memes

If all natural-born citizens has to go through the naturalization process before getting the right to vote, trump would never have been elected.

Not just because they don't know the 100 (I think they changed it to 120 now?) questions, but also because they would not pass the:

"Have you ever been a member of any totalitarian party?
Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?
Have you ever advocated the overthrow of any government by force or violence?
Have you ever persecuted any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion?" Questions

(Fun fact: They can revoke your citizenship after the fact if they catch you lying, or if you do any "terrorist" activity within 5 years of naturalization. Jan 6 riotor types would never pass this. As a naturalized citizen, I'm kinda dreading this since last November)

If those Americans could read they'd be very upset about that!

This is pretty much all you need to know about the state of the United States. It's being run by 10 year old imbeciles.

Republicans at work. A dumb electorate is the easiest to manipulate.

To make it worse year by year the republicans continue to defund education, remove sciences, sex education and history from being taught in schools. While trying to force christian religion in public schools.

What a timeline America is going through.

TIL at least 46% of Americans can read.

For clarity: this is based on piaac test results. The literacy test results are sorted into 6 categories (1-5 and <1) for comparing the distribution internationally. 54% of Americans score less than 3, compared to top-scoring Japan and top-english-speaking Australia at approximately 35% and 45%. The task description for level 3:

Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing. They can combine various processes (accessing, understanding and evaluating) if required by the task . Adults at this level can compare and evaluate multiple pieces of information from the text(s) based on their relevance or credibility. Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy, including continuous, noncontinuous, mixed. Information may be distributed across multiple pages, sometimes arising from multiple sources that provide discrepant information. Understanding rhetorical structures and text signals becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially when dealing with complex digital texts that require navigation. The texts may include specific, possibly unfamiliar vocabulary and argumentative structures. Competing information is often present and sometimes salient, though no more than the target information. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inferencing. Tasks at Level 3 also often demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate text content to answer accurately. The most complex tasks at this level include lengthy or complex questions requiring the identification of multiple criteria, without clear guidance regarding what has to be done

I could not find which source originally cited level 2 as "6th grade" equivalent, though the oecd recommends against drawing that parallel.

Can we fix that by abolishing the department of education?
It's only gonna get worse, isn't it?

The podcast called Sold a Story talks about how the school systems adopted a curriculum that doesn't teach kids how to read. They are more like mimicking literacy. It gives appearances they they are reading but they aren't comprehending.

Me Fail English? That's unpossible!

Well, reading and writing is a 6 millenia old technology, thus it's in dire need of replacement with AI readers /s

Yeah, we’ve noticed. Not that Europe is far behind I fear.

Literacy is definitely declining; people just don’t have the attention spans they used to. Between Twitter, TikTok and other brain rot, reading a book or simply a longer text just isn’t something a lot of people do.

Honestly, people make more of this than it is. I say that as someone whoes reading level in the 8th grade was rated "post-High School" in tests. Though IIRC, that particular test wasn't considered accurate past a 10th grade reading level or so. Suffice it to say, though, I was always rated at least a few grade levels higher than my actual grade level when it comes to reading.

If you pick up examples of post-High School writing, you'll find it's hard to read. Basically, check any abstract on a paper for a technical field. It'll be full of field-specific jargon and long sentences. Copy and paste it into a writing assistant like Hemmingway, and it will scream at you to simplify the sentence structure.

Converting to terms of Lexile level, Fellowship of the Ring has a rating of 860L. By a conversion chart, we would expect 50% of students to be able to read it by the spring of 4th grade. Even the bottom 10% of students can read it by the beginning of 10th grade.

That's a relatively hard book; harder than what most fiction asks of you. Of Mice and Men, which is on plenty of High School reading lists, only has a Lexile level of 630L. Conversely, Romeo and Juliet can go up to 1260L (though this varies depending on the editing of different editions).

The fact that some replies don't understand the title of the article and some are trying to explain it is funny af to me, I'm sorry 😂

Only 54%?

X to doubt.

Yeah we elected one in to the presidential office too

knew an old man who couldn't read. he could write phone numbers in a notebook and remembered who it was by where it was written. no names. Fort Worth 1980.

And 21% of American adults are illiterate

Too bad they can’t read this article.

I dare not find out what my reading level is, for the same reason I dare not find out what my IQ is. I don't gain anything by knowing it, and knowing that I'm stupid will only worsen my self-esteem issues.

I feel better assuming I'm roughly average for both measurements.