If all natural-born citizens has to go through the naturalization process before getting the right to vote, trump would never have been elected.
Not just because they don’t know the 100 (I think they changed it to 120 now?) questions, but also because they would not pass the:
“Have you ever been a member of any totalitarian party?
Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?
Have you ever advocated the overthrow of any government by force or violence?
Have you ever persecuted any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion?” Questions(Fun fact: They can revoke your citizenship after the fact if they catch you lying, or if you do any “terrorist” activity within 5 years of naturalization. Jan 6 riotor types would never pass this. As a naturalized citizen, I’m kinda dreading this since last November)
I mean yeah, all those topics are covered in HS civics class…… Which they skipped.
Skipped or failed… Either or.
School starts at home (for many parents, this is an unbelievable idea). I had a classmate who is an anti-vaxxer, even though we did biology together and learned how vaccines worked. My classmate is alright as a person, but I think her environment outside of school made her not one of the sharpest tool in the class and never paid attention to the lessons. My point is that, if the home environment is not conducive to learning, the person is less likely to be intellectually driven. I know there are exceptions and it boils down to “nature versus nurture”, but as mentioned already, an environment that does not foster learning makes the person less likely to pursue knowledge.
Why do you think Reaganomics was implemented? If both parents work, they aren’t going to be able to spend as much time teaching their kids to read.
Some parents are genuinely lazy. More often than not, a typical phrase some parents would use is “didn’t they teach you that in school?”
This is also a big thing. If I may add to it, the environment may also help add maturity needed for certain topics. My HS had a banking and personal finance class. Many kids just didn’t care, others didn’t have any way to visualize it as they didn’t really get an allowance, and those with jobs who would benefit the most were often not taking the class because they needed to work.
I was lucky to be there. Really that I was able to credit by exam some classes; which gave me space in my junior and senior year to fill.
This is pretty much all you need to know about the state of the United States. It’s being run by 10 year old imbeciles.
no, its being run by greedy, assholes, who know exactly what they’re doing. The 10 year old imbeciles are their republican voters and the yes-men they hire to do their bidding.
If those Americans could read they’d be very upset about that!
Republicans at work. A dumb electorate is the easiest to manipulate.
To make it worse year by year the republicans continue to defund education, remove sciences, sex education and history from being taught in schools. While trying to force christian religion in public schools.
What a timeline America is going through.
Also to sloppify all media.
TIL at least 46% of Americans can read.
It’s about 80% that can read. Only about 10% can understand the concept of a metaphor though.
For us foreigners, 6th grade is around 10 / 11 years old?
Yes, about. Ten years is peak reading for most Americans. And we wonder why they f-ck up the world.
Yep. God help us.
A little older. I was 11 in grade 6, but I was also the youngest student.
I’m curious what it is for other countries so off to do a little searching…
Update:
Right, it’s better but not wildly so when spread across the EU and lower in some places. This page is from the Irish Central Statistics office with 2023 numbers and puts us at 21% at or below the level 1 (at or below a grade 6 equivalent). On that page (2023 numbers) the US is at 28% so that 54% statistic in the OP smells a bit.
The main difference between Ireland and the US is that we’re only 5% below level 1 where the US is at 12%.
For reference, Portugal has 15% below level 1.
Here’s the definition of level 1:
Here’s the relevant graph with all levels in picture format but you can get the individual numbers by going to the page and hovering over the individual levels.
Japan and the Nordics crushing it to nobody’s surprise.
FYI, Portugal has a massive disjunction in educational and reading level between people who grew up before the Revolution that overthrew fascism and those who grew up after.
Fascism definitely kept people ignorant: mandatory education back then - and Fascism lasted until 1974, so we’re not talking about the first half of the XX century - was only 4 years, which is just about enough to learn to read and that barely so, and access to anything beypnd that was nearly impossible for most people as the country was very agrarian and dirt poor.
I’m Portuguese and some of my older aunts are functionality illiterate, whilst most of my generation in my extended family (so around 14 people in our 40s and 50s) have degrees - which shows the veritable chasm in the availability and quality of Education before and after the Revolution.
The point being that minus that bulk of illiterate and near-illiterate old people who grew up during Fascism, the picture for Portugal changes a lot and, frankly, any 1st World country which is close to present day Portugal without having a whole generation that lived under a dictatorship which denied Education beyond the very basic to most people, doesn’t really have an excuse for it.
That’s an absolutely fascinating insight. Thanks!
Some years ago I saw some graph that showed the proportion of people in each country of Europe whose maximum formal education level was Primary Education, Secondary Education and Tertiary Education an Portugal had lots of people with only Primary Education, then few with up to Secondary Education and then lots again with Tertiary Education, and having that gap in the middle is quite unique in Europe.
The difference between the importance of Education for the Fascists (earlier, none at all, later just about enough to make them cheap factory workers) and for the post-Revolution governments (which were all leftwing), is like night an day, and Portugal definitelly shows how it’s possible to invest in Education and undo many decades of severe under-Education of the population though you can’t really undo the damage to the older generations (even with Adult Education, which was available if you lived in cities, but only used by a fraction of those who could’ve benefited from it).
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 reads like a description of the D&D PHB.
…is that why so many people think they get an extra attack when they do something other than an Attack action? Yes, that includes the Ready action. You get one hit if you ready an attack.
I cast 5th level numeracy on the goblins, integrating them by parts.
Hmmm so back in 6th grade when i would read the questions on the test and fond the answer to ome question in a different question on a different page was that level 3 reading?
Can we fix that by abolishing the department of education?
It’s only gonna get worse, isn’t it?I’m not disagreeing with you (I don’t know enough about the department’s operations), but I can understand why people are unhappy with the ED (Department of Education). It has existed for almost 40 years, and has spent tens (sometimes hundreds) of billions of dollars annually.
The result: Well, most Americans’ reading level, as highlighted in this post. Also, a shocking number of people can’t even name a single country in Africa – a big continent with more than 50 countries to choose from. Also, college borrowers in the US owe ~$1.5 trillion to the ED.
Should the ED be abolished? Honestly, I’m way to ignorant to even make an educated guess. But after so many decades, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and $trillions of debt owed by students, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that something should at least change.
What you’re describing isn’t really a failure of the education system. It’s a reflection of the average American mindset. I was born in the US and grew up in the public school system. I loved math and science, and while I struggled with the rules of grammar, I still loved reading. I have always had a love of learning new things.
But most people aren’t like that. Not just in America, but across the world. A true love of learning is rare, and I think that’s because learning is hard. It requires humility, effort, and the being able to admit that one might be wrong. It means questioning long held beliefs and sometimes changing parts of yourself completely. That’s a deeply uncomfortable prospect and many people avoid it.
I think most people fall sleep while leaning on the third tier of Maslow’s pyramid (belonging and social identity.) The next level, where self-reflection and self-actualization begins, is hard to climb because it means hanging question marks on their long-held ideas and beliefs. They choose the safety of clinging to comfort and routine.
The current controversy over dismantling the US Department of Education is a complex issue that can’t be fully unpacked in a short reply on the internet. But in my view, what’s driving the American zeitgeist toward authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism is this resistance to growth and change. Internalizing new ideas means re-evaluating what you’ve always believed. For many, that feels like a threat. And instead of rising to meet the challenge, they’d rather pull everything down to their level, where they feel safe.
But, at least for me, the climb is worth it. Continuing to learn means accepting discomfort. It means growing past who you were in order to become someone better. It’s how we find purpose, empathy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive.
By design. Learndt particular individuals tend not to vote for Nazis.
Yep, going to report this. It’s not a meme … it is actually fact and documentation for our eventual Idiocracy future.
Just kidding about the report of course.
Op would be very upset if he could read this.
The podcast called Sold a Story talks about how the school systems adopted a curriculum that doesn’t teach kids how to read. They are more like mimicking literacy. It gives appearances they they are reading but they aren’t comprehending.
Honestly, people make more of this than it is. I say that as someone whoes reading level in the 8th grade was rated “post-High School” in tests. Though IIRC, that particular test wasn’t considered accurate past a 10th grade reading level or so. Suffice it to say, though, I was always rated at least a few grade levels higher than my actual grade level when it comes to reading.
If you pick up examples of post-High School writing, you’ll find it’s hard to read. Basically, check any abstract on a paper for a technical field. It’ll be full of field-specific jargon and long sentences. Copy and paste it into a writing assistant like Hemmingway, and it will scream at you to simplify the sentence structure.
Converting to terms of Lexile level, Fellowship of the Ring has a rating of 860L. By a conversion chart, we would expect 50% of students to be able to read it by the spring of 4th grade. Even the bottom 10% of students can read it by the beginning of 10th grade.
That’s a relatively hard book; harder than what most fiction asks of you. Of Mice and Men, which is on plenty of High School reading lists, only has a Lexile level of 630L. Conversely, Romeo and Juliet can go up to 1260L (though this varies depending on the editing of different editions).
I saw that “3min read” tag on the screenshot and thought, “Not for 54% of American adults.”
Me Fail English? That’s unpossible!
