We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
33% of high school graduates never read another book again in their lives after graduation.
Let that sink in.
228 million adults in the US, and 75 million of them are committed to never reading.
Sounds a lot like the voting block for a certain orange fascist.....
Hey just FYI, that statistic is bullshit
Even Brewer, the author of the infographic, publicly admitted in 2012 that he couldn’t back up any of the statistics and asked people to stop sharing it. Brewer claims to have used statistics from a survey by an organization called the Jenkins Group, though the group itself says the statistics were incorrectly attributed to them. Brewer has never been able to provide any other source of the numbers he used in the infographic.
The questionable statistics seem to have originally come from a 2011 Mental Floss article, which claimed to have taken them from a Jenkins survey from 2003. Mental Floss has updated the original article saying they have no idea where the statistics came from, either.
Oh so then they’re fully qualified to be ICE. No intelligence required. In fact, intelligence hurts your chances.
Thats LITERALLY what police in my area were advertising 10 years ago for a hiring event.
They had fliers for a big hiring event that said "High school diploma not required. Dropouts encouraged to apply"
I remember seeing it and saying "Well this can only end well." in a very sarcastic tone.
Not to rain on the anti-US sentiment here, but this isn't far off from most other western/developed/colonial/whatever (aka members of OECD) countries. I don't know what study they're talking about in the article, since they never cite their source, but here's the results from a similar survey from 2013 (PIAAC study).
In terms of literacy, only 6/24 countries are reading at Level 3 (roughly equivalent to what other studies describe as "above a 6th grade level", it does not track 1:1 since again I don't know which study they're using initially) and the remainder are reading at Level 2 (I feel comfortable describing it as "at or below a 6th grade reading level" based off the criteria used in other studies).
The US for sure has an education problem, but it's not as dire as this article makes it sound. In the above PIAAC study, the difference in literacy is only ~20% between the top score of 296.2 (Japan) and the bottom of 250.5 (Italy), and at 269.8 (USA) is only ~10% behind Japan in terms of mean score. We should absolutely be doing better, we're among the worst for non-starters and < Level 1 (illiterate and partially illiterate respectively), but when looking at the values in context we're not really doing all that egregiously compared to other OECD countries.
(edit: spelling)
A nerdy side note:
I question the relevancy of the < Level 1 statistics, as the controls for partial literacy do not appear to have been robust for non-native speakers of the survey languages. This may have been by design, but given the high rate of invalidation due to language incompatibilities seen in other studies, I am hesitant to draw conclusions from that value without a clearer understanding of the methodology. Partial literacy due to language incompatibility is extremely easy to mask for basic questions, but imho should differentiated better from partial literacy among native speakers.
Everything published at or below 6th grade reading level
Americans consume this content almost exclusively
The median reader consumes at or below the 6th grade level
even ivy league students don't read books anymore.
College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different.
I love Vibes Based Reporting.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
As someone who was in college twenty years ago, I've got to say there's no way in hell I could make it through an entire novel in a week while balancing the rest of my course load. Either I'm reading the Cliff's Notes or I'm not getting it done. I also ran a 15-hour course study in hopes of landing a triple major in four years (bad idea, kids!), but even with a more conservative 12-hour load, imagine this plus 3 other classes making the same demands on your time.
This isn't a new problem. It is, perhaps, a problem that the current generation of students no longer has the cheat-codes to navigate. But doggedly insisting people were housing a 400-page book in a week and retaining it for meaningful discussion? Get fucked, dude. Nobody was actually doing that ever.
If you could come to the table talking about these novels, its because you already read them in High School, not because you consumed them in a week in your hectic freshman year.
If they could do you think Trump would have gotten elected TWICE! nevermind he probably still would have...
Clearly the DOE has been doing a great job for 40+ years, reducing the average reading level
Class content is determined almost entirely at the local or state level, not the federal. How well students in Mississippi read has almost nothing to do with how the DOE has been doing, because what kids in Mississippi (and every other state) learn is determined by the state.
And much of it isdetermined by Texas, one of the most regressive and oppressive state
Funding does impact what, how, and by whom kids are taught. A large portion of education funding is federal.
Mississippi is subject to the same funding standards as every other state, and is miles behind everyone else. What they choose to do with that money locally is what is affecting outcomes, and it’ll be that way as long as curriculum and standards are set at the local and state level.
Yeah, you don't know what you're talking about; yet you make a bold statement as if you do. Curriculum is decided by the state and literacy rates can be skewed by the amount of ENL students and citizens you have in your population. The problem is bigger than what this article alludes to. No war except class war. Socioeconomic disparity is the biggest problem in this country, but the people with the money give us scapegoat after scapegoat and we keep falling for it.
I've wrote user instructions and setup guides for my last job to copy paste in for common issues. A ton of people struggle to follow the instructions even with screenshots and big red arrows for each step. I've run a few though analyzers and find targeting a 3rd grade reading level is the max you can do before you get questions about the instructions.
Best bet is screenshot for each tiny step(cropped with the big red arrows) with nothing more complicated than "click here" as text. Just assume the end user can't or won't read.
Same. You can't write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.
They refuse to read anything that's in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don't you dare make it a compound sentence.
A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads... they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are 'too many words'.
A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I'm overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can't just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.
That was the goal of the Republicans. When US was in the middle of the cold war, schools were pushing STEM because military and industry needed STEM graduates, but the side effect of education is left leaning voters. So since the 60s, the US education system has degraded to the point that college sports scholarship grads can be illiterate.
So the gap in tech was filled in with H1b Visa people trained at proper universities.
in 2025, Harvard students don't even attend lectures. They still get As because they paid for As.
That's a lot of numbers without any citations. I mean, it feels right. But please take the minute to add your sources.
I always wonder how these things are determined. Does a 6th grade reading level mean that you cannot read above that level (simplifying here), or just that you generally don't read above it? Never in my adult life have I taken a survey/test that would generate the statistics like this that we always see, nor do I know anyone that has (which isn't to say that they aren't happening). If the media being generated for me is written at a lower level, and that's what they are basing these types of statistics off of, that's not reflective of my abilities. Don't get me wrong, my country is beyond fucked, but I'm not really a fan of how the author of this article tried to make their point (and I'm not just talking about the reading level statistic).
It's been a while since I read about it, but if I remember correctly it's roughly the level medication directions are written in. Simple, direct language that's hard to misinterpret. People at that reading level can read levels above it, but struggle to comprehend it.
Now who benefits from a poorly educated populace?
Follow the fuckin money.
As an avid audio book listener I really thought the rise of podcasts would make americans more literate but it seems like it had an inverse effect.
What's going on in the US? Is the water poisoned with heavy metals or something? The mental decline is palpable.
The boomers are aging and lead poisoned. Education system is spotty. Poor areas have less tax revenue, leading to worse schools, and that creates a cycle.
People are addicted to social media and it's literally rotting their brains. 15 second video clips with the same background audio playing in a loop.
I think it is a lot of things happening concurrently.
"Are you smarter than a 6th grader?"
"What? That seems like such a low bar to make a whole game show off of. Wouldn't it have basically a 100% rate of contestants winning? I mean, they're using adults. Might be a bit more interesting if they use a bunch of 2nd graders that are said to be gifted."
(Show comes out)
".........so it appears I was wrong, and this country is fucked."
(Decades go by, and we're now in present day)
"See? We're fucked."
I'm European and already figured this out the moment I got on the internet 🤣
How many people voted for Trump?
78,000,000/340,000,000 or about 25% of the country
With 36% choosing they didn't care enough to vote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
They also think below 6th grade levels. People in this country are dumb as shit.
That's why it is called reading comprehension. That last word is usually glossed over but is the important part of the two. Almost anyone beyond second grade can read the words in a text; comprehension and manipulation though....
I dont know if its because I'm getting older (Nearly 39 now) and I don't read outside of using a computer but I feel like my overall vocabulary, spellying and grammar get worse and worse by the day. Feel like I need brain training.
Just enough to win elections
That explains a lot