Well that would certainly explain the meme culture.
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
#22Most of my professional life involved continually being surprised how little most people actually read.
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#23It's interesting that one of the richest countries on earth has such low education standards
The people smart enough to make progress can of course read no problem.
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#24Most of my professional life involved continually being surprised how little most people actually read.
As in reading for pleasure?
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#25It's interesting that one of the richest countries on earth has such low education standards
> In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. My impression from reading the Wikipedia article is that the U.S.’s lite…
>I also wonder how much the immigration rate affects this stat.
Probably not much? Looking at reading achievement by race, we see that whites do worse than asians, and blacks doing worse than hispanics. In both those pairs we see the group with more immigrants do better than the group with less immigrants.
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#26Earlier 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…
> You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates A functioning political system shouldn't only have ever have 2 viable candidates. Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time. Maybe the broken, overly simplistic US political system is a _symptom_ o…
> Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.
There are lots of things you can say about the major American political parties, but that they have stable political views over time is not even close to one of them. (This is, in fact, a direct consequence of duopoly, since coalition building occurs within big-tent parties rather than between parties as it does in multiparty democracies.)
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#27Looking 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?
This is the key observation: these surveys aim to determine the general English literacy of the American workforce. You don't have to be a US citizen or a voter, or even an English speaker to work in this country. A more accurate metric would be "prose literacy in the individual's at-home spoken language," which would probably yield a significantly less drastic picture. Perhaps not the best one, but nowhere near as e…
Still, it is interesting to look at questions that most people failed. Apparently in the 2003 round of evaluations only 16% of participants could answer the question "What is the purpose of the Se Habla Espanol expo?" after reading this short magazine article.
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#28It's hard to tell from Wikipedia what the 6th-grade reading level is and how its measured. Google points me to Flesch Reading Ease. Not a very precise formula... If I remember correctly, the NYTimes is written for the 8th-grade level. Similarly, many hospitals/healthcare facilities don't allow writing above the 8th-grade level. So, expressive, detailed, and stylized writing are all easily possible at the 8th-grade le…
I believe that, when we're talking about the reading level publications target, that's typically evaluated using a linear combination of the average words per sentence, and the average syllables per word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
If so, then the difference between 8th and 6th grade level works out to about 0.17 syllables per word, or about 5 words per sentence, or some blend of the two. So the gist would seem to be, don't be like me; use periods instead of commas and semicolons, and don't use a word like "orthography" when a word like "spelling" will do.
I doubt that that this is what the department of education was looking at when they assessed adult prose literacy, though. But I'm having a bugger of a time tracking that down, too. I'm not sure that I agree with Wikipedia that a Forbes article that doesn't properly cite its own source is an acceptable citation for that figure.
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
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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 if you work at a normal job, you get that, and if you don't, the ER never refuses anyone thanks to our legal system which you also disparage.
Re: 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level
#30It's hard to tell from Wikipedia what the 6th-grade reading level is and how its measured. Google points me to Flesch Reading Ease. Not a very precise formula... If I remember correctly, the NYTimes is written for the 8th-grade level. Similarly, many hospitals/healthcare facilities don't allow writing above the 8th-grade level. So, expressive, detailed, and stylized writing are all easily possible at the 8th-grade le…
>What's the gap between an 8th grade reader and a 6th grade reader?
They can both interpret the instructions on the side of an AT4 but the 8th grader will be able to tell you that it did not have any alliterations, foreshadowing, or personification.
People always forget that at some point in middle school "getting better at reading" stops being about interpreting the literal meanings of sentences and paragraphs and starts being about spotting and understanding the more advanced structures that makes for good creative writing and (outside some wordplay the advertising department engages in) is completely superfluous to what it takes to transact business.