I found this podcast from this 
post:
I subbed today for a 7th and 8th grade teacher. I’m not exaggerating when I say at least 50% of the students were at a 2nd grade reading level. The students were to spend the class time filling out an “all about me” worksheet, what’s your name, favorite color, favorite food etc. I was asked 20 times today “what is this word?”. Movie. Excited. Trait. “How do I spell race car driver?”
I’ve only listened to one episode so far, but it’s really well produced, seems well-researched and very well put together.
From what I gather so far, the ways that the American public school system “teaches” kids how to read is not only completely wrong, but actually saddles them bad habits which fundamentally hinder their reading comprehension.
A huge swath of American adults are functionally illiterate, and I think I’m starting to understand why.
My best friend is a literacy specialist and the stories she tells me are absolute doomer fuel. Lesson plans written by text book companies that do the exact opposite of what the scientific literature states is effective. White boomer teachers screeching at ELL 5 year olds about their inability to speak English and shaming them for speaking in their own tongue, even when other students can also speak it. Kids getting pushed into special ed referrals because teachers just don’t know the basic skills of differentiated instruction. School administrators pushing boxed assessment programs that aren’t rigorous, aren’t research-based, or aren’t appropriate for what they’re being used for.
The saddest part is that the traditional view of some kids being inherently worse at reading is almost always just wrong. The number of kids who actually have a learning disability that will permanently stop them from reaching parity with their peers is extremely low. Anyone else who struggles has been failed by the educational system. Period. They could have caught up and stayed caught up with just a little extra attention. The literature is all there. We know how to teach people to read. We can do it efficiently and without causing stress or trauma. And the system seems hell bent on preventing that from happening.
I remember reading about how some 1st/2nd gen young immigrants (like under 10) not really being able to speak any language cause their parents didn’t speak their language at home with the hope of helping the kids get a leg up - except they weren’t stellar at English and could’ve used a lot of adult ESL classes. So those kids never really got their parents first language and they couldn’t really speak English, and they were kind of a mess at school for a bit. The official guidance was, just speak to them in your most proficient language and the school system will catch them up in Kindergarten and Grade 1.
: “You know, all that book’ learning hurts muh economy, right?”- “kids these days. It’s all 'how do I click the book '”
I’m not a teacher, but I had a job where I had to manage younger adults and a significant portion of communication was done in text. When I started the job I wondered why so many used weird short hand and what I thought was purposeful misspelling. I later learned that it wasn’t shorthand, but that many were just barely literate.
This is from the
thread. So, essentially, we have a whole generation of Charlies from Always Sunny. America is fucked.I am legitimately sick to my stomach from anger after learning about this. A bunch of snake oil peddling cultists have scammed the American and other Anglo school systems, from the sound of it, for decades. And tens of millions, if not a hundred million kids have suffered for it.
why would China do this
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People think school should prepare you for your future job in an amazon warehouse
We’re gonna start seeing Playskool babies’ first parcel scanner toys soon.
That exists and kids love scanning things with something that goes BEEP really loud
I guess it’s just daycare to these people…
That’s mostly what it is after a certain grade level anyways
People have just accepted that American public education is a failure and the parents have to do the real teaching. And yet so many parents don’t even know there’s anything wrong until way too late. Even if the schools are passing kids despite not being able to read, an engaged parent should be able to notice it very early on as long they read with their kid at home. My mom read to me nearly every night until I could read on my own. She would read a page and then have me read a page after a while. Eventually, I was reading whole books to her and I loved reading so much that when I got in trouble one time she took my bookcase away, leaving me with a TV that sat unused, while I bawled my eyes out.
tbh i still wouldnt take away the bookcase, if anything i might swap the books out for more boring educational ones.
she took my bookcase away, leaving me with a TV that sat unused
My intuition suggests that this contravenes the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26.
Even if the schools are passing kids despite not being able to read
And schools should always pass kids. The body of literature, theory and experiments in that regard for teaching education in Europe is quite extensive. If your society is structured around passing grades then the way to built up on the ability of students isn’t to force them for years in the same rooms, but to change what they experience, keep up the social links and give specific support.
Besides that even if a school isn’t able to give specific support it is better for kids to not be put in repeating classes.
What you write is true though, having cultural attitudes at home that do sometimes center books are great. They ought to be somewhat supplemented even for kids that are praised as being smart with other things, that are beneficial for social and physical aspects. If your kid likes a certain series, try to enable the kid to visit a fan conference about it or alike.
Just like in Le Guin’s Earth Sea, one of the most important lessons for the young magician’s apprentice wasn’t to control magic. It was to chill under trees and find calm as well as connection in nature.
And schools should always pass kids.
I’m absolutely not familiar with the literature you’re talking about here, but I have failed a lot of classes in my time, probably even a majority of them a couple years (7th and 8th grades) and I know that I would have been miserable (or more miserable I guess lol) if I’d been made to repeat things for that.
I did actually once have my French teacher try and make me start over from the beginning with French the next year instead of advancing to the next level, but I ended up unexpectedly moving to Québec the following year instead where my French was good enough within the year to join in the regular French first language classes so lmao
A special ed teacher who had been working for decades and who knew many students who had been held back told me the same. Even as adults these students would tell him that things had been going okay until they had been held back. One administration hinted at doing the same to one of our kids because he didn’t speak English at an academic level, but we worked our asses off to bring him up to speed in a matter of months, and the same special ed teacher told us that parents don’t actually need to hold their kids back if they don’t want to (something the principal failed to mention). Soon enough our kid was reading, writing, and speaking at his grade level (which he’d already been doing in his mother tongue) and the principal acted like she had never even suggested that she wanted to hold him back. And shit like this could have ruined his life! School is already difficult enough without every figure of authority telling you you’re too much of a fuckup to advance with your friends to the next grade!
when I got in trouble one time she took my bookcase away,
Giga Chad mom casually lifting up an entire book case and moving it out of your room.
No she just glared angrily at the bookcase until it left of its own accord
While parents aren’t the people solely responsible for their childrens education, it is striking to me how things have changed recently.
The kids coming in are less well-equpped than they used to be. Not potty trained, can’t tie their shoes, can’t tell the time. Like it used to be a few kids that had an issue or two, but now it’s a bunch with a lot of issues.
Things have gotten worse recently. Parents aren’t as able to help their children as they used to be. This does increase the work load for teachers.Making everyone desperate and afraid seems to be working wonders! Capitalism is so cool
That’s why I personally don’t want to have kids. Considering the state of labor in the west, how are parents supposed to be able to spend time with their kids? Granted when I was growing up, my mom always stayed at home because she could. She didn’t have to work because my dad made more than enough to provide for a family on a single income (pre-2008 recession).
Stay at home moms have to be hella rare in this age of rampant exploitation, so I have no idea how kids are being raised. Add on the fact that there’s no guaranteed parental leave in
and I’m at a complete loss
Parents are essential for student growth and education but that doesn’t make them responsible for all of it. The entire point of school is to take on the the major burden of teaching kids with expertise and efficiency and providing a place for children to be with other children.
Thanks for the recommendation–will definitely be checking this out.
edit: I just listened to the first episode and WTF, the people responsible for getting this new curriculum into schools should be in prison. It’s a crime of unfathomable proportions against children who have no way to defend themselves.
The “reading recovery/whole language” people are literally a cult. There are so many quotes that boil down to, “Teaching phonics and having kids actually figure out words just felt so traditional. Reading recovery was so refreshing and Lucy Calkins is my hero!”
There was an audio clip of a worm-brained lib going to a Lucy seminar and she could not stop gushing. “I get to see Lucy! This is the best day of my life!” and so on. These fuckers get the wall. This shit is still happening because of all the acolytes that refuse to accept the dogma of actually fucking reading to learn how to read. The Soviets, Cubans, and Chinese figured this out decades ago. America is going to become a client state of China in our lifetimes because no one knows how to do anything.
Wait, what would the alternative to phonics be?
Either read through some of the linked thread or listen to the first episode of the podcast. It’s so dumb it’s unbelievable. There’s a “system” that is literally “just guess lol”.
Yeah I’m seeing it now, but I just couldn’t believe it - Thought I must’ve misunderstood something. They just make kids memorize whole words instead of learning how letters funtion? It’s wild. The us is apparently just full of illiterate youths now?
It does explain quite a few encounters I’ve had on here and twitter, where users misunderstood basic stuff. A lot of people just reiterating what I write as if it was an argument against me and the like. Seems like reading comprehension is non-existent.no no, it’s even worse. read the whole word is an older idea. they’re teaching kids to guess the word without even looking at it. they’re taught to check if they have the word right by looking at the first couple of letters. like they’re teaching kids by literally covering up the word and only showing it after they guess.
But how can they check if they don’t know what the letters say? This seems like such an odd idea.
It’s always good with several different ways of learning something, but this doesn’t seem to be teaching the subject at all? Like it’s just guesswork, and it’s guesswork that still requires the ability to parse letters, which at that point just teach 'em to read.context, syntax, and the first couple of letters. they teach them phonics but prevent them from using it to sound out words.
i can’t really believe what i’m reading. i’m a teacher in the global south. i don’t even teach formative years, but this feels like the Three Dimensional Chess fantasy applied to pedagogy.
yeah, it’s less teaching kids how to read and more purposefully sabotaging their ability to read, based on a fantasy of teaching them to love reading. it’s cult woo shit.
Thats actually how i used to read a while back. I was taugth the normal way letter by letter. But then somtime in middle school i realised i read way too slow so i started experimenting trying to get rid of vocalization wich was the biggest inefficiency. And the solution was to grasp the meaning of the word without reading it compleatly. If its some set of consonants i cant even pronounce i cant suvvocalize them can i? Until eventually i no longer needed to do that.
Granted i cant spell for shit. But its actually more efficient to read like that.
It took me over a decade of trying really hard to stop my subvocalizing. If i had been taugth like you descrive from the begining i would not have had to spend so much effort to get rid of bad reading habits.
It took me over a decade of trying really hard to stop my subvocalizing.
I’ve never heard this term and I’m losing my mind because I’m a very slow reader and, based on what I’m seeing, more-literate people don’t hear the text in their head? I literally never considered that this would be absent from reading aside from recognizing a familiar term (like the name of a store, “ambulance,” whatever). God damn it . . .
I mean I don’t think this method of education has ever been widespread enough to entirely explain low literacy rates in the US. There are other factors at play here.
America is going to become a client state of China in our lifetimes because no one knows how to do anything.
Anecdotal story, and I mean no offence to Americans. I was once day-drinking on the rooftop of an airport hotel with a mate, and struck up a conversation with a chubby Danish fellow. He said he was a business owner. He noted that neither of us were Americans so he felt comfortable talking a bit of shit.
He said his company does business with quite a few European countries, but also Americans. He said he hates dealing with Americans because every single time he had a question for them they always had to put him on hold and ask their supervisor because nobody ever seemed to know how to make a decision.
“WHY? WHY do you have to ask your supervisor? This is a simple yes or no question!”
And then he sighed and said “I honestly have no idea how these people made it to the moon and back”.
There is a deep fear of responsibility and being wrong that is beaten into Americans from childhood. No one wants to be the one at fault, so they always defer to authority. It makes them into very compliant workers who also need constant supervision. People are so poorly educated they are often incapable of doing anything without direct instruction, including answering simple questions. It’s real fucked up here and this podcast made me shake with rage at how much more fucked up it is for kids now. I’m just thankful my mom took an active role in my education and taught me phonics, reading, and basic math before kindergarten.
In our defense, if we fuck up, we could lose our jobs, and then we’re really fucked.
America is going to become a client state of China
I’m all aboard as long as we get some belt and road over here.
The rapid gutting of the education system is a understated yet horrifying thing.
When our kids were 7th and 8th grade my wife subbed at the school for a while. She worked a number of days at their grade level and a grade or 2 higher.
What she saw was very similar.
Our kids were getting straight As. No exaggeration. Yet they were having trouble doing homework consisting of math problems they struggled with 2 years prior.
They weren’t being taught anything, they were being prepped for the standardized tests given at the end of the year. Also, any tests and quizzes throughout the year they were given multiple tries to retake, and that explains the straight As.
That’s when we pulled them out and began homeschooling. No regerts.
We’ve been homeschooling since the pandemic started but my kids said they want to go back to school this year, so we’re letting them go back. I’ve told them that I’ll be with them, though, if they change their minds. I have years of experience as a teacher overseas and I’ve also subbed in local school districts. I didn’t encounter issues with reading pre-pandemic but I’m pretty sure now that after three years of doing commie homeschool, my kids are the ones who should be teaching social studies rather than learning from the white liberals whose only job is to obscure the past and confuse the young. We also tutored the fuck out of our older kid who was having issues with math. Thanks to doing that with khan academy, he no longer has those issues, and both of our kids are now interested in coding (which isn’t offered for kids their age at their school).
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its almost like there is some underlying socioeconomic factor… some sort of material condition…it’s the vibes, the vibes are seriously off
I think part of the problem is that being read to by your parents at a young age and having books in the home that you are encouraged to read does so much for literacy l, as much if not more than what kids are taught in school. And most parents don’t have the time or the inclination, or they themselves are barely literate and have no basis for teaching their kids to be literate. And the cycle continues
I think part of the problem is that being read to by your parents at a young age and having books in the home that you are encouraged to read does so much for literacy
That probably helps on some level, but from listening to the first two episodes of the podcast, the problem seems to be that a lot of kids are being taught a fundamentally incorrect method of how to decode written language that’s making it much harder for them to read that it otherwise should be, and often leaves them completely unable to parse new words. Like, if you gave them a word they’d never seen written down before (especially if the word is by itself, devoid of any context), they wouldn’t know how to pronounce it, even if they’ve heard the word spoken before.
So simply having books available won’t actually help (most of) them, because they just don’t have the skills necessary to figure out how to decode written language, or how to connect written language to spoken language. They need to be taught the correct way of reading first.
(Of course, once kids finally have an understanding of the fundamentals of how to decode written language, having tons of books available to read so that they can further practice those skills would definitely be a massive help for improving literacy.)
the problem seems to be that a lot of kids are being taught a fundamentally incorrect method of how to decode written language that’s making it much harder for them to read that it otherwise should be
While I accept that it could be the case here - and having read up a bit on it rings true - there is a real danger of “educated” people often liberal with a slight to conservative or neoliberal, to tell people how education really works and that alternatives are wrong or false, often on grounds that are very flimsy or completely propagandistic.
The classism aspect in such things is something I look for first (with keeping other -isms in mind). Then of course there is the aspect of culture and financing. But before I look into that I try to look at how the things we talk about are used as a filter and their surrounding structures are. Only then at earliest I tend to look into effects claimed to be there (and think about how they could be disproved and what influences were missed).
For example institutions for
CW
“children with learning disabilities”, which were a catch all phrase for plenty of humans to not have them interact with the white “norm” population in other schools are not that good for kids in them, especially since they hinder inclusion. That regular schools suck doesn’t mean that it would be a correct way to keep kids away from their peers.
Historically a lot of classism, homophobia, racism, moralism etc. were ingredients to that, too.
The point is inclusion is important and the more common system has to adapt. Financing schools in the USA is faulty in any case and how they are and how political they are lead is another big problem, besides them functioning as child care and education for factory workers, instead of what they could be.
When I was in middle school I was put in an inclusion social studies class, despite that being my best topic by far. At the time I was a little shit who was frustrated by it. Not by the students, but by the patronizing way they spoke to us. I got to know the kids with more special needs and they weren’t dumb.
I hated being in the inclusion class because I loved history and wanted to go faster and the simplified topics and repetition frustrated me to no end. But looking back I can see it built up some empathy in me that I was frustrated for these kids and the state of their education that they dealt with daily.
I can’t imagine going through their entire general education being spoken down to in a baby voice every single day.
While I accept that it could be the case here - and having read up a bit on it rings true - there is a real danger of “educated” people often liberal with a slight to conservative or neoliberal, to tell people how education really works and that alternatives are wrong or false, often on grounds that are very flimsy or completely propagandistic.
True, but at least in this case it seems pretty clear cut that phonics is definitely superior to Reading Recovery & it’s derivatives, as well as that Reading Recovery was pushed in large part due to a similar kind of “market disruption” mentality that guides a lot of modern Tech corporations (even down to forming cults of personality around their equivalent of “innovators”).
Basically, Dr. Marie Clay came up with the Reading Recovery theory back in the 70s out of a genuine desire to help kids who were struggling to read, but her methodology was flawed, and she did so in an era where there really hadn’t been much research into how people learned to read, so no one could really dispute whether her theory was correct or not at that point. Despite this, her theory became heavily pushed due to it being the shiny new thing that promises to revolutionize teaching, and of course, a large part of this push was definitely coming from companies that produce educational material looking to make money off of selling this program to teachers & schools. It wasn’t until the 90s that research was finally done that disproved Dr. Clay’s theory, and by that point, there was enough people & money invested in Reading Recovery that it became a classic case of science having to fight an uphill battle against entrenched capitalist interests.
Also, the class aspect of this push is kinda interesting, as this new method of teaching reading seems to have been largely pushed onto kids from wealthier background first. However, the negative effects of Reading Recovery style programs were often masked by the fact that wealthier families could afford to pay for private tutoring when they noticed their kids were struggling. I.e., while these kids from wealthier background were being taught how to read via Reading Recovery methods in the classroom, their private tutors were teaching them to read via phonics. But from the outside view of teachers, school officials, policy makers, and proponents of Reading Recovery programs, it seemed like everything was fine and the Reading Recovery was working well, leading them to start pushing these programs more into schools with kids from background that aren’t nearly as wealthy. And naturally, it was only once the Reading Recovery programs started leaving the protective shield provided by the wealth of the labor aristocracy & petite bourgeoisie that its damage started becoming more apparent.
(Ironically, this also seems to have resulted in many wealthier school districts actually being more inclined to stick with Reading Recovery than poorer school districts, as their wealth continues to leave many parents, teachers and school officials oblivious to the damage that these programs would be doing to their kids without the counterbalancing force offered by private tutoring.)
Of course with all this said, it’s still worth acknowledging that Reading Recovery isn’t solely responsible for the increase in illiteracy seen in modern US society. People from poor and/or minority communities were already experiencing lower literacy rates compared to communities of wealthy white people long before Reading Recovery was a thing, so having the resources necessary to successfully implement educational programs definitely matters just as much as implementing “correct” educational programs.
tl:dr: Absolutely be skeptical of libs trying to push “correct” or “innovative” educational programs (because they’re often blind as to how class differences can effect such programs), but at least in this case it seems pretty clear cut that Reading Recovery is bullshit that was being pushed under the guise of innovation.
I haven’t listened to the podcast but English as the language theyre learning has gotta add a whole other level of difficulty. Like Spanish you know the vowel sounds are all the same, Norwegian updates their spelling so that it always matches the actual pronunciation, Korean literally puts how to say the word symbolically in each part of a character, Japanese hiragana and katakana is always the same, Cree syllabics are one-to-one (although it was designed that way intentionally), the only other ones that’d be hard is like Chinese or Japanese Kanji and stuff like that but those usually have a pronounciation hint character/radicle in their as well.
English is like that but with wildly different rules on top of bad pedagogy, yikes.
English is definitely a bear of a written language, but it’s so much worse than you think
Despite English’s weird spellings and exceptions, there aren’t that many different sounds and there is a very effective way to teach how those sounds correlate to written words. It’s just that no one used that method for like 30 years because it was “too old fashioned”.
I’ve lived in several blended homes with other parents and they always like to trade off on reading to kids at night. It’s easier when you can take turns. But also there’s a common frustration with the act of reading to a child becoming boring after a while. And I think a lot of it has to do with fluency. I’ve heard many grown adults struggle to read books meant to children. It’s not that they couldn’t read the words. It’s that they were so busy reading off the page that they couldn’t control their inflection, add drama, or discuss the contents of the story while reading. It’s kind of like watching someone whoMs really good at the piano sight read music they’re not familiar with for the first time. You can hear the song come out, but it’s stunted and awkward and not very expressive.
It’s hard if they don’t realise storytelling is a performing art and you’re communicating the book to the child, not to yourself, so you have to send the images in your head to the child.
This is really fascinating stuff. It explains a lot of things I’ve noticed about other people in my life I’ve known who are poor readers. I’ve always been a great reader for as long as I can remember, had parents who helped teach me to read and read with me and all that which can help a lot. The “incorrect” way that school are teaching to kids is to basically guess what words means instead of trying to memorize the phonetic pronunciation of individual words to commit them to memory. I remember in high school there being activities where we would go around the room and different students would read different parts of like a book or textbook out loud. And as someone lucky enough to have learned how to read well, I was always flabbergasted when I would hear some people read. I’d be reading along in the book and thinking “what the fuck, they’re saying words that aren’t even on this page. How is this even possible to mess up this badly that you’re not just mispronouncing words you’re literally inserting words out of nowhere” and the research would suggest that’s its because they were literally just reading the first part of the word and guessing the rest of it. Zero, like, base line understanding of what letter combinations make what sounds. No wonder some people hate reading it’s basically playing a guessing game 😳
I remember there was a opinion piece saying that Education in the Eastern Bloc and China is a tool for the government to control people.
I guess not able to read is a way to not turn red
it’s even more nonsensical than that. governments have been trying and failing to stamp this out for 20 years. the people behind it built a cult following in elementary education circles and rebranded their curriculum so they could keep peddling their nonsense, changing the description to avoid falling afoul of the law but without changing the content. it’s literally that the publishing company had a much larger marketing budget than any of the researchers saying “no, stop”. so until public media started running the story, there was no meaningful education for teachers telling them " this theory of reading education is wrong".
it’s capitalism eating itself.
You’ll think that people look at public services like education as a product are stupid but we all know deep inside that the commodification of education has the end goal of making more divisive with premium private education for the elite and the bare minimal for the ‘‘public’’ education (which can be run by religious institution just like the good olde days).
Ultimately this is just a way to stratify society with more defined castes
I’m flashing back to my middle school days when most of the kids in “accelerated programs” came from wealthy families
That rhetoric perfectly tracks with the charter school push to turn education into job training programs for K-8 students
History will be provided by a for-profit coloration, so no need to worry about that bit. If you go into school knowing how to read, then great. We’ll group you in with the kids who will be of use to any of the Fortune 500 companies. Otherwise, we’ll group you with the “other” low-skilled kids. The only critical thinking skills that will be used will be the ones that teach you how to solve business problems
Charter schools are stupid because it’s never about education. We all know what they do with ‘‘problematic’’ students.
This is just a last filter before dumping the leftover into military school in this shitty Folgers coffee called the privatized education system
Something something Parenti talk Literacy being abhorred by the right because it leads them to read which leads them to the left
It’s almost ironic because literacy is what created a caste of liberals within the USSR and China that turns up to be more pro-western post 80s.
Don’t you love how ‘’‘totalitarian’‘’ regimes just like to sabotage themselves
Found it! It’s just some schmuck on twitter tho https://twitter.com/akoz33/status/1232052025514496002
And yeah the intelligentsia in the east block is an interesting thing to look at. On the other hand, theres too far and you get pol pot
British & Polish citizen, perm. resident of Japan. Reaganite, Thatcherite, Zionist, anti-“Green Utopia”
Bill “The Good Billionaire” Gates saw to that about 20 years ago and it started with an amazing piece of neoliberal propaganda called “Waiting For Superman.” His buddy in the “reform” movement was
, by the way, and even arranged to have special uncredentialed classes full of “students” to victimize in his spare time.The real shit is when you realize that Bill Gates (and most other western “philanthropy” in Africa) is basically just privatizing public services while simultaneously exerting a extreme degree of personal control over the educational curriculum of almost an entire continent.
He isn’t being nice, he’s building a pool of human resources, for anything he wants.
And they will call him a saint for it.
Gates isn’t some scheming evil supermind. He’s just a clueless mf in a vile system, thinking he’s doing good.
I struggle to believe that:
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/08/bill-gates-global-health-policy/
“Wah, greyzone”
It’s well-sourced and from three years ago when they were less weird.
Gates “has got a mechanistic view of global health, in terms of looking for silver bullets. All of the things he supports are largely framed as silver bullets …
While the article made me rethink my initial statement, Gates still strikes me as a
type who has convinced himself that what he does will save the world. I also think Gates believes in eugenics
He’s just a clueless mf in a vile system, thinking he’s doing good.
sounds like something a PR team would want to propagandize people into believing
Melinda straight up left his ass the second the Epstein connections came to light. I don’t think he’s entirely clueless.
I don’t think she was either
Exactly, she left once they became public. Proximity to power is a helluva drug
Waiting For Superman
Sounds like a lost Nietzche manuscript.
Godot vs Superman: Infinity Wait.
I mean even “educated” PhDs who “read a lot” are still stupid as fuck and cannot for the life of them realize that they are being swayed by propaganda so I think the problem goes way deeper than just basic reading comprehension
Actually now that I think about it, solving reading comprehension is a lot easier of a task than trying to un-brainwash these dumb “well-read Politics and Prose” liberals who drive around with NPR stickers on the back of their cars and laptops…
stupid as fuck and cannot for the life of them realize that they are being swayed by propaganda
These doesn’t have anything to do with being ‘stupid’. It’s a matter of choosing theoretical frameworks for navigating the word. I don’t see any non-arbitrary reason for choosing a framework that writes-off most of common discourse as propaganda, even if that’s the path I chose based on the contingencies of my own life.
They’re not swayed by propaganda, they benefit greatly and in return also uphold the domestic capitalist system and international imperialism
While they do benefit they are stll employes most of the time. And not actual capitalists.
I general i think Highly credentialed people are people that rank very high in the “agreablness” part of the horoscope. In fact the eductation system signals 3 things a floor of intelligence, a floor of “concientiousnes” and high “agreablness” They are most likley to follow on rules and authority. This makes them easiert to be brainwashed. Thats why pmcs tend to be spinless.
That makes a lot of sense, yea definitely not all PhDs are servants of capital
I was thinking specifically more about the intelligentsia subset of PhDs
Well you are rigth, that phds generally live cushy lives. And those material conditions certainly play a role in them liking watever system they are in. Thats of course the main factor. Even if they are not capitalists. But i think some people are just more likley to follow authority. And i think having a phd hihghly correlates with that so i wanted to compliment your comment.
For example even the nyt opeds were selected to tat job because they were already brainwashed. Rather than the opossite.
I was admitted to college as a secondary Ed major, and switched to CS and became a STEM lord because of what I saw when I did my first observation in a classroom. I realized that America does not give a fuck about the next generation, and that I would have to do education as a second career after I was financially established, because it’s incredibly difficult to be a good teacher and be there for all your students when you’re financially struggling yourself.
The school administrators don’t care, the textbook industry does not care, and sometimes the parents don’t care. It’s very difficult
