cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/1006130
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The original was posted on /r/aboringdystopia by /u/Last_Salad_5080 on 2023-10-03 14:21:04.
Maybe if we actually paid teachers and gave funding to education this wouldn’t be a problem. Education in the US is god awful.
You know what Education in the US craves? Electrolytes…
And many adults choose not to read. It is almost as if they are connected
This is the reason the GOP exists as it does. It is the fucking idiots party.
It might be, but I guarantee you that there’s a not insignificant number of people who align with the left who are dumb as rocks and just happened to fall into that party instead.
If there’s some study proving that uneducated or unintelligent people are only ever exclusively on the right and the left is just full of geniuses, I haven’t seen it.
Yes, in general those who have attained college degrees are more likely to vote Democratic and those who have attained just a high school diploma are more likely to vote Republican. There is a clear divide where the more educated cohort of society leans Democratic.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221079862
Education isn’t 1 to 1 with intelligence, it’s mostly a wealth test in the US. Though I’d argue the phenomenon is more to do with being exposed to different people and wider cultural beliefs than raw intelligence, anyways.
Education also matters because it teaches critical thinking and epistemology. You can be highly intelligent, but if you don’t have any critical thinking skills and an understanding of the rules of evidence, you can still be easily misled and otherwise manipulated.
Orr maybe, you see what you want to see.
Which is exactly the goal. They want a large number of poorly educated people who are easy to manipulate. This is why they defund schools and ban reproductive health education as their very first steps when they come to power.
Large number of poorly educated, easily manipulated people? You mean like the illegal immigrants the left is letting in in droves?
Fuck off.
My ancestors and maybe yours too for that matter, were poorly educated, not by choice. They migrated here bc they were desperate and it offered hope. And now many generations later, my parents’ and all subsequent generations in the family have been college educated with many success stories.
You just don’t like brown people. Fuck off.
Our ancestors didn’t drag their children through barbed wire and didn’t demote US citizens to 2nd class by receiving free healthcare and benefits over them. They also didn’t steal to such a degree that the police gave up on enforcing the law.
I’ve never understood this conspiracy. Illegal immigrants can’t vote. How exactly is the left supposed to benefit?
Yeah, the argument makes literally zero sense, but if you bring it up to them, it opens the door for them to talk about other batshit crazy conspiracies. Like needing tighter controls on who can vote. Which are thinly veiled attempts to limit the opposition from voting.
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The issue is those benefits like free healthcare, scholarships, and such is that they aren’t also given to actual US citizens, we treat illegals better than our own.
And yet “Terms Of Service” are supposed to be fair. When they’re written at a college level.
It’s not the terms of service’s fault that adults can’t read over a 6th grade level
No, but think about how we structure society.
We give people shit education, and they wind up not being able to read at a 6th grade level.
Then you basically have to navigate an entire world where you are required to pick how to sign away some of your rights/enter deals written beyond their comprehension.
This is a system that breeds suckers as sets them up as suckers, to screw them later.
The solution to that isn’t to dumb down everything, it’s to lift everyone else up. Mandate that adults be educated and provide remedial classes at community colleges for free. Failure to comply results in losing the ability to hold gainful employment or vote. Anonymize testing and tie test results to social security numbers.
It’s either do that, or allow civilization to collapse while other countries that do force their citizens to be educated flourish.
Not just college, but by lawyers, so a doctorate level.
That seems a little generous. While I know it’s challenging, I don’t think law school is quite the same thing as a PhD program.
I agree with your statement, but law school (in the US) gives you a literal doctorate. It’s not a PhD but JD stands for juris doctor.
Yes, I am aware of what JD stands for. Glad that we can agree that it’s not really equivalent to a PhD.
A little known fact is that provided one can pass their local bar exam, they’re still a lawyer/officer of the court, regardless of whether they attended law school or not.
It’s not really a thing anymore, but historically a lot of lawyers served a kind of apprenticeship in lieu of law-school.
Abraham Lincoln is a great example, for instance.
Anyone have the stats on what percentage voted Trump or didnt vote at all?
What’s a good example of a 6th grade reading level?
(Also I old.reddit-ed that link and it took me to a post in r/funny titled ‘nice hat’ with an old picture of Lady Gaga, for some reason?)
6th grade, not 6-year-old.
Haven’t read it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least the prose itself was actually written relatively competently because the melting creamsicle has never personally written a word in his life. Usually professional ghostwriters can actually write.
I know, it was a subtle dig at how he also claims he hasn’t matured since age six, which I actually believe.
That book was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz.
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American’s have been going down the dumbass road for a long time. And you rarely meet someone who is well rounded like you meet in Europe. Not to say there aren’t dumbasses in Europe. There are many. But Americans don’t even seem to try. Not anymore.
I’m American and have lived in Europe for 15 years. I assure you there is every level of educated/not educated (crystalized intelligence) and every level of very bright and pretty slow (fluid intelligence) over here, just as there is in every country in the world. Being educated and being intelligent are not the same thing.
Europe is not one place either, take a random Dane and a random person from Italy or Portugal or Croatia or Scotland and put them side by side and tell me thats one culture, ya know?
To your point, though, I will say that the quality of the foundational education in the US does pale pretty quickly when compared to the majority of public education systems that I’d be aware of here. I’ve been pretty embarassed about how limited my knowledge of geography and history has been at times while talking to some of my Italian, Irish and German friends.
I am friends with a primary (elementary) school teacher (teaching outside of Hamburg) and she expressed that she’s seeing a rapid decline in the students’ interest, work ethic and thus their proficiency in the past few years. She’s genuinely alarmed. We might start seeing articles like this about mainland Europe in a few years.
Me fail English? That’s unpossible!
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Nuance.
Conciseness.
not entirely surprised
Yeah, I’ve walked outside. I don’t need a source for this one.
I’ve spent 1 day in a Facebook philosophy group. I’m not sure there’s any hope left. If I didn’t have to be on Facebook for local call for art announcements I would run so far away.
pointedly doesn’t look at the numerous Lemmings he’s seen complain that relatively simple statements are grammatically confusing
I’ve absolutely had someone blow a gasket over asking for clarification when they wrote a few sentences where it was unclear from their statement whether they were progressive or a white power lunatic. I could have assumed but my level of certainty was hovering in the mid-50% range. Sometimes the author is an idiot and the questioner is justified. EDIT: from what I could figure out, the gasket blower has a habit of assuming you know their post history rather than letting each comment stand on its own. Which is not very smart.
We have people who think that ‘e-mail’ gets an s as a noun - ever - when ‘mail’ never has.
They will be confused that the sun keeps rising.
You must be a hit at parties.
Here’s an article with more details about the study: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy#:~:text=by EMILY SCHMIDT | March 16%2C 2022&text=This means more than half,of a sixth-grade level.
Dr. Iris Feinberg, associate director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University, points to under-served communities with “print deserts,” poorly funded schools, and little internet access as being the places where the people with poor reading skills live. She also called it an inter-generational cycle of low literacy, so it’s not just a recent problem with people not wanting to read.
Why u hurt our brain with thing that not screenshot of headline or tweet
wait yall can read?
What did you say?
It’s really important for folks to understand what is being talked about here, because I run into folks even here that are like “that’s a wall of text, I’m not reading that”. And that’s kind of the behavior that’s being talked about. Like, if you find yourself in “read the headline, not the story” you might be in this group they are talking about in this article that is linked. And do not let me come off high and mighty here, I absolutely have issues with this some times because I get all kinds of caught up with life and do not have enough time to maintain my reading habits. It is a complex issue on why there is this deterioration of reading skills. And I will likely say something to the effect of “Internet BAD!” but do know it is more than just that, it is just that is the easiest go-to for a “short” comment.
So that said. Nice little sample question one would see on a test that would test this is:
In Lions of Little Rock, two girls form a dangerous and clandestine friendship, that is challenged by racial segregation. Name, in chronological order, the multiple episodes of racist threats and violence and how they increased the tension of the relationship between the two girls.
It’s not a question of “Can you read the book?” It is a question of, “Did you extract information from the book? Can you connect the dots asked in the question based on the information that you read?” Lots of people who identify themselves as literate have a lot of difficulty doing these kinds of things. So we have to understand that, this is not testing if a kid can read the word “onomatopoeia”, it is testing if a person can extract useful information from written words.
All of that is different from the “eighth grade reading level” where you are typically asked things like “extrapolate what you think the underlying theme the author is trying to present.” Sixth grade reading is mostly being able to put things back in the order that you read them, picking out the descriptive terms that were in the text, and identifying what the entire point was for this particular piece of work, among other things. One does not have to really get creative here, sixth grade reading is just “in slightly finer detail” being able to regurgitate what was just read. Now to get kids ready for higher reading, there is usually questions about “do you think this person at this point was feeling happy?” That kind of stuff that relies of extrapolating meaning which is usually above the “sixth grade level reading”.
And it is indeed shocking how many people cannot do this. But in order to be shocked, I think people need to understand what is being tested here. A lot of social media does indeed condition folks to allow this level of reading to atrophy. The number of people who toss around TL;DR is really high and some of that is because it does not interest them. That of course is fine, but some of it is because 50% of the way through their brain is tired of reading text. AND THAT, is problematic. And really I can only touch on so much of the issue in this comment without it feeling like it is going on forever.
There are all kinds of assessment tests online that folks can review and see exactly the kind of questions that are being asked. The whence and wherefores on this matter and the causes for it happening are indeed complex and obviously I cannot cover them all here. But one big one, in my opinion, is education and its intersection with technology. Technology does indeed make lots of things easier for us, but some of those things that technology unburdens us from we should probably reexamine that relationship. Perhaps we need better education with technology or maybe we need less technology with that education, they both have pros and cons to them. There are not easy answers in this for the kind of background American education presents, which that is also an addressable matter in all of this.
You’ve indirectly highlighted the biggest issue I have with referring to literacy as “x-grade reading levels”. Literacy skills stack on top of each other and, sometimes, in slightly different orders. Calling them by a grade level makes people associate these skills with certain educational levels in school when, in reality, you only learn these skills from repetition and growth. I wish there were (and maybe there are and I’m just not familiar with them) clearer distinctions for these types of skills that meant more than “x-grade” which is practically meaningless to most people and harmful for those struggling with reading and comprehension.
Well that sounds like semantics that you take exception with, on how particular educational groups define things. Your frustration is well founded but misplaced on me. Indeed all things build and in different orders for different people no doubt. However, in the context of educational reporting at the government level, these are the labels that are applied in the various reports. And as all things, those things roll down hill.
clearer distinctions for these types of skills that meant more than “x-grade”
There are, but politics being what they are, those labels are less meaningful labels to folks that arguably have the most power to change the course of things (that last part is strictly my opinion, sorry/not really sorry I injected it here). In short, I concur with your observation.
However, in the context of educational reporting at the government level, these are the labels that are applied in the various reports
Yes, but this is exactly my issue. And I don’t think it’s about semantics, per se, but rather more about usefulness. Educational reporting using these terms is great for that demographic but is entirely useless for the people upon which it’s reporting.
You’ve indirectly highlighted the biggest issue I have with referring to literacy as “x-grade reading levels”.
There are standards of complexity that are set by grade level.
Here’s a resource with a great breakdown
Combines these with reading standards for various grades, and the metric makes a lot of sense. To say someone reads at a 5th grade level means they are technically literate but struggle to find true meaning, subtle concepts, and likely have a limited vocabulary.
I think you make some valid points. I like to imagine most of us have other interests and projects we are engaged with and my be less motivated in some areas when we engage with other things. This is almost always the cause if my headline hot take behavior or unwillingness to read a text wall. I’m primarily here for the inadequate dopamine hit of social media; not as much for the personal growth potential.
I think the primary issue is an education system that makes reading and learning a nuisance and chore. This is a problem that can be solved in the coming decade with the use of technology, but it will take a serious overhaul of the entire system. There is no room for proprietary software and exploitation in education. The entire system should be standardised on open source software, funding should be allocated to run a small independent and offline AI server and the teacher’s role should be divided between the AI system and a traditional group oriented role. This will allow individualized education without exploitation. An AI agent that is specifically designed for this task and paired with the teacher’s supervision makes it possible for each child to follow the path that best suits them. They can read any book they want that meets certain requirements. They can progress at their own pace. Issues can be identified long before any current teacher is capable of spotting. Most importantly, this is not about AI as a product or replacing the teacher in any way. This is making use of a tool, and doing so ethically. This kind of thing can not be done for profit or by contractors. The privacy of such a system should be of paramount importance that is not possible long term with any company focused on profitability. The only people with access to the AI should be the students, parents, and teachers. Even IT staff at the school should not have access to the AI logs and data, and there should be no persistent storage long term. It has to be a tool that is used by the teacher only.
To be clear, I am a hobbyist working on such a tool for my own self education with the computer science curriculum. This is about AI agents. This is not about a raw AI LLM. An agent is a collection of LLMs connected through a code base, and connected to databases. This does not rely on the model training alone for answers. This is a system where the final answer is checked and reviewed multiple times and verified against accurate sources before a final reply is made. Most people here are likely unfamiliar with this and what it is capable of doing.
This is the inevitable future, it is only a question of how long it takes people to adapt to the new potential. This level of individualized education has only been available to the ultra rich, but it is now possible for everyone at scale.
I read all of this. I am definitely guilty of looking for a TL;DR. I absolutely believe my overuse of technology has caused my reading and writing skills to deteriorate significantly and my memory as well. I struggle with remembering and analyzing. I have never been a good book learner though. I suspect I have a learning disability that wasn’t quite bad enough for intervention when I was in school aside from special reading training in grade two or three.
I am definitely guilty of looking for a TL;DR
In the context of social media, this isn’t really the same problem of not wanting to or being able to read longer stuff in general. There are countless screeds from any number of sources that you wouldn’t want to waste your time going through (not saying the above poster is one of them), so getting a general sense of a longer post is an important skill.
Being able to work through edited prose in detail is also important, but remember that it’s very different from what we all encounter online. In the immortal words of someone who probably wasn’t Twain or Pascal, “I did not have time to write a shorter letter.”
Bruh, I ain’t reading all that. You crazy?
I read your first paragraph then skipped the rest of whatever you’re going on about. It’s about saving your time in a world where there’s near infinite amount of content to be able to read, it’s a skill to know what’s worth reading.
Right. I find myself doing this, yet I’m still able to read and consume whole chapters at a time in university textbooks
I agree to some extent, but honestly the time spent on reading lemmy/reddit/Twitter/etc could almost certainly be spent on more important literature. I’m not going to pretend that a few minutes in a sea of wasted hours really makes a difference.
wall of text
I’d just like to note for the record that your post wasn’t a wall of text. Not only does it have paragraphs, it is also well-structured in its information delivery and you use connectives well, constantly answering “why am I reading this sentence (or subordinate clause)” in the first couple of words. This is not only easy to do (if you’re used to it), it also takes enormous load off the reader by not having them divine erm “train of thought context”, and actually follows natural speech patterns. But it does require that your thoughts are organised, that you can write the whole thing in one go, or you will have to go back and massage everything down to size. Which brings me to
TL;DR
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.
Or, differently put: Writing skills are actually just as if not even more atrocious across the board. Another reason for tl;drs are people who are paid by word count.
My reading skills tell me this author has a profound sense of sorrow about the state of the world.
This author is now also aware that there is no comfortable place in your mouth to rest your tongue.
This author is reminding you that you are suddenly aware of your breathing.
And you can feel your toes.
Ugh I just toe pilled myself, fucking karma. I’m going to put some socks on.
Based and discomfort-pilled
Me: oh man, adults can’t read??
Also me: let me find a comment that sums up this article for me.
On a serious note, great summary, cleared a lot of things up.
A long time ago I reasoned that the poorest least educated of us would be functional illiterates for whom a separate glyph based language would be created. A smiley face does not require reading comprehension or analysis, nor does it produce a populace that asks questions.
I don’t think the landholders who run this shit want more than fifty percent literacy from the serfs who will be beholden to their grandchildren. Too many smart serfs would endanger their legacies, and too few would render the industrial collective serviced by their human capital uncompetitive.
The next few decades will be about them figuring out just how many smart motherfuckers they need, and how to keep those firecrackers too frightened to start a revolution. They’ll be minmaxing the hell out of us.
Hard tl;dr from me, dawg
I’m not convinced that social media causes a loss of reading skills. I suppose it is possible but I would want to see some studies on the topic. Anecdotally, I do find myself reading less than I used to. I took a number of English lit classes as electives purely for fun and enjoyed reading a number of fun works that I think would hopefully qualify me as reading above a 6th grade level. But that was many years ago. I haven’t done a lot of reading in the last decade except for news articles about everything going to hell. Of the few books I have read, I read them for pleasure and each was lightweight, not too much analysis and explication required, one rather challenging history book about the lead up to the first world war notwithstanding, though it’s difficulty is due more to more complex sentence structure and arcane vocabulary, and less to its erudite discussion of an already complex topic. Nevertheless, I don’t believe I have had any difficulties demonstrating far beyond mere functional literacy you described despite my infrequent reading of anything longer than a news article or Reddit post. Still, this is anecdotal and so I would be interested to see if any scientific evidence exists to connect a loss of reading skills with disuse and to what degree those skills are diminished.
I tried looking for any studies on this, and all I can find is info on kids. Nothing in adults, except one study that found cognitive benefits to older adults who used social media.
Appreciate your efforts! Interesting find about social media. Would not have expected that.
It’s not a question of “Can you read the book?” It is a question of, “Did you extract information from the book? Can you connect the dots asked in the question based on the information that you read?” Lots of people who identify themselves as literate have a lot of difficulty doing these kinds of things.
I’m really sorry if this comes across as a TL;DR, but there’s a name for that. I’m positive you already know, but for the benefit of those interested, it’s called “functional illiteracy.” And it’s wild, still blows my mind to this day. Like, if you’re functionally illiterate, that doesn’t mean you don’t know how to read…it means you can read but can’t understand language written beyond the basic level. There are a lot of variables involved and I’m oversimplying a lot, but that’s it in a nutshell. It’s fucking terrifying, to be honest, especially because it’s so widespread.
Read to your kids, folks! And talk to them about it afterwards!
Read to my kids? Why would I want to turn my kids gay with WOKE READIN BOOKS?!
/s
Even more wild that a functional illiterate was elected president of the most powerful country in the world!
I feel like I encounter this alot at work. Write an email describing the problem, asking for clarification or a decision, and get a response back that seemingly ignores what is being asked with a question that was already answered in the previous email.
And the other classic: Ask 2 questions, eg in an email or even one post here. Clearly marked, with 1. and 2.
You can only ever expect to get back one answer. Comprehension and attention span of a…
“SQUIRREL!!”
that’s a wall of text, I’m not reading that
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Dumb it down for me doc?
LOL
Low-hanging fruit
A strawberry? watermelon? cucumber?
I’m not good at this game /s
can someone recap it using an emoji?
🤷♂️
The amount of people on this very site who cannot parse comments they have an emotional reaction to is staggering.
Lots of people are going to laugh at this and not realize it is describing them.
Lots of people are going to laugh at this and not realize it is describing them.
Why not both lmao
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The other thing that needs to be acknowledged here is that literacy has overwhelming been trending upwards over time. As grim as this is, it’s actually fantastic news when we look at where we used to be.
It’s not a new study though, it’s kind of old.
All studies are new if you just believe enough!
As a former child this is nothing new to me. I remember how much I hated when the teacher had people read things out loud in English class. Hell honestly any class. The amount of people who read like every. Word. Had. A. Period. And the people who would read any word longer than 3 syllables like it was hy-phe-na-ted. It was fucking torture.
20 minutes to read one single page.
I never had patience for that and would just read ahead and ignore the person speaking.
I was shy-ish and didn’t participate much, but I would often volunteer to read aloud. It was easier for everyone that way, since one of the few things I was exceptional at was reading
I also couldn’t stand reading along with someone who couldn’t. It was too painful
Kids read like that because they know if they make a mistake they will get a lower grade. Better to be slow and correct.
This happened all the way through highschool.
I don’t know in that case.
Yeah, this was torture in grade school. I figured it would get better in middle school.
Then it was torture in middle school and I thought it would get better in high school.
Then it was STILL torture in high school and I thought it would surely, surely get better in college.
Then I got to college and there were still mofos reading. like. this.
I am an engineer who oversees a team. Most of them can’t write more than a coherent sentence. Code and analyze data, sure, but put together a coherent paragraph? Not really.
