Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
Idk, man. I've seen counterpoints (sorry I couldn't find a reference that wasn't a joke, but that's just my internet diet).
We've never been more dependent on literacy as a means of navigating the world than in the modern moment. Maybe the shift from text to videos as a means of communication is changing that, but even then... how do you even operate a cell phone without some degree of literacy?
Generally speaking, education rates have only trended upward since the Depression Era. We have a higher percentage of college students, a higher percentage of professional workers, and higher levels of literacy in Gen X and younger than in the Boomer and older cohorts. That's not to say we don't have an absolute mess of an educational institution.
I think a lot of people we count as officially literate are functionally illiterate though. I'm still surprised by the amount of people who just can't read every sentence in a paragraph, find it difficult to read and follow step-by-step instructions, or insist they can't explain something in text and then explain it in one or two sentences verbally.
There's a difference between literacy and composition, though.
Also, I've seen plenty of instruction guides that do a piss poor job of telling you exactly what to do.
Idk how many people straight up can't read a menu or a newspaper. But I've seen ample evidence to suggest it less than "a lot"
Yeah I'm talking about people who fail to follow all the steps in a bullet-pointed four step guide, or just completely omit one or two crucial sentences which state how important doing the thing in the sentence is. People who can do it if I just read the paragraph or steps out to them while they follow them.
According to this
And just to confirm that it's a US education problem:
The majority of illiterate adults were educated in the US.
I'm not saying I don't implicitly trust Forbes, HuffPo, and TechCrunch journalists...
But these are the same folks constantly trying to fix education by privatizing it.
"66% of 4th grade children in the U.S. could not read proficiently in 2013."
I just have no scope for this. What is "read proficiently"? Is that high or low for 4th graders? Why did we move from "6th grade reading standards" to "4th grade reading standards" inside two bullet points?
I've spent my whole life being told how schools are failing to teach basic skills, but university enrollment and professional work forces have only grown over that time.
The problems in the education system are well established. But the "nobody can read!" trope is so heavily sensationalized that I'm reluctant to take it seriously on its face.
Literacy isn’t just reading the words and having a basic understanding, literacy also involves how comprehensively you understand what you’re reading and the critical thinking skills to engage with what you’re reading. And it’s the latter two parts that are severely lacking in our education system.
Maybe. But I see quite a bit of naked disinformation in mass media that can't really be refuted unless you abandon the outlets themselves entirely.
Comprehension only gets you so far on third hand info. At some point, when all your media resources say X, you're going to believe X whether or not its true.
That's not "education" per say. It's access to data.
That’s a good point, but it’s not exactly against what I’m saying. With poor literacy it’s very easy to internalize propaganda because you lack the critical thinking skills and broader knowledge base that enhanced literacy provides you. Those tools are what is necessary to dismantle propaganda, and those are the tools that aren’t being effectively learned in school.
Sure. But even advanced literacy won't save you from an abundance of misinformation. Just ask Thomas Aquinas or Emmanuel Kant.
You can have an extremely well researched and erudite debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I'm not sure how related these are, there are plenty of highly literate people are extremely propagandized, and vice versa
definitely a bad thing on the whole though
Here is a more official study (that had a less dire analysis) : https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
However even this shows only 12.9% of American adults are at a level 4/5 literacy. In the footnotes it stated these levels were combined because only 2% reached level 5 across all surveyed countries.
I'm not sure how America defines those levels, but this is how the UK does:
Level 1: Adults can read relatively short digital or print texts to locate a single piece of information that is identical to or synonymous with the information given in the question. Knowledge and skill in recognising basic vocabulary, determining the meaning of sentences, and reading short paragraphs of text is expected.
Level 2: Adults can make matches between the text, either digital or printed, and information. Adults can paraphrase or make low-level inferences.
Level 3: Adults are required to read and navigate dense, lengthy or complex texts.
Level 4: Adults can integrate, interpret or synthesise information from complex or lengthy texts. Adults can identify and understand one or more specific, non-central idea(s) in the text in order to interpret or evaluate subtle evidence-claim or persuasive discourse relationships.
Level 5: Adults can search for, and integrate, information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Adults understand subtle, rhetorical cues and can make high-level inferences or use specialised background knowledge.
Is that abnormally low on a historical/geographic scale?
Lower than average (overall, not just 4/5) in the linked study in the footnotes.
https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-2013/the-supply-of-key-information-processing-skills_9789264204256-6-en#page9
It seems like several of the articles covering this are being a bit doomer about all of this now that I've seen the actual study. It's funny how the articles complaining about literacy also refuse to cite things properly.
I think there was one done by the dept of education in the US too which had worse results, but I'm on my phone and dont have time to find it.
What I'm usually more concerned about is how many adults I've met have terrible media literacy, and get most of their information from TV news, Facebook videos, and YouTube videos and take all of that in uncritically. But that's a different problem. I know very few people who read anything more complicated than a cheap novel though, which isn't great, but that's all anecdotal.
Nobody wins the Nobel for proving the Null hypothesis (which is a shame, in its own way).
That's what is within easy reach.
I'll recommend this or that source to my elderly mom, for instance. But she struggles with the medium of PDFs and is totally beyond podcasts.
Meanwhile, MSNBC is just... right there on the TV. YouTube is consistently in the front page of a Google search. Facebook shoves headlines right into your feed full of grandkid pictures.
Complaining about media literacy is fascille when the "bad" sources are prominently on display while the "good" sources are buried in the weeds. At this point, it isn't a media problem but a technology problem.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it
I think at a base level of "Can read and communicate concepts and ideas" it's true that the USA is literate but in the sense of having strong reading comprehension and the ability to synthesize/critique based off of that comprehension, we absolutely suck.
I see plenty of long winded heavily overanalyzed power posters on Reddit. But when they treat the CIA Factbook as gospel and denounce Seymour Hersh as Fake News...
That's not a comprehension issue. It's a trust issue.
Critical thinking issue too, imo
Garbage in, garbage out. Critical thinking only gets you so far.
I'm saying that learning to distinguish garbage from not garbage is an important facet of critical thinking
Yes. But those same skills, absent reliable information, can be subverted.
What you're describing is ultimately just an understanding of institutions. Having a very well refined understanding of libraries doesn't get you useful data if you're trapped in the fiction section.
Ask Decartes how that works. "What am I able to know is true?" is a very fundamental philosophical question without many bulletproof answers.
Fair enough, thank you for explaining where you're coming from, have a good day
I don't know how it's done, but I assure you that I have tried to teach people basic tasks which amount to "read this sentence and then press the button it says to press" and been unable to even with coaching. Fully grown adult people in their 20s and 30s who have jobs and families and hobbies and all.
Well, not so much hobbies. A lot of them do nothing with their (dwindling) free time but watch TV, movies, or anime.
Honestly. If i was in that position: were i have to read a sentence and press the button i would also pretend i cant do it. Just to mess with whover is making me do it.
As for watching anime dont you have to read a lot of subtitles for that? Or do they speak japanese and chinese?
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Honestly. If i was in that position: were i have to read a sentence and press the button i would also pretend i cant do it. Just to mess with whover is making me do it.
As for watching anime dont you have to read a lot of subtitles for that? Or do they speak japanese and chinese?
I'm not making anyone do anything, if you can't read don't get a job doing paperwork
Every popular anime since 1980 has been dubbed in english
Eventually. But it usually takes months, even years, for a dubbed release. Meanwhile, I can get fansubs inside a day or two of the show airing in Japan.
I've noticed ever since Crunchyroll became a thing and Netflix started showing anime the number of people watching fansubs has gone drastically down. And dubs are quite quick nowadays. Funimation was dubbing MHA as it was being released in Japan for instance.
Actually the number of fansubs has probably stayed the same, but more people watch anime now. MHA, Attack on Titan, and Kimetsu no Yaiba are sincere cultural forces the likes of which I've never quite seen before. And most people are watching them dubbed through legitimate channels. Fansubs are considered a weird nerd thing among the typical anime watcher outside of Japan. Maybe they always were?
I suppose so. But when I was in college, back in the early 00s, I had friends who were taking Japanese classes just to be part of the fansub community. We could get episodes of FMA and Bleach a day or two in advance because the show was on the UTexas intranet before it got picked up in force by the bigger file-share services.
Crazy to think you could have gotten a legit dub inside of a year.
I suppose by now English subs are just baked into the main release schedule (especially when AI can do a half-assed job of translation on the cheap). And since every major production studio has its eye on the American audience, we get some pretty high profile voice actors in modern releases. Samuel L. Jackson in Afro Samurai, for instance. Or Matthew Mercer doing Attack on Titan's Levi Ackerman.
Even then, I tend to see a delay on the scale of months on dubs in the English-speaking markets. The official Attack on Titan Final Chapters dub release wasn't out until a few weeks ago. I watched those episodes subbed back in... I want to say February or March?
Dont do paperwork period. Thats the devils work.
I didnt know about the anime thing. I was under the impresion that most anime was not oficially localised for english. And fans were only able to aford subs.
Much of anime is dubbed these days, esp on major streaming platforms.
Is the undermining of US literacy an attempt to decisively win the subs versus dubs debate in favor of dubs?
i think the caveat gotta be comprehension of some degree. the people making and popularizing novel communications, and by necessity using it a lot---they're very literate, knowing rules and bending them. but you can just learn distortions without really knowing why or what the differences are. you can pick up the context & appropriate uses of a contraction or acronym without knowing what they actually mean---and there's many old words that are just calcified versions of that which nobody but pedantic nerds know the origins of.
nobody's clever for using OK now, but it would've been a sign of literacy (and iirc aristocracy) back in the day
Certainly possible. But I don't think social media is degrading that comprehension any more than the newspapers degraded it a century ago.
Just like any language skill, its a learned affectation. You're still more literate for knowing it than not.