this post was submitted on 31 May 2022
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the_dunk_tank

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It's the dunk tank.

This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.

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Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

How much reading do the average service job, or even many office jobs, really require?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

afaik literacy isn't just the ability to read but also the ability to gather and analyze information from a source.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

Here's a better map https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/ that paints an even bleaker picture of only 46% nationwide "full literacy"