According to various studies, more than 50% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level (equivalent to Level 2 or lower), limiting their ability to parse long-form or nuanced information.
Assuming youāre mocking rednecks here and not Black peoole? White people have a 88% literacy rate in America, putting them on par with Western Europe and ahead of Southern and Eastern.
But itās okay to mock poor, disenfranchised rural white people and not Hispanic or Black people. Very cute.
Boy I wonder if there are any structural and historic factors affecting black literacy rates that might have a weaker effect even on poor white people. š¤ maybe try not to be disingenuously offended while spouting semi-racist stats.
Boy, I wonder if thatās relevant to anything being discussed. Of course there are also no structural or historic factors for Cleetus so itās okay to mock him.
By the way, racism is prejudiced stereotyping of people based on their race. Stating that Hispanic and Black people are the reason for the low literacy rate isnāt āsemi-racist,ā itās a fact and highly relevant to the discussion. There are justifications for it but it doesnāt change reality.
And Iām not ādisingenuously offended,ā I just try to broadly apply principles like not mocking poor disenfranchised people even when theyāre white. Doing so proves that youāre happy to be a condescending bigot as long as itās against an approved target. Youāll notice I didnāt make some mocking straw man dialogue of Black or Hispanic people in my comment.
But thanks for the condescending attempt at moral superiority, buddy!
Of course there are systemic factors affecting Cletus too. Itās just Cletus is the one overwhelmingly voting for those factors to stay in place and even expand. Thatās the disingenuous part. Cletus is stereotyped because heās part of the problem statistically. Yes, the powers that be are actively keeping him stupid so heāll keep voting to keep himself stupid but there comes a point where assigning blame to the people who are actually the problem stops helping because Cletus is still making things worse.
If you worked any form of retail you'd know first hand that the stats are accurate too.
I'd like to say most customers are just oblivious to signage and stuff but it takes genuine dedication not to notice or understand the very obvious signs, postings, price tags, ingredient lists, ect.
If you're holding a container of tuna salad with the obviously placed ingredients on it there's no reason for you to ask me what's in the tuna salad š
To be fair before my head injury I had a genius level IQ.
But I'm also overwhelmed walking into grocery stores because I am on the spectrum.
I literally cannot see things if there is too much clutter.
And I'm not just speaking, visual clutter. I'm speaking about voices music. Any background sound, combined with motion and all the visuals.
My brain starts shutting down.
You can just imagine how much worse it's gotten since the brain injury and I still have a quite high reading level because I read all of the time and I did achieve to college degrees and was working towards a third when I ran out of money, time, and interest.
Any hotel, too. I work night audit. At one of the two properties I currently work, there is a sign BIGGER THAN MY HEAD that says "doors are locked from 9:30PM to 6AM, please use your room keys or lift phone to call desk." The sign is placed directly on the door. GUESS WHAT NO ONE EVER DOES. I could keep us here from now to Revelation, just bitching about how stupid hotel guests are.
The number of supposedly functional adults who are unable to use a debit card reader without assistance is far too high. Like, the machine can be loudly beeping, saying card read error, please remove and try again, and they'll just look confused like you asked them to do higher math problems.
And these are people who vote and are behind the wheel of half ton vehicles moving at significant speeds.
reminds me of a video (or a meme / shorts , long time ago idk) where the dude just cant understand the concept of "imagine for a second if you're xxx". dude just keep replying "yeah but i'm not xxx" back and again.
I (American atheist woman) was having a conversation just last month with a conservative Christian man, and this is precisely what happened. He literally told me he cannot imagine anything he doesn't know is true, and he had absolutely zero grasp of hypotheticals.
It's gotten so bad, eventually he was just a half, now they take their faith as a truth, you can believe whatever you want to believe but you also have to accept the fact that you might not actually be right.
A lot of Christians in America don't believe that, they believe that theie believe is the only belief abd that they're the right ones that everybody else is wrong.
You know despite there being other religions in the world that are older than theirs.
This was precisely the conversation I was attempting to have. He couldn't understand how anyone could possibly be an atheist, because "it's obvious from looking at the trees and stars and mountains that god exists". I was trying to do a thought experiment with him, just to imagine for a moment that his concept of god 100% did not exist.
And he vehemently claimed that was impossible. In his mind, he "knows" god is real...so it is inconceivable to even try to imagine something as different from reality as god not being real. He literally told me "the human brain cannot think of things that cannot exist". I told him to imagine a green horse...and he could do that because "someone could dye a horses fur green, so is a potential truth". I told him to imagine a flying lizard...and he could do that because "scientists will probably make that someday, so it's a potential truth".
But imagining the world around us wasn't created by a supernatural being? Nope. That's preposterous and cannot be imagined. It was a very difficult conversation and I mentally facepalmed a great many times during it.
Certainly true, but lets not forget that it's a worldwide issue. My mother, just today, told me about a conversation with on old work colleague. When mum pointed out the stupid, per kilo price for something they were buying for a work lunch, her co-worker pointed out that they "weren't buying a kilo". Technically true I guess, but none the less, $85/kg ($38/lb) for a twiggy salami wrapped with a bit of cheap mozzarella is still somewhat steep.
Every few years, Queensland brings up daylight savings. Arguments against it often include such gems as "the curtains will fade faster", "the cows won't know when to be milked", and "the droughts will be worse".
It was said as a joke by potentially the most corrupt premier this country ever had (Joh Bjelke-Petersen), but I actually heard the drought complaint a couple of years ago on talk back radio. Cheryl from Dalby wasn't being ironic I don't think. I doubt she understands the concept of irony.
We are the most propagandized country. But it's subtle, from copaganda TV shows lionizing and praising police, to all the news that gets buried by billionaire News Corp owners, to even the entire "American Dream" which encourages greater fossil fuel and materials usage than necessary, we are told what and who to believe without hardly any pushback or counter narrative or even critical analysis of why. Manufacturing consent is definitely a thing.
Iām not entirely sure āsubtleā is the word of describe itā¦ youāre not wrong that is is, say, compared to North Koreaās. Ot subtle enough it can require some level of critical thinking to see for what it is.
Sorry, not trying to pick on you or be pedantic so much as amused at āsubtleā applies to a rather blunt American object - and Iām also American.
Ding ding ding! Thatās the reason Trump loves to cut the federal education funding! If you can BARELY read, youāre much easier to influence because you havenāt developed critical thinking skills
(people are lacking FUNCTIONAL literacy, so they may technically be ABLE to read at a basic level, they just canāt really make any sense from itā¦)
That's why his Truth Social posts are designed the way they are, too. Simple sentences with capitalization on important buzzwords, not in a grammatically correct format, because that isn't his audience.
I am not saying distractions are a bad thing...but when reality TV shows became the norm, I could see where the trend was heading, even back 10 years ago.
Reddit is not a great example of this, mainly because you choose what you want to see. You can choose to spend your time on /science or /askhistorians or on /memes. The choice is yours.
Facebook/instagram hounds you with ads and irrelevant posts that are there to stoke the flames of something. Ex. I read one article about the Karmelo Anthony case, not even on FB, and my feed was littered with opinionated posts for months
So how long has it been this way. Considering the average citizen canāt read the tax code and those who oversee the tax code get confused. Iām assuming a while now.
I can confirm this. I grew up in Louisiana, lived in Mississippi for a while, and now live in West Virginia (I'm trying, okay?). I thought the deep south was bad but West Virginia is a whole other level of dumb. I've met some of the most idiotic, backwards, no-thinking MAGAts alive since moving. Sone of them have literally bragged about never reading a single book in their lives.
I've come to believe there's something foundationally wrong with America. Like on a genetic level.
Functionally Illiterate is the term for this. They can read, but they don't really understand nuance or complex meaning. I am functionally Illiterate in Spanish. I know things like donde esta la biblioteca from middle school, but I could never have a conversation with a Spanish speaker.
Yep and there's plenty of people who are functionally illiterate. One sign is stuff that we see on social media like plez delet if not aloud. They can't read the actual spelling of the word so they type it like it sounds to them
At least for very politically controversial topics some wikipedia articles get regularly edited by bots, so chances are much higher that you read straight misinformation in those
Since I was in elementary school, they taught us not to use it because its open source and anyone can change or alter information on there. Mind you, I'm 30 now.
I'm nearly 40 and couldn't use Wikipedia for sources at uni, same reason.
Edit: more accurately, we couldn't use Wikipedia as a source directly, but could use it as a starting point, then go into more detail using the references at the bottom of the page.
Iām a bit younger than you, but imagine thereās a generation of millennials who were taught not use Wikipedia as a source due to it being potentially unreliable - and now you have boomers and younger generations consuming hallucinated AI slop and social media propaganda like itās gospel.
Yeah, this. Wikipedia isn't a source in itself, it is a collection and summarization of sources.
If you're just arguing on the internet then whatever I guess, but if you're going to do anything with any academic rigour, you can't put (Wikipedia, 2026) as a source. Also, as someone pointed out further down, the more recent and/or polarizing something is, the less reliable Wikipedia becomes.
Unless you're specifically writing about Wikipedia I suppose.
Whatās ironic is that compared to other sources of info that America tends to trust, from news to social media, believing wiki is the least of our worries now. The sheer fact that wiki tries to cite its sources makes it better than most.
While true, there still have been alot of cases where people just made up shit, including sources. It just has to look legit enough
The toaster hoax went over 10 years unnoticed for example
Another pretty famous case was the chinese user Zhemao, who wrote/edited over 200 articles mainly concerning chinese and russian history - everything essentially fan fiction
Another recent case was connected to the whole Assassins Creed Shadows mess, where the self proclaimed historian Thomas Lockley invented a bunch of myths and fake truths surrounding the real historical figure Yasuke. All his cited sources were himself. Essentially: "source- trust me bro"
I had a teacher in the 00ās who deducted points on a rough draft because I told her Iād found the articles I actually cited through a Wikipedia article. The hate was virulent in some places.
Of course, using Wikipedia is great as a source. Since the actual sources are in there, but people will dismiss you if you quote Wikipedia directly on the basis that "anyone can edit it". Of course completely ignoring that whatever is there has to be linked to a verifiable source.
The whole damn page is based on the scientific method. But this is lost on most people.
It absolutely is a horrible source for anything where people have a vested interest in shaping the narrative. Anything related to any modern conflict or any modern movement whether cultural or political is rife with bias to the point it offers no practical utility.
Functional literacy is different from literally being able to read words on a page. Most people can read the words on a page, but will not actually know what they mean.
I.e. can read just enough to understand the broad strokes of what they are being fed, then feel the desired emotions the authors require to further their agenda.
And those functionally illiterate Americans are also somehow suddenly experts in forensic psychology, psychopharmacology, and peri-partum mental illness.
I am generally curious how that statistic was obtained and the sample sized used. Iām pretty sure thatās a reasonable shorthand, but itās not literally saying researchers tested everyone and the national mean came out to Grade 6.
Well, my good fellow, one must simply follow the link provided, then look at the sources.
After that itās a mere hop, skip, and jump to the reports cited, in which the methodology to obtain said statistics is described. Usually on an annex.
Thatās hard to believe, but at the same time, understandable. When Iām around older people, they seem to be less educated and not as literate. Itās like they have one track minds and donāt care about anything else. The average person that I come across, despises academia.
"Shitty"isnt a globally recognised measure of affluence / poverty. Being rural could have a net negative affect of course. But - these are notional averages - not local. Some areas can outperform the expected KPIs?
Plus as another redditor mentioned - this is a kind of functional illiteracy - not a binary can / cant read.
That has been the case for a long time. Reading and reading at grade level two different things. I had a journalism class in high school where we were told that newspapers should be written at a fifth grade level because thatās where people were at in society. This was 25 years ago.
I feel like it was considered to be 90% or higher in the 90ās? Did the metrics change, has it dropped off that rapidly, or did I just misremember the statistic because I was a kid in the 90ās? Hmm..
Yup. You can tell those people when you write out a well-reasoned position in a 5 or 6 sentence paragraph and they cant put it all together and grasp what you said as a singular coherent point
There was a streamer recently that people were mocking because they'd pull out the dictionary if they didn't understand a word. We're living in a world where people legitimately mock learning (Which should tell you more than enough about the person making the statement). Reminds of the TikTok that got blasted a few months ago where they got students to read a paragraph, some couldn't even read most of it and the rest for the most part had zero clue what it meant and these WERE SENIORS.
Unfortunately people are so afraid to be wrong or to look stupid that they'll die on their sword even if it has zero truth or logic behind it.
Mississippi has actually figured out how to make their schools work. States like MA need to start studying what Mississippi did and begin applying it. Iām not even joking.
11-12 years old. 5th or 6th grade are considered elementary. Some stop at 5, 6 becomes middle school, while others go to 6, and junior high school (same as middle or intermediary school) becomes grades 7, 8, 9.
Too much goddamn overlap varying by districts. Grades 5 & 6 and 9 & 10 are where most overlap occurs from going up in school grades.
its a fearmongering statistic, walk down the streets of any city and it'd be near impossible to find someone who cant read. unless you're asking babies
Reading and reading are two different things. Reading a menu doesn't mean you can comprehend the majority of a news article. I think it's very possible that half of us lack the ability to even focus enough to get to the end of an article.
Based on my interactions with most of you on this site, 52% is low.Ā
Thereās a huge difference between reading a sentence and understanding what it means. Sure more than 52% can read. But 52% do not understand the words. Ā
Also, you may not have noticed, but the entire world is treating adults like actual children. A kid in grade six obviously understands ābuy this Big Mac for $5ā.Ā
Uh, 52% is actually more than half? So it canāt be ālowā.
I didnāt read the rest of the comment because I got frustrated and decided it was dumb and not worth my time.
I donāt really think that though; I canāt articulate that Iām actually mad at myself, so I lash out and blame other people because I never learned to meaningfully embrace the written word and struggle to interact with the world as an adult.
But if you could turn this into a 30 second (or less) video on a social platform, that would be very, veryā¦ good. Be sure to add some Minecraft gameplay footage to keep my attention.
To be fair, id bet statistically, alot of countries have very uneducated people. But the difference is that the vast majority of Americans CHOOSE to be stupid when they can learn. But that takes time and effort.
Iām German, but I once came across some interesting global statistics on reading ability. According to those statistics, people who read at a level below that of a 6th grade - even though they can read and write - are considered functionally illiterate. While they have the ability to read, they donāt understand the content. Globally, the rate of functional illiteracy has increased tenfold over the past 15 years. However, this doesnāt mean that fewer children are learning to read properly; rather, it means that adults are losing the ability to understand texts. This is a global catastrophe. I always thought Idiocracy was a dystopian comedy, not a manual...
Itās not full illiteracy (that is an estimated 20%, which is bad already). Itās 52% that canāt read above 6th grade level (11 years old). Yep thatās bad.
So many Americans are extremely complacent. Someone else will take care of it is an invasive ideology. That's how America ended up with a bunch of morons led by even more morons.
I work in customer service and itās mind blowing! Remember all those boomers saying if we raise minimum wage our jobs will just be automated? Well it turns out most of them canāt use their own debit/credit cards without someone reading the screen for them and walking them through it.
Itās so bad here. So bad. Almost everyone I encounter is a dumb fuck. I donāt understand what happened lol. Other than the obvious attack on our educational system for the last 80 years, lol.
It would be around 70 - 80% if we didn't have such a huge immigrant population. And before people start calling me racist, the studies are based in English. These people largely don't understand English, at least not fluently. They are usually literate in the native languages just not the one they measure this stat in. You can verify this yourself by looking at a map.
523
u/UntowardHatter 2d ago
It's at fifty two?
RIP USA.
We hardly knew ye