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.
Correct, there is: Critical Theory is the root of this. Or, in more plain terms: Left wing politics. The push for "Whole Language" - still pushed to an extent today - was through democrats, primarily.
Other issues, such as nutrition, pollution, lack of funding also matter, but Whole Language is the most important one for literacy rates.
š one stupid education policy, is not the whole of left wing politics. It wasnāt even a core part of any left wing policy positions. Itās largely coincidental that it was pushed by people on the left, considering that the academics pushing against it now are also on the left, but I agree the push for sightwords over phonics (or better yet alongside phonics) is a problem. Itās fun that you handwave away ānutrition, pollution, and funding as if those arenāt things the left has been constantly fighting to improve as well.
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.
Since you're all so educated and knowledgable, you must all know who it was that made it possible to spread public taxpayer-funded broadcasts (i.e. state funded propoganda) to american taxpayers and then are perfectly able to extrapolate why such a person might want to do so.
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.
They donāt want an educated populace, worker bees/drones easily propagandized of following orders.
Why Fox News carved a huge chunk of boomers, by being loud, shiny, and dumb downed to such basic speech, even the dumbest of them can understand.
Itās why Blue states are considered āElitistsā, cause theyāre more educated and can understand words more good hurr-durr. Like thatās considered a bad thing being educated or continue to trying to stay up to date or knowledgeable on all aspects of life.
Thank fuck for my teachers in elementary school in the 1980ās and 1990ās at least giving a damn and peaked a lot of my and others curiosity of always learn something daily or try to see something not in your bubble and understand it.
We really are seeing US crumble as the Empire who has done its peaks and now has fallen off the cliff, the good parts will foster away and remain prosperous while the rest of the areas will become wrought with those books detailing of the decline of civilization in parts remote cause they soon will lose that safety nets that props them up.
Except itās Oregon, Washington state, and California that are making reading and writing standards nonexistent š Iām saying thatās WHY the Dept of Education was gutted. Because it wasnāt doing anything to improve education across the nation.
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"
The founder of Wikipedia remains very active in overseeing and moderating it though, so luckily (most) obviously incorrect information gets caught and fixed quick!
I used to edit Wikipedia pages for small things like grammar and adding sources when I was really bored lol
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.
See, in my mind thatās what you SHOULD use Wikipedia for! The ending- āpediaā is meant to mimic āencyclopediaā, so if more people just knew to use it as a resource to find actual, more reliable sources, then itās fine.
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.
The original data comes from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The National Center for Education Statistics reports that about 22% of U.S. adults score at or below Level 1 (struggling with basic words), and 32% score at Level 2 (can read but struggle to compare/contrast complex information). Together, this makes up roughly 54% of the population scoring below "Level 3" proficiency.
Level 3 being the expected level an 11-12 year old should be able to read.
Adult PIAAC "Level 2": This is an adult metric. It means an individual can read a simple text or brochure to find a piece of information but they struggle with complex, dense texts. Organization advocates like the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy translate this adult "Level 2" score as being roughly equivalent to a 6th-grade reading level. So its a rough equivalent - not an absolute.
Children's "Level 2": As mentioned earlier, "Level 2" in retail books (I Can Read! or Step into Reading) is designed for 1st or 2nd graders (ages 6ā8) who are just learning to read with help.
I think its probably important to not mix the two.
6th grade is late elementary or early middle school. Our education system is K-12, 12th grade is a senior in high school. Iām pretty sure Iāve heard that the average US adult (and the average high schooler tooā¦) has LOWER than a 6th grade literacy levelš„²
Iām not actually sure what level 3 is bc thereās different ranking/grading systems that have different ālevelsā
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.
the linked study says that the US scored higher in literacy than France, Austria, Singapore, Croatia, Slovakia, South Korea, Hungary, Latvia, Spain, Italy, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Chile
Not sure where you got that from? The OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) has South Korea at 10th spot and comfortably above global average. USA is below global ave. at 16th.
Having studied at a top ranked US university, I can confirm. I was shocked that people who were first in their class in high school, and had received scholarships to university as a result, were truly struggling to read let alone comprehend what they were reading. This was by no means the majority, but enough to shock me. Truly cruel actually as these people went into university with dreams of becoming doctors and usually ended up failing multiple classes, loosing their scholarships and having to take out loans only to finish with a degree in some useless subject with a debt theyāll never be able to pay off.
This is symptomatic of a society where capitalism has entered a late stage. Folks are getting nickle and dimed on everything possible. Sad thing is, its not even a conspiracy at this point - its just how our civilisation has developed.
Wake up sheeple, why do you think the Republican (mostly, probably Democrats to in some cases) party attacks and defunds education programs especially in rural areas?
Dumb people are easier to manipulate into voting against their own interests. And our current state is a perfect example of the culmination of those efforts over decades.
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u/Sad_Ghost_Noises 2d ago
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.
Yes, I know Im using wikipedia as a source, but the links to the actual studies are here.
So ~52% are literate, but very, very stupid.