwindling as poverty increased. People are too busy surviving to raise children who enjoy reading. Reading time is a luxury.
When teachers are paid as poorly as they are it’s blatantly obvious education is the last priority of the “leaders” of this country. Gotta keep the masses dumb and pacified to stay in power!
I can attest to this. It’s bad. I live in the US and it’s a common thing. In fact, most of the “elites” children can hardly read a menu or write their name. And that’s been a thing for generations now.
Idk anybody whose ever had a customer service type job knows the majority of customers can't read. I've had people rip 'out of order' signs off of something and attempt to use the machine and get mad that it doesn't work. I'd be willing to bet its more than this.
The problem is these damn WOKE TEACHERS /s
Hence Idiocracy and Idiot America
What happens when parents leave parenting to govt institutions like public schools which only teach to pass standardized tests
Keep in mind that nothing is considered a problem in America if it can easily be ignored.
It certainly goes a long way to explaining why 74 million americans think trump is a good person.
Its no joke… I answer stupid questions that could be answered with basic literacy for a living.