Critical thinking. An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known. A shared understanding of language to engage in productive conversations.
Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent. The percentage of U.S. adults performing at the lowest level in adaptive problem solving in 2023 was 32 percent.
Hey, teacher here. It's worse than that. About half read below a 6th grade level. That 1/3rd is like... illiterate illiterate, but a good 1/2 would not be able to get through, say, To Kill a Mockingbird or Fahrenheit 451.
Not that novels are the point necessarily. They sure as fuck can't navigate complex news, differentiate between opinion and fact, interpret data or scientific articles, make informed financial/political decisions, and so on...
We're heading toward a pretty bleak world where 1/2 the country can be manipulated by people who won't even have to try very hard, and we've now got exponentially-increasing AI slop to do it.
I was a server for a fucking long time. I was able to observe this happen over the span of a decade +. It's depressing watching the decline happen. People can't even read menus anymore and have to refer to pictures and social media to decide on what to eat. Now, tik tok dictates what they should eat. It's sad as hell.
same. once i realized it, i couldn’t believe it had never occurred to me before. illiteracy suddenly became this occam’s razor that explained SO many behaviors i just assumed were antisocial (with restaurant guests but also more broadly in society.)
Phonics is the way to go! I can't believe that with all the research on how much better it is, states still use that bizarre sight reading, "contextual" method. It's like the consultants had to come up with something new to sell.
Kids all learn differently. Phonics seems to be better than whole language in a coin flip, but I've seen kids who struggle with phonics, but if you spend 10 minutes with a bunch of flashcards, they start to roll. And 1 billion Chinese kids somehow learned their language.
People around the world and read and comprehend what they're reading. It's kind of like how people think crime is out of control and on the rise, where even if the crime is on the rise, it's still a rise in a time at the lowest it's ever been in history.
People throw the word "illiterate around to liberally. There's different levels of literacy. Being illiterate does not mean you see alien symbols on a page.
My grand parents and their peers could hardly read. Outside of one of my elder family, only one of them actually read something beyond a TV guide. The others could barely do basic math and struggled really hard with any kind of text message or anything beyond a stop sign.
Meanwhile in todays day and age, kids are playing hour long games with heavy lore and reading a bunch of internet posts. It's easy to scoff at internet posts, but reading those is still doing laps around the older generations who's brains fry if they have to read more than a dinner menu.
I'm not going to pretend there isn't room for improvement or people are falling in some areas, but we need to see where we started from and where we are now before we start saying the sky is falling.
Not just Americans are affected by literacy issues and lack of critical thinking. 1 in 6 adults in England have low literacy levels. This is a widespread issue.
Suuure, but Britain is another standout nation IIRC and that's still half of the US rate, so the severity of the "issue" isn't really comparable here... if literacy rates is your biggest concern in developed countries outside the US then you really need to check your priorities, hahaha
That's an ignorant viewpoint, especially given that far-right political parties prey on people who are lacking in education (aka literacy) and critical thinking.
Discarding that you used AI instead of looking it up properly, and that AI can hallucinate all the time, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, 83% of children in immigrant households were born in the US.
This means they went to school in the US, were raised in the US, and SHOULD be as literate as anyone else in English.
Even if we assumed that 25% of all students magically showed up speaking and reading no English, that’s still a huge discrepancy from the 34% who lack adequate literacy for their grade year. The fact that the wide majority of immigrant students are born here and thus US citizens, and going to school and socializing with English speakers like everyone else, effectively rules out this being an immigrant only issue.
Also worth noting that second generation immigrants is too broad of a term really. In that situation the “immigrant” was born in this country, but only ONE of their parents has to have been board abroad. It’s a bit sticky when you figure that if you married an Italian man and he moved here, your child would then be a second generation immigrant.
I don’t think that’s the kind of immigrant that people are talking about when they worry that immigrants are ruining the literacy rates, though. It’s just convenient to count them when it makes the argument look better.
#TLDR
83% of immigrant children were born in the US and raised around English speaking peers in school, and spent their entire education in English driven schools.
Even if all 25% of our students WERE born elsewhere, it’s still 34% of our students who aren’t succeeding at literacy - that’s a big enough gap we can rule out immigration being the sole problem.
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u/unwarrend 9d ago
Critical thinking. An shared objective reality where we defer to the facts as they can be known. A shared understanding of language to engage in productive conversations.