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54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

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Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would question how many people "failed" to answer this question because of poor literacy versus a lack of domain knowledge in the subject matter. The article is full of sales and marketing jargon that most people -- in my experience -- just don't have experience with.

I cannot even find one piece of jargon in that passage. Here is a list of marketing jargon [1]. Just because you are not exposed to a topic does not make any conversation about the topic contain jargon. If I say "baseball is a sport where you use a bat to hit a ball to score points", the word "bat" is not jargon because we only use that definition in the context of sports. [1] - https://www.precisionmarketinggroup.co…

> I cannot even find one piece of jargon in that passage.

"the Hispanic market."

"brand conscious"

"brand loyal"

""It’s all contacts . . . contacts . . . contacts!""

"media play"

"sponsor visibility"

> Just because you are not exposed to a topic does not make any conversation about the topic contain jargon

That is true. It is also true that people who are familiar with a particular subject and vernacular tend to not recognize when they aren't explaining something clearly. (For the record, I've worked in sales, alongside marketing colleagues, for almost 20 years.)

> If I say "baseball is a sport where you use a bat to hit a ball to score points", the word "bat" is not jargon because we only use that definition in the context of sports.

At no point does the article contain anything like a clear description analogous to your example.

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#182
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If less than half of 8th grades can't read, should it maybe, just maybe mean it's time for spelling reform? It's baffling, that you need a method and something special for such a basic thing as reading.

If you mean "just maybe" literally, then sure, it's worth thinking about. Figuring out the sounds is a small part and we definitely shouldn't assume it's the bottleneck.

Well, that's literally how children read -- they figure out the sounds from letters and pronounce syllable by syllable, then repeat the whole word (if then don't forget something in the middle of it). Naturally, if there is more than one way to read everything, it kinda doesn't work.

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#183
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that HN posters are vehemently against social media, particularly FB. The reasons I’ve read are all about the general negativity, pessimism, false information, etc. While HN submissions are generally held to a higher standard, the general comments/discussions are equally toxic. Apparently FB is such a cancer and everyone else is such a problem - but we’re actually part of the problem.

Skepticism is a far cry from general negativity and pessimism. The relative scarcity of ad hominem attacks on HN is one of the most notable differences to other popular message boards. Personally, I appreciate the open attack on ideas and source credibility, and don't find it toxic at all.

There aren't ad hominem attacks between individual posters, but individual topics/subjects are attacked all the time. The most frequent one I've seen is either some political group or companies/employers. If you go off of HN comments, FB, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. are all "evil" and terrible companies run by insidious people that want to steal your information, take all your money, and turn us all into mindless slaves.

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#184
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. People are probably hostile because you're going against scientific consensus and saying a range of disabilities that affects millions of people doesn't exist.

We’re talking about learning basic stuff, not top tier postgrad stuff. The article is about the majority of American adults being unable to read prose at a sixth grade level - that is, years before SF suggests teaching algebra. That is absolutely a massively distributed pedagogical failure of outstanding degree. Unless the average adult is so mentally disabled that acceptable-or-above teaching should result in this o…

I'm not here to defend the American education system. It's just a big jump from "this issue is so widespread only a failure of teaching can explain it all" to "learning disabilities don't exist".

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#185
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving asides the offense/racist grandparent comments, the worship of money is what has made America prosperous, and what still allows us to get the best and the brightest. Ask "them enlightened" Europeans (or Australians or...) how much they make, and rejoice we get to live a prosperous life here in America! And no, before someone says "but what about universal healthcare?", health insurance doesn't count, because…

"worship of money is what has made America prosperous" Ah, so it's a religion and prayer works? It's got nothing to do with US being the only industrial power that wasn't obliterated in WW2 and had debt that took untill 2006 to pay off, like UK did? Or with US being center of global finance, having global reserve currency, etc? Okay lets take your argument at face value - what's the money for, to lead a better life,…

I'm not advocating for a money religion, what I'm saying is that people do terrible things for money and your point only elaborates on this.

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates. Seriously, a 6th grade has enough brain capacity to vote in American politics. Also, schools do teach literacy but a lot of funding gets sent to private schools and suburbs while large inner city schools get underfunded. There are also racial issues, where people of other races have continued to be…

>"capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates" This short sighted attitude is the peoblem. Do you know your representative? Have you ever spoken to them? How do the two presidential candidates come about? Have you ever been in a political party? There is a lot more to democracy than choosing a front clown

Yes I've called my Representatives I get someone answering the phone that says they'll take my concern or suggestion and that is the end. If you want to have a meeting with them then you have to pay for it and you usually need to draft the changes to the bills in advance if you want them introduced which takes entire teams to do, but even individuals can see where things are clearly wrong. The only special people in politics are the ones who pay and have money. Everyone else is just hoping they'll get a share of the pie in the end.

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#187
post #164

This submission has an egregiously editorialized title, which is against the site guidelines for good reason: " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. " As a result, we got a tedious, dumbed-down, inflammatory and supercilious discussion. Just what we don't want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW, I've attempted submissions of the underlying US Dept. Ed. study numerous times under its own title with no traction:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=by%3Adredmorbius%20literacy

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#188
post #15

Looking at the original PIAAC data source ( https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/ ), it looks like the level one or below counties are pretty strongly correlated with proximity to the southern border... How many of those people were educated in the US system, or are eligible to vote? Also, in the future maybe submit the primary data source, rather than a Wikipedia link that cites a Forbes article?

The original source has been submitted multiple times previously, three of them by myself, for what it's worth.

The HN submission queue is an arbitrary place. And clickbait is popular beause it works. (I strive strongly against it myself.)

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in reading for pleasure?

Presumably - I have often wondered how much more we all read and write now compared to people 50yr ago (even if a lot of it is in Slack / email / SMS etc.) It does appear that reading books for pleasure is gradually trending down in the US[1] unfortunately, but in terms of raw words read or written, I would think that we're doing a lot more online than we used to do off... 1: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016…

There's a substantial difference between reading short takes and longer, complex texts.

Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book illustrates this in the multiple levels of reading it describes. Critical and synoptic reading of complex works is a developed skill.

Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent is right though. All a "learning disability" is is a requirement for a different approach from the instructor than the one-size-fits-all nonsense that we push down poor kids' throats as "education". The lack of ability to benefit from this farce in millions of students isn't surprising; and it can be absolutely address with better instruction and individual approach. I say this as a former instructor, math…

> All a "learning disability" is is a requirement for a different approach from the instructor than the one-size-fits-all nonsense that we push down poor kids' throats as "education". Tell that to my Dyslexia, I had many mentors growing up, and was taught by many people using many different approaches. I still can’t spell for shit, and my phonic processing is still garbage. No about of different teaching methods is g…

The teaching failure lies making what you struggle with a required component of education, and measuring you on it in the same way as others, while providing you with no alternative route to success that doesn't require you jumping through hoops.

To give an analogy: someone who can't walk has a disability, but it would be a failure of the instructor to make 5K running the only way to get a passing grade in physical education, while simultaneously not making barbells available.

And looking at your very well-written and perfectly structured comment, I struggle to accept its conclusion. If all you need to write this well is spell-checker — a tool more common than a ballpoint pen at this point, and one that's been around for decades — then the instructors that didn't teach you to use it were failing at teaching.

If you can speak well, and they never even suggested dictation software (again, something that's been around for a long time), it's a teaching failure.

Writing is not about spelling words the same way dictionary spells them. Writing is about communicating ideas clearly, and your written prose is great.

You can't write without a spell-checker; your tutors can't write with a quill, most likely. There's no difference.

That you think that your prose is poor — there's the teaching failure.

Do you see what I mean now?

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