More than half of USAmericans can't read to a sixth grade level, what does this actually mean?
More than half of USAmericans can't read to a sixth grade level, what does this actually mean?
Like, in a practical sense? Do you have any stories or examples from your life?
Worked for a major insurance company in rural Alabama. Had customers who couldn't even write their own name, all of them were black people living in an incredibly poor area. None of them seemed particularly dumb or something, they just didn't have access to education because of segregation. This wasn't that long ago (2010ish), but a 70 year old today was school aged before desegregation in Alabama. Especially in rural areas that didn't enforce it for a while.
I think a lot of people ignore the effect this has on stats like this.
I am certainly not immune to this. I struggle to read theory and find it difficult to understand. ADHD does not help.
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970.
Work emails have to be “dumbed down” to get co-workers to respond.
If I send the fully detailed email I want to, explaining what the situation is, what actions I need them to take and why, I get ghosted 9/10 and have to waste time getting their attention.
If instead I send one sentence emails I can at least get a response and back and forth conversation going. The majority of my co-workers have difficulty parsing anything more than like 2 paragraphs for relevant info.
Years ago I wrote here using an alt about how I had yelled in public at one of my chud neighbors because he put a trump sign on his lawn. I stalked him later on facebook (which I no longer use) and saw his writing about the encounter. I could barely understand what he was even talking about. This is a white boomer who works as a school bus driver. Becoming a school bus driver now is super hard actually, it requires six months of full-time training/education where I live, but I suspect that he got into school bus driving before all of that, because his writing looked almost like he had just smashed his keyboard with his hands. No punctuation, many spelling and grammatical mistakes. I remember he wrote "I'm" when he should have written "I am"—it was something like: "He doesn't know how nice of a guy I am," but he wrote it "He doesn't know how nice of a guy I'm." This guy also speaks with a heavy accent and only in short, simple sentences. I've worked as an ESL teacher for years, and I tell students now—many of them are perfectionists—that they already speak English better than some native speakers.
I don't know what level his literacy is at. I guess he is barely capable of communicating in writing and also able to sign and cash checks and buy things at the grocery store?
Another story: I work in a blue collar field which requires us to enter about four houses each day. 95% of houses have absolutely no books at all. Of the remaining 5% of houses with books, the vast majority are only bibles and cookbooks. 1% has books that are mostly for decoration. Another 1% or so has books that appear to have been read. I have only found a handful of houses with communist texts. Most of the houses with books that seem to have been read are just filled with liberal nonsense. (One Mormon landlord I met, who owned so many houses I think he was confused about the number, had dozens of Mormon-themed books in his basement, including even one book about overcoming doubt about Mormonism.) A coworker and I once entered the very rare American house that seemed to have hundreds of books. My coworker (white, in his thirties, has a high school education at best) didn't even notice them. I guess I just found this stunning. I was fascinated with the books' existence and wanted to examine them all, even if they were almost certainly all liberal nonsense (the owners were retired academics, one book I remember seeing there was something like "Hitler and Stalin"), but my coworker was still just glued to tiktok on his phone (and not communist tiktok). He's actually an okay guy. He so desperately wants to be a normal American, but he has two trans kids whom he seems to love, so it's basically impossible for him to be as reactionary as he would like to be. I talked with him for about a hundred hours when we worked together, never revealing that I was a communist and always avoiding obvious Marxist language, and only made modest progress at best. When we finished working together a few months ago, he had expressed interest in voting for RFK. He had also never heard of long covid and seemed to be concerned about it when I mentioned it. Then he went back to normal. As for me, I have trouble watching videos to learn things because they're just too slow, sometimes even if I set them at double speed. I prefer reading, although I do listen to a lot of books and podcasts, although I'm usually listening while I'm doing something else. Not to denigrate learning from videos since I know they can be useful and some people really get a lot out of them (especially when it comes to learning blue collar shit), but in my opinion, a random book is going to have a lot more information than a random youtube video.
The way it has manifested most clearly in the situations I've encountered it is a basic difference in approach to writing and reading as concepts. They don't see writing or reading as a way to communicate, they see it as a puzzle they have to solve by following rules, so that they can return to communicating once the puzzle is out of the way. Unless they're in very casual/online settings, or very motivated to find specific information, they avoid the puzzle because it's annoying.
It means that a large part of my job is just copying and pasting things that have already been sent to clients because they straight up do not read everything they're sent even if it's just three or four sentences in a paragraph. This has gotten worse since Covid. Loads of these people are business owners, too. I can't imagine working for them, it must be a fucking nightmare.
edit: It also means a lot of clients balk at text communication entirely insisting that it's easier to explain something over the phone. Inevitably, the thing they absolutely needed to monopolize someone's time for can be expressed in a single fucking simple sentence.
I would say I'm pretty smart, I have a job that relies on being intelligent and I excel at it.
My toddler and I are pretty much learning to read together. I didn't realize how much I stuggle to read, or at least read aloud, until I tried reading books to my son and it fucking rocked my world.
At first I thought the books were poorly written until I heard my wife reading a bunch of them without a problem.
I have dyslexia and legitimately didn’t learn how to read until I was about 13 years old. I mean, I got by on memorizing clusters of familiar looking phrases. Vibes-based reading. Oh and lots of cheating and lying about homework.
Two decades later, I still struggle compared to my peers. But I have had the privilege and luck to learn strategies to make up the difference.
I’m also an elementary school teacher. There’s only so hours I can try to teach my students to read. One of the biggest determining factors for reading ability/comprehension is how much vocabulary children are exposed to at an early age (0-4 years old). Reading to young children is crucial for language development, reading ability, and a slue of related skills. I don’t know enough about linguistics to know this for sure, but I’m assuming most of my students have parents with restricted vocabulary. And probably just not talked to enough as babies. Something just has to have affected their kids cognition in pernicious ways. Them getting COVID 8 or 9 times in their lives probably hasn’t helped either.
So the other week with my fifth graders we’re doing intro geometry stuff. I said something like, “A cylinder is just like the rectangular prism. It’s just that its base is a circle.” And like okay, I’ve been trying for half an hour trying to distill the absolute cluster fuck this caused in my students brains.
“It’s similar to this coffee mug. See? It has a circular base and it’s a prism. I know you’re thinking a prism has to look like the rectangular prism. It might be helpful to think of the cylinder as a circular prism.” I said, exasperated.
“What are you even saying?” a child asks rhetorically.
I eventually have to say something like, “Listen, if you can’t understand this it’s a skill issue and kinda cringe.” There’s a million little things that are hard to put into words how utterly dysfunctional some of these kids brains are and will be later in life.
Oh and I have to speak to these children’s parents on the reg, which is its own sort of hell.
I had a roommate who grew up in a poor farming community. He has dyslexia but the school had no special education funding to address that. As a result he grew up completely illiterate and stayed that way into his 30s. He passively absorbed libertarian ideas from the media he consumed, but lacked the ability to cross-check any of it. I remember him giving me a history lesson from a Call of Duty game.
It means they are easily propagandized to and won't have the critical reading skills to realize it
They can sound out words and know what most common words mean in isolation but their ability comprehend the meaning of a text is very basic, if present at all. Reading a short story, being able to summarize it and comment on themes, conflicts, character motivations, metaphors, allegory, how they relate to the story or certain characters are generally beyond them. Reading a political article and reading between the lines to get past the writer's bias is completely beyond them (tbf they would never read an article, they would watch a video or look at memes on facebook). That said, they have little to no ability to think critically so whatever authority figures beat into them when they were young becomes their worldview and everything that contradicts it is seen as an attack on them and society.
It means they have a difficult time parsing Parenti quotes. They can read it aloud, and they can tell you roughly what it's about, but they have difficulty following and comprehending the argument being made.
My mom once stated in a FB post that socialism was evil, when I asked her to elucidate "It just is!"
I had a coworker who was writing a note to the boss and misspelled several common words, including "house".
Often times people just avoid writing or typing in general, in favor of speech-to-text.
"I used ChatGPT Bazinga to write this message"
Sometimes you have to be brought back to reality and realize that the vast, vast majority of USAmericans have not grappled with materialism, thus nearly all the connections they make are like a 6th grader writing out their 5 paragraph essay for the high stakes exam that determines if their school gets funding or not.
US self made brain drain is going to hit the country like a comically large boomerang, it already has essentially.
Reading at a 6th grade level is reading for plot. Just like, what happened? Who was there? More advanced things like subtext, metaphor, and unreliable narrators come later.
I found this online the last time this topic came up: https://www.oxfordonlineenglish.com/english-level-test/reading
Go ahead and read the story, and imagine that a lot of people cannot read and understand it.
There's also this article about how many kids are taught to read badly: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ (amusingly, also available as a podcast)
What does it mean practically? Bad things. If you haven't read 1984, give it a go and think about why the authoritarian state benefitted from a diminished language.
Do you have any stories or examples from your life?
A middle school textbook is pretty basic stuff. Think of all problems, blunder, mistakes, accidents, etc happening all over the US every day that are caused by the average American having difficulty understanding anything written at a middle school level or above.
With the rise of the internet along with it's dark side and the expansion of right-wing media - maybe it was enviable that a repulsive republican like Trump would be president not just once but twice. And maybe it's no surprise that huge number of Americans fall prey to conspiracy theories and snake oil salesmen like RFK. A large percentage of Americans hate vaccines and think they cause disease.
My worry is that not only will the problem not get fixed - it will most likely get worse over time. There is a concerted, bipartisan effort to ignore the problem. The GOP likes an uneducated public. Trump even bragged about it. The democrats will remain unwilling to even acknowledge the problem because they think the public will lose faith in American exceptionalism, the American dream, etc.
I find the OECD's levels of literacy more instructive than grade level. This page has a short definition: https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/what-do-adult-literacy-levels-mean/
pdf page 75 (table 4.5) here has more detailed definitions: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2019/11/the-survey-of-adult-skills_d7f1bc16/f70238c7-en.pdf
Seems like reading skills go hand in hand with abstract and critical thinking skills.