More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don’t fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
Yeah the thing that explains this is Republicans spending 40 years (and a lot of campaign money) to destroy public education in every single way possible.
And more recently, brain rotted iPad / tiktok babies. Economy is garbage, parents work all the time, are still broke and stressed, hand the kid a distraction rectangle as a pacifier, it basically melts their ability to focus or concentrate, while also causing addiction to the rectangle.
Its another one of those things like Climate Change: Once you can see the problem in the world, prominently and obviously, it is way too late to fix without extreme coordination and effort.
And yeah, as other have noted, this makes Democracy unworkable, because democracy is just a marketing campaign battle.
So, cyberpunk dystopia, technofeudalism, here we come.
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I thought I was 2nd grade wtf!
If a NYT article is considered a “high benchmark”, literacy in the US must be really terrible. I consider the NYT as educated, yes, but not exactly difficult. And I’m not even a native speaker.
There’s something ironic about how poorly this is written. I choose to believe that they’re doing it intentionally; If only to preserve my sanity.
That’s not really a good scenario for a modern democracy to find itself in for reasons that are unfortunately already very clear
I think one way we see this play out frequently is watching people debate issues unproductively with obviously zero theory of mind for their opposition due to one or both parties involved having poor communication skills.
you mean how like every time someone ‘argues’ with you on lemmy they call you names like zionist? or tells you how stupid and ignorant you are because they are ‘very well informed’ and you are just a stupid moron who is head is full of lies and propaganda?
In fairness there’s way more shameless propagandists on lemmy than anywhere else I’ve been shy of conservative reddit. But it’s close.
Don’t worry chatgpt will fix this, they’ll explain all the hard concepts for us dummies with only a bit of advertising and corporate propaganda injected.
/s - fixed it for you
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I’ll take the win, I get to be elite at something
You were always elite in our hearts, Shortstack
I’ve studied this a little before (at graduate school) and I don’t think we know exactly why, mostly because it’s a ton of factors and none of the different camps in academia seem to agree on one.
Your standard Lemmy user may appreciate that late stage capitalism probably is the biggest factor, since poverty and illiteracy are hand in hand. The professor I RA’d for, for instance, just did projects that gave families money and they just did better. It was really that simple, since a ton of this is in the home, even before starting preschool.
But others have argued that there’s also an anti-intellectualism in our culture (even before MAGA, kids go “ew nerds”) and even more say it’s pedagogy. That includes theory, like whole word vs phonics (my advisor spoke of the reading wars of the 90s like he had PTSD lol) as well as practice, like memorization vs reading for reading sake.
And, of course, the government under Bush Jr. really did the opposite of research by enacting the bipartisan No Child Left Behind which fucked both poor folk with contextless “accountability practices” while pushing soulless memorization.
Sorry for a long rant, just, y’know in 2025 onwards it’s easy to forget that education has been routinely fucked, usually by conservatives. I can always explain more though, just don’t want to make this comment too long, lol
They were supposed to bring critical thinking to the high schools and conservative parents in the US threw a shit fit because they truly believed their kids would no longer believe what they did. We never got critical thinking in high school and most people don’t get an introduction to it until college.
Critical thinking should start in kindergarten and by third grade children should be able to create a simple opinion based on facts they understand. We are doing such a disservice to young people it isn’t funny.
I’m not sure if it played out quite like that originally, though I guess there would be some people’s parents thinking that way, especially in 2026. Keep in mind, NCLB was bipartisan.
In 2003, though, I read that the reality for a majority of schools is a bit more stupid, they don’t understand testing and statistics at the federal level and designed a system of accountability that promoted teach-to-the-test methods, which is mostly memorization. That’s because low performing schools (read: poor schools) got punished for not meeting an arbitrary test score, so it was a go to survival tactic.
Conservatives still get their desired result, though, which is an education system with minimal critical thinking practiced. Perhaps it was a poison pill, or something, given it’s made Americans by and large even dumber since then (and we were already doing bad for other reasons and Reagan).
This was back in 2012ish when the Republican Party platform was the following.
“Knowledge-Based Education We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
Yeah, can’t have it in high school because that’s lib-rule college shit.
That’s around when the tea party movement was taking off, so that tracks. You see the seeds of what we see today back even in 2008, too; but to bring it back to reading deficits, we’ve had problems long before then (which, obviously, snowball into what we see today, e.g. Florida banning sociology and such).
Ooh, I kind of forgot about the madness of schools being funded mainly by their local neighborhood, making schools in poor neighbourhoods poor. Could it be that increased segregation or relative marginalization have had an impact significant enough to bring the mean down?
That’s quite correct, but it’s two fold. Even if you have funding from the state and feda (which we do get to offset this effect), the home lives of these kids are generally much worse than middle and upper neighborhoods, which also brings down the mean. We’re talking pollution, 80 hour work weeks, higher incarceration, etc. it all brings down the mean.
Then the feds have the gall to REDUCE funding if schools can’t bring themselves to by the bootstraps? It’s awful. That said, Obama admin did help a little in this regard, since at least they did listen to the educational research on this.
The fact that it’s called “critical thinking” rubs me the wrong way. Makes it sound like there’s also another way of thinking even though the alternative is just not thinking
liberal parents also hate critical thinking. it’s not a partisan issue.
i live an in ultra liberal city and the parents are 100% against critical thinking here too. they just want their orthodoxies taught instead of conservative ones.
If you can produce official platform comments that the Democratic party was against critical thought like the Republicans are on record saying then I could believe you.
Otherwise I am going to chalk it up to your excessive devil’s advocate nonsense.
Democratic party supports identity politics. that’s the antithesis of critical thinking… lol
one of the key reasons Harris’ campaign was so terrible and was poorly supported was her active embrace of ID politics above common sense economics. to the point that many minorities didn’t support her because they recognized how backwards Democratic were on immigration and other social issues.
and the Dems continue to support his nonsense despite how incredibly unpopular it makes them.
Yeah, that is what I thought.
So you think ID politics is critical thinking?
Or is critical thinking… not judging people by their race and sex, but evaluating them on their individual merits and circumstances, each with their own set of concerns?
No, that you were just playing devil’s advocate with nothing to back you up.
You are confusing critical race theory with critical thinking. I had a heck of a time researching this because all that would pop up in a search was critical race theory. It was annoying.
You have no idea what teaching critical thinking actually is, do you? It’s teaching thought exercises tin elementary that make students evaluate how they form their opinions and how to vet sources, in college or AP high school it turns into critical theory and trying write irrefutable dissertations of your position. It isn’t just CRT and it sure isn’t “identity politics“ though identity politics (which is an abhorrent term btw) can be defended through critical theory, see Judith Butler for instance. Anyhow you’re kinda dumb.
Oh I know that people who use insults to try and ‘win’ arguments are not people who know what critical thinking is.
And you are completely wrong about what critical thinking is, and proving my very point that it’s been turned into nonsense indoctrination treating Judith Butler type figures as geniuses when they are hacks who’s work is based on the thesis denying critical thinking is even possible, because we are all trapped by our race or sex or nationality and to be evil beings.
Judith Butler’s and her cohorts work is basically taking the concept of original sin in Christianity, and just replacing the word ‘sin’ with race or sex. It’s a dogmatic belief system.
If you had critical thinking skills you’d be able to recognize that. Critical thinking doesn’t lead to belief systems. It tears them down. If you are trying to create a belief system or teach it as truth, you are not engaging in i critical thought, you are indoctrinating people. And one way to do that is to shame, shun and harass the non-believer.
You are believer.
Where and when does Butler state in any of their works that we are “trapped” by race or gender, etc. It’s on you to challenge her dissertations academically. That’s the whole freaking point of critical theory as a whole. It’s why weirdos like Jordan Peterson can’t win actual intellectual arguments against Žižek in an actual academic setting and have to result to grifting on X and youtube. FOH, you’re clearly mentally challenged and reactionary.
there is anti-intellectualism in universities now. it’s rampant. one of the reasons i left my PhD was seeing how bad it was getting back in 2010.
because intellectual thought is dangerous to tribal allegiance, and people prioritize tribal allegiance above all else.
(interested in more!)
Sure, I’ll give you another piece of the puzzle: reading (and language deficits in general) start young. Like, very young-- by age 2, you’ll see a difference in working class families and upper class families by “6 months of development” or more, depending on the study. (I lost my Zotero citations, but you can search Google Scholar for “differences in vocabulary by socioeconomic status of toddlers” to find a few).
Experts try to offset that by promoting not just preschool, but early childhood education from birth onwards. Of course, widespread implementation stalled in Congress but you can still see some districts with at least free education at age 3, and you do have (or had?) language support for toddlers through disability services. It’s very minor compared to the need, though.
That said, there’s still a billion other factors. Free breakfast and lunch at school, for instance-- easy enough to pass in a sane state, makes a tremendous difference at all grades. Parent involvement programs that are sensitive to parental schedules (like night shifts) and home language and so on. It only makes a dent, though- a statistically significant dent, but until family life isn’t as stressful and difficult for the working class, it’s a bandaid over a gushing wound.
Thanks for the thoughtful, informative comments. It’s people like you who make Lemmy what it is. Appreciate your contributions!
This statement is kind of glossing over things:
“If you can read a New York Times article…”
It’s not that most people can’t read the words, and possibly understand the basic surface level of what it says. But at the "6th grade level "they’re sometimes failing to recognize sarcasm/tone, potential biases, implied meanings, and the greater context of things not directly stated in the article that would impact the full understanding.
Yes! It’s actually an important distinction to make between being able to read the article and being able to comprehend it and then furthermore being able to contextualise it.
Interestingly, I believe this is somewhat similar, but also a bit of a digression so forgive me lol. I am autistic and many people I interact with don’t notice unless I tell them. My report actually says, that, particularly with verbal social interactions, although it can appear that I understand everything I’m actually only getting that kind of “surface level” information - hence I can miss social cues and such. I can get along okay with that surface level information because I can still participate in the conversation with the bare bones.
I think this is somewhat similar to how some people can read - they can read the words, get the general gist but they miss a lot of the implications that aren’t directly stated. This is why you get a lot of people who can regurgitate kind of “headline news” but don’t actually understand the issue being discussed - they understand the formed sentences but not the full picture. I’m not sure if that makes sense but that’s how I am starting to understand the difference that some people have between reading and comprehension. And how it explains that sometimes someone can sound like they might know what they are talking about - until the conversation gets to a certain point.
Honestly, the education backsliding is one of the tragedies that will be take us generations to fix an education is the best defense against propaganda
Is it backsliding or has it always been this bad?
It’s backsliding It’s the constant war for defunding education that Republicans fight as soon as they get in
Definitely backsliding.
We used to teach phonics, now a lot of schools use some bullshit called three-cueing which literally teaches kids to guess words they don’t recognize.
“By the 1990s and early 2000s, research began to conclude that phonics was the necessary method of teaching reading to children, with an American congressional panel in 2000 concluding that the essential components of reading instruction were “vocabulary, comprehension and phonics”. Programs began to re-incorporate phonics around this time, although three cueing remained a part of curriculums in the approaches of balanced literacy and whole language.[1][4] As of 2020, an estimated 75% of American teachers used three cueing”
I agree that we have made recent changes that were bad. But we’ve also expanded access to free lunches in some places, decreased some extreme poverty metrics, have expanded AuDD diagnosis and treatment, raised the minimum wage in a handful of large metro areas, etc.
Is it obvious that a worse teaching method (and the many other bits of bad policy) does more damage than the improvements? This isn’t clear to me.
A worse teaching method would produce many generations of uneducated people. And education is important because even with all these advancements made right now, if in the future the people fail to keep up with it, its going to be nothing.
I agree bad teaching practices can have knock-on effects (though I don’t think knowledge of phonetics was at real risk of dying out?). But so can bad health outcomes, learning environments, etc?
I think, especially in education, that effect sizes are difficult to judge. And I can’t find good data for reading ability over time. So I am very interested in what we are sure about/evidence is.
Something that I did find is this. Its US-only and doesn’t actually provide the numbers, but it tells you the general trend.
Ah, found one that does. 2022’s decline seems pretty significant, in both mentioned subjects.
But so can bad health outcomes, learning environments, etc?
Yeah that’s possible. Maybe in a few years, if the statistics stay the same, it’s a teaching failure.
Considering the post and comments are about literacy specifically, and those things you mentioned don’t really have anything to do with literacy directly, I’m gunna go with yes.
I don’t think specificity is enough to guarantee a large effect. We have tons of homeopathic ointments for extremely specific diseases, and their effect is entirely negligible compared to, say, improved sanitation.
Sorry are you saying that something like literacy, which has well-studied and accepted pathways to widespread adoption, is comparable in any way to homeopathy, which is pseudoscientific nonsense from start to end?
Because lol no, homeopathy is nonsense regardless of whatever other nonsense the education department is doing…?
I’m saying that just because something is specifically intended for something doesn’t imply that it has a larger effect than other things which have broad effects.
So no, the fact that homeopathy is psudoscience is irrelevant for my example (and the argument as you phrased it above). I read you, effectively, as saying:
because teaching is intended to influence literacy, and poverty reduction influences many things, teaching has a bigger effect
There’s a reason why Republicans are constantly cutting school funding, and pushing idiotic policies that basically force school resources to get diverted and underperformers to be passed regardless of readiness.
it’s never been better if you are rich.
if you are not rich, it’s backsliding.
same with the economy too. if you are rich, you’ll never done better, but if you aren’t, you can’t get ahead no matter how hard you try.
40 years ago the difference between being rich and poor, didn’t matter as much in terms of education and opportunity. there wasn’t a huge gulf between rich schools and poor schools. now there is a huge gulf between rich schools and middle class schools.
This seems to be hard to tell from the data. While the others are right that there have been recent downward movement, the country is old and we don’t have data going back very far.
basic literacy has almost certainly increased (meaning one can write a sentence about onesself, and read it). The large majority of Americans meet this bar (and the rest are children or quite old/sick), while only ~80% met this bar 100 years ago.
But it seems we haven’t kept data on reading level for very long. The wikipedia page is pretty good afaict. I suspect what actually matters for democracy and such is the literacy rate of voters, though I haven’t seen great data on it. We know a large share of folks don’t vote, I would guess this correlates very strongly with literacy.
Also, there’s a relevant confounder here (which the wikipedia page highlights): one can be american and not speak english, but still be literate in their childhood language.
I know you didn’t mean it but the irony of this poorly written comment is downright humorous.
Valid, I’m using voice to text and was in a rush. At least no one can ever accuse me of being an LLM.
This is why Trump resonates with so much of the country. They can understand him.
The idiots version of a smart man.
he also legitimizes their problems that the liberal elites ignore.
the liberal elite basically think everyone should go to college or get fucked. and most of the country… doesn’t go to college and is getting fucked.
No no. The elites think we should go to college AND get fucked.
This but unironically. Many people’s first time even paying attention or participating in politics, I bet.
Why hello there, hyper-literate fellows. Fancy exchanging some five-syllable words? Perhaps a few phrases? Or cock jokes? Cock jokes are nice too. I am hyper-literate, you see, so my cock jokes are veeeeeery long
May I introduce you to the phrase: bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
It bounces when you say it
The irony is if you’re smart enough to read a nyt article you should be smart enough to realize what a rag it is. Unless you support genocide I guess.
Plato’s cave
Catch 22 lol
Another day, another time I have to copy-paste this comment clarifying the 54% stat:
For clarity: this is based on piaac test results. The literacy test results are sorted into 6 categories (1-5 and <1) for comparing the distribution internationally. 54% of Americans score less than 3, compared to top-scoring Japan and top-english-speaking Australia at approximately 35% and 45%. The task description for level 3:
Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing. They can combine various processes (accessing, understanding and evaluating) if required by the task . Adults at this level can compare and evaluate multiple pieces of information from the text(s) based on their relevance or credibility. Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy, including continuous, noncontinuous, mixed. Information may be distributed across multiple pages, sometimes arising from multiple sources that provide discrepant information. Understanding rhetorical structures and text signals becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially when dealing with complex digital texts that require navigation. The texts may include specific, possibly unfamiliar vocabulary and argumentative structures. Competing information is often present and sometimes salient, though no more than the target information. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inferencing. Tasks at Level 3 also often demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate text content to answer accurately. The most complex tasks at this level include lengthy or complex questions requiring the identification of multiple criteria, without clear guidance regarding what has to be done
I could not find which source originally cited level 2 as “6th grade” equivalent, though the oecd recommends against drawing that parallel
This is a really complicated statement to refer to test questions that probably say shit like “The ball is blue on Tuesdays. It’s Saturday today. What color is the ball?”
Exactly. Show me an example question for this test and then we’ll talk
More realistically, it would be stuff like
The sign over a parking spot says no parking Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Select the times and dates that you are allowed to park there.
9:30 AM, Tuesday
8:00 PM, Sunday
5:15 PM, Thursday
12:00 PM, Monday
rainbow color, because ball is gay on Saturday and it’s only blue on Tuesdays because of cisheteronromativity that is enforced at it’s workplace.
https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/piaac/piaac-released-items.html
Scroll down for samples.
Can’t read the New York Times? Probably because it’s behind a pay wall.
Have they tried to create a free account, or log in?
You can gain access to limited free articles, news alerts, select newsletters, podcasts and some daily games.
this didn’t work
