How bad are childhood literacy rates? • Hacker News Board

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#61

Post by WillAdams » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 10:37 AM UTC

smogcutter wrote: post #25

For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard. Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace th…

The thing is, Jerry Pournelle claimed in his "Chaos Manor" column from _Byte Magazine_ that he and his wife had developed a system for teaching even adults to read in short order using a video game/tutorial system and playing games seems to be pretty much universal on devices.

Why can't things such as Khan Academy be included in the school curriculum, allowing children the chance to work at their own pace? The best school system I ever attended did this (through 8th grade, children were allowed to work up to 4 grades ahead --- after that there was no cap, many teachers were accredited as faculty at a local college (or students would be taken to the college, or professors from there brought to the school) --- it was not uncommon for a student to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#62

Post by watwut » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #26

WillAdams wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory. Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poem…

I couldn't even read those books. Forget about memorizing them.

It is because you read the translation that intentionally translated them into obscure hard to understand and interpret language. So that they poem feels more ancient and "serious" to reader.

But originally they were written in the language of the time and in the way that made them easy to remember for contemporaries. They had rhythm, because that is easier to remember. They contained a lot of repetition, because that is easier to remember.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#63

Post by satyrun » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

logsr wrote: post #36

SchemaLoad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not just one kind of literacy though. I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.

language is one of the basic mechanisms for social differentiation and status. in academia specialized language is how different disciplines are differentiated and abstruse literary references are how people demonstrate their knowledge and status in the field. knowing how to read ("knowing your letters") is not literacy. from an academic perspective the majority of the population is illiterate.

This is just wrong.

Ordinary language is highly ambiguous, so specific domains have to use words that have been disambiguated for the domain so that people inside the domain can clearly communicate with each other.

Two chemist aren't doing performance art talking to each other because I am uneducated in chemistry so can't follow the conversation.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#64

Post by kccqzy » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

ryao wrote: post #24

HEmanZ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds. Books like Huck Finn are critical…

> Are you being sarcastic? I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me. > Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a differe…

A better question is, did the adults forcing children to read such books provide a safe space for the child to ask seemingly stupid questions such as "why did this character in this book talk in ungrammatical sentences" not wholesale rejection of such books.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#65

Post by kccqzy » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 1:28 PM UTC

ryao wrote: post #51

AngryData wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.

People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school…

Well colloquially "pet" itself is a past tense. Depends on the register of the language. And "wrong" is also an adverb. It would help if the educators explain when to use "wrong" vs "wrongly" vs "wrongfully" since all could be adverbs; or you could read enough to figure out the subtle differences.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#66

Post by nmfisher » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

ryao wrote: post #24

HEmanZ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds. Books like Huck Finn are critical…

> Are you being sarcastic? I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me. > Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a differe…

I think the problem was that you were forced to learn formal grammar, not that you were forced to read Huck Finn.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#67

Post by goosedragons » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

WillAdams wrote: post #61

smogcutter wrote: post #25

For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard. Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace th…

The thing is, Jerry Pournelle claimed in his "Chaos Manor" column from _Byte Magazine_ that he and his wife had developed a system for teaching even adults to read in short order using a video game/tutorial system and playing games seems to be pretty much universal on devices. Why can't things such as Khan Academy be included in the school curriculum, allowing children the chance to work at their own pace? The best s…

I don't think most students are self-disciplined enough to do that. Motivated adults are very different from unmotivated children.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#68

Post by HEmanZ » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

ryao wrote: post #24

HEmanZ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds. Books like Huck Finn are critical…

> Are you being sarcastic? I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me. > Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a differe…

I feel pretty bad for you reading your comments, it sounds like you had a very bad educational experience that caused much more confusion than it should have.

It sounds to me like you may be neurodivergent in some way that made these two parallel aspects of literacy, literature and grammar, hard to disentangle during your education. It sounds like a failure of the education system to adequately guide you or take your particular ways of thinking into account, not a problem with the sort of underlying philosophy of what books we read in school.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#69

Post by SamPatt » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

WillAdams wrote: post #15

SamPatt wrote: post #11

This seems bad on its face, but I wonder if this is specific to reading comprehension or to all comprehension? If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished? Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to b…

The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory. Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poem…

Yes, and we've lost something, but hasn't this tradeoff likely been worthwhile? Reading may impact memorization but externalizing knowledge obviously had immense benefits.

If yes, then how do we know the next tradeoff won't also be worthwhile?

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#70

Post by WillAdams » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

SamPatt wrote: post #69

WillAdams wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory. Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poem…

Yes, and we've lost something, but hasn't this tradeoff likely been worthwhile? Reading may impact memorization but externalizing knowledge obviously had immense benefits. If yes, then how do we know the next tradeoff won't also be worthwhile?

I don't see how rate-limiting one's access to knowledge to video speeds due to illiteracy, and removing the ability to take/read useful/usable notes could be helpful.

When I was in college, I was volunteered to take notes for a student who had a disability which precluded their taking notes in Art History class, so I would fax my notes to the secretary's office from my Newton MessagePad, which notes included sketches of each of the slides (many of which were not in the textbook) as well as page references to the textbook (since I brought mine in to class and followed along in it during the lectures) --- turns out the notes were shared with the everyone else taking the class in the dorm, resulting in a marked improvement in GPA and a lowered failure rate --- until the textbook was changed from Janson to Gardner a couple of years later.