Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2022
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:doubt:
I truly cannot imagine being unable to read. That even 1 in 5 people I met could be there is mind boggling.
The literacy rate is calculated as reading above a 5th grade level which seems like a really low bar to set for adult literacy. https://www.libraryjournal.com/binaries/content/gallery/Jlibrary/2020/04/literacycrisis/ljapril2020litcrisischart1.jpg
Yeah. This is genuinely sad, but also confusing. Like, how do these people interact with the world? Ignoring anything uplifting, how would you work, or find places & things you needed without being able to read?
How much reading do the average service job, or even many office jobs, really require?
I've never known a functionally illiterate person to work in an office setting. I've known a whole lot who work at the docks or refineries, which I really believe is why all the safety training for those is done through oral lectures and videos.
from experience, most functionally illiterate people will know a few key words, can perhaps read numbers, and know how to sign their own name. What they can't do is scan a document for relevant information nor can they read a passage of text and gain information from it. They can maybe recite the alphabet, maybe. They can also sometimes sound out certain words if they really, desperately need to get through some text.
Almost all of them I've known have worked in manual or household labor type jobs. A few have done pretty well for themselves actually. One of my students worked as an HVAC installer. A lot of the time they'll have kids or a spouse who knows how to read as well. Almost all of them I've known have had miserable lives, shuffled around living from one relative to another, long periods of homelessness, losing custody of multiple kids, never making above minimum wage. It's hard for them to do basic things and yeah, they're often very reliant on family or close friends.
A guy I went to high school with is functionally illiterate and will admit it. He owns a tire shop in my hometown through sheer happenstance and lives in a mcmansion. America is a silly place.
I read an ethnography about a guy in New York in like the 90s. Guy couldn't read, but he'd managed to set up what was basically a drug dealing company, with all the managment practices you'd expect from a small company with a few dozen employees, and the author kept pointing out that the guy had basically re-invented the McDonald's franchise model from scratch. The actual end point drug sellers even made about the same wages you'd get at McD's
afaik literacy isn't just the ability to read but also the ability to gather and analyze information from a source.
Here's a better map https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/ that paints an even bleaker picture of only 46% nationwide "full literacy"
Jesus christ the US really is a failed state.