I am certainly not immune to this. I struggle to read theory and find it difficult to understand. ADHD does not help.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
You'd have been disappointed in my house. I tend to give away the books I actually like and read mostly on e-reader nowadays (but I only do like a few books a year).
I recently heard this from someone. Does anyone have a link to the recent research indicating this? My reflex is to be immediately suspicious of narratives along the lines of "everyone is stupid," especially in online communities with fringe political beliefs.
Lib source, but it collates the claim and some sources: Snopes
The main participants were Gallup and the US Department of Education
The whole part trying to dodge the correct allegation that the US ranks 125th out of 195 countries is really depressing. "Uhm actually, there are some variables that are skewing these results.*"
*Variables that are skewing the US to rank higher than it should.
I think the "6th grade" bit is made up to help translate the results of these studies into something even 6th graders can understand, but the feds do these massive studies every now and then
it means using plain language, visual aids, and keeping things concise will get you far in the states.
boom, gottem. #pithy
Part of literacy is analysing texts like presentations. If a politician gives a half hour speech, what are they actually saying? That sort of thing.
This thread has much more been about graphical written word. Like, if someone listens to an audiobook or reads a physical book in the same way, their literacy level determines what they can get from either.
Or at least, that's what I thought I was asking >.> idk
for about a decade or so, i had an official role generating resources for informal adult education based on published research within the academic structure as part of it's 100+ year old "service/outreach" mission. over the last century, resources have been stripped from this mission, probably because it was structured so that communities had a big say in what sort of education they wanted delivered, preventing a full blown top-down approach to community development that powerful people deploy to maintain uneven development.
what i took from my time working in this sphere is that advancing the cause of literacy means meeting people where they are. among other skills, this requires creativity and humility which are two abilities that are not particularly valued by the PhD research or academic publishing processes resulting in an overall abdication by the "highly educated" of their responsibility to their communities. most prefer to scoff at the great many who lack the training they received and instead stand idle above the crowd as experts.
while the adversarial stripping of resources from our institutions that provide a basic, universal right to a broad education has lead us to the current situation, too many of our "public intellectuals" are reinforcing the problem by refusing to see their enhanced duty and responsibility to disseminate knowledge to their communities broadly, instead of gatekeeping it behind credentialism and careerism. there are obviously exceptions to this, as individuals, but they are the cranks and the burnouts with derailed careers. the elitist sociopaths are running the departments and colleges and they would happily disenfranchise everyone without a college degree before they'd advocate for a right to universal higher education.
I see it here sometimes, and also in myself. Trying to undo the snobbishness of academia.
To be clear, American illiteracy is something that is done to working class Americans. I'm probably not going to shed a tear if an illiterate fascist gets fucked over by policies they supported, there are better people to focus on, but it is tragic.
I’m going to be honest, there was a ballot measure on this year’s ballot that I had to read and break down, and idk what my reading level is but it’s more than a 6th grader. I can see how the average person can easily get bamboozled with the way things like that are written.
Was it written in legalese? That's a whole can of worms on its own.
I assume so, which is why I struggled to understand it.
my first election as a snotty teen i had to learn what "eminent domain" meant in the booth, and of course despite taking and passing high school civics i had no conception of why it would be important.
And in some places they won't allow you to have your phone out at all, so you can't even look it up on the fly or keep a note on your phone. Even in states that require in person voting, sample ballots with explanations should be sent out weeks ahead
So much of the minutiae of government/politics is left out of the lexicon in favor of clickbait headlines and 24/7 entertainment politics
Makes sense why you struggled imo
Yes! Sometimes I wonder what would pass if it were written more plainly. Oregon voted down a measure that would only increase taxes on companies making a lot of money and then distribute that money to citizens. Like wtf how could that not pass?
Then they DID vote for a measure that allows the state legislature to impeach members. Literally giving up our power to vote for who we want and letting the politicians kick people out when they feel like it is ridiculous. I bet the first time someone gets impeached it will be a leftist/progressive and not some fucking piece of shit from east Oregon who is literally trying to become Idaho
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.
I really dislike writing a long email that contains in very simple text everything that is required of them, maybe some of the background, and I either get ghosted or only the very last thing (or very first thing) in the email gets responded to. Usually from clients rather than coworkers.
I work on an app that's pretty complex and requires a lot of back and forth between devs, customers, and the people who do all the training/sales. I've had A LOT of success using numbered bullet points instead of writing normal sentences and paragraphs.
Something about the numbers makes them want to read it in order instead of skimming and it being broken down and labeled lets me respond with things like, "great, what about the 3rd bullet point?" Instead of having to repeat things. Plus most of my coworkers are in Texas so they love bullets.
i mean, that's emails. no one wants to read emails.
Not just the volume of content, but also modifying syntax and verbiage.
"Parsing? What's that, a vegetable?"
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.
Dyslexic maybe? I know a decent number of engineers who struggle sometimes even though they do medium complex maths and can remember long lists of standards or do a bunch of coding.
Huh, I wonder.
I always struggled in school, even though I generally understood all the concepts pretty well.
I do remember at one point being pulled from classes and read a book to a guy, then a week later being put in special ed. The special ed program got shut down and shortly after I moved and the new school was even more of a shit show where no one cared/had the capacity to single out one struggling student.
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970.
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.
So, when I think of "text", I think of speech, audiobooks, film, as well as literal text etc etc. For instance, reading the Parenti quote and understanding its meaning would be the same as listening to someone say the Parenti quote and understanding its meaning.
Which I thought this was about. If a politician says something, the ability to parse the layered meanings (usually, "this is the public thing I'm saying" and "these are the interest groups I'm signalling loyalty to"), and not like... Being able to read cooking instructions in text but being able to follow cooking instructions in a tiktok.
I think the inability or unwillingness to actually read and process everything presented to them probably applies to the speech of politicians as well. They're not paying attention to everything being said much less analyzing it critically.
I feel like some processing is going on. They understand that the speech is signalling loyalty to interest groups, but they don't actually remember the words said and also mistake the loyalty group being signalled (hence the "leopards ate my face" phenomenon, at least partly). This isn't critical analysis, the belief that "politician is saying that for me!" and "politician is saying what we're all thinking!" is the barest bones of processing. They do engage a bit more energy if a politician says something they openly disagree with.
No idea because I can’t read what you said
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’ve said for the longest time that my 7th grade self could accomplish all of the day to day admin tasks I’m assigned at work and still stand by that statement. You can’t effectively read without knowing how to interpret what the author/speaker expressed
I also could be too literal so ehh
Someone has a story below about the South Korean President and their coworker just taking the President's statement of North Korea is invading at total face value even though the article was about how he was trying to create the crisis. Just a bonkers level of finding a single sentence in an article that you vibe with and then making the conversation about that (or rather about how you're on that side).
I think people understand allegiances and power much better than they can express it, and in fact struggle to express why they agree with "powerful person on their side" when pressed for a reason. Like, I could say to the same coworker "Trump said that communism rules", and they would immediately be able to engage their critical thinking abilities and disbelieve that or ask for a source.
It means,,sadly, that the US education system is doing precisely what it was intended to do. Sigh
I imagine a lot of the lib discourse of this either avoids the education funding model (rich areas get better schools) or views it as either inevitable or good. If you're a "middle class" lib in a rich area, maybe everyone around you hasn't gone to a school with very little funding, everyone around you has gone to uni etc.
Still intentional.
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