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?
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
Jesus I’m so fucking glad that didn’t happen to me.
I can talk humanities and social sciences at a graduate level and am comfortable with the physical side of trauma medicine, but STEM subjects are really difficult for me for more or less the same reason. Shitty public/Catholic schooling meant I effectively lost out on a meaningful primary and secondary science and mathematics education. Now I'm a scientific horticulturist because I thought horticulture was a fake science that I could sneak my way into because I'm decent with plants. It isn't though. Outside of ecology, it's the ultimate interdisciplinary physical science. I've had to learn mathematics through analytical trigonometry and calculus but even basic algebra barely makes sense to me. Chemistry and physics are totally lost on me. I spent those preteen/teenage years building an intuitive knowledge base for the subjects that interest me but I feel the effects of an underfunded public school with any kind of super technical field that I never had childhood exposure to. It fundamentally doesn't click.