4 ms·

Ah yes, the well-worn 'people have always been complaining about things getting worse' rebuttal.. But your argument is flawed - just because it might not always

Ah yes, the well-worn 'people have always been complaining about things getting worse' rebuttal.. But your argument is flawed - just because it might not always have been true does not mean it is not true now. As I said, I'm inclined to believe those at the chalkface. Here's one reference I was able to find easily: https://www.bjupress.com/resources/articles/t2t/declining-literacy.php https://www.bjupress.com/resources/articles/t2t/declining-li...

zimpenfish 9y ago
> bjupress.com Would you consider them an unbiased source given their stated goal is to "support Christian educators by producing textbooks and materials that shape a biblical worldview"?
- Boothroid 9y ago
  That's another logical fallacy. There are stacks of references available on this.
  - ivanbakel 9y ago
    Could you then find another one?
icebraining 9y ago
I find that article to be in need of review by someone with good literacy. It presents single datapoints and talks about "this decline", despite not actually presenting past data to compare with the current numbers. The largest timespan it shows is the literacy from '92 to '03, and they explicitly quote the report saying that "average prose and document literacy did not differ significantly". They also fail to mention that the 2003 report showed no decline except for Hispanics. Maybe, just maybe, immigration by people with non-English backgrounds was the cause, not textbooks? It'd be nice to at least see that discussed.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > they explicitly quote the report saying that [...] Which ignored the part immediately before that citing an 8 point rise in quantitative literacy between '92 and '03. Also blatantly ignored the following sentence showing +6 for prose and +8 for document literacy for POC. And the one about Asian/Pacific Islanders getting +16 from '92 to '03. It is a shoddy piece of work picking only those points that bolster their existing conclusion.
jcranmer 9y ago
You could do better than a reference that lies about the contents of its citations. For example, there is no evidence that "over 50% of American adults over the age of 16 were functionally illiterate." The actual number is 14%, if I'm taking the cited source's statistic of "below basic prose literacy" as the definition of "functionally illiterate." Actually, upon reading the whole article, this feels a lot more like the same millennium-old whining "kids aren't appreciating the same classics I did and therefore they're stupid idiots." Kids these days read and write a lot--text messaging, twitter, facebook, social media. If you want to convince someone that it really is the case that people are getting dumber, you need to find references that don't read like the same age-old complaints: you need to show that it's dumber on an objective measure of intelligence, not "they don't show appreciation for the classics," which is what you usually find instead.

zimpenfish 9y ago

> bjupress.com Would you consider them an unbiased source given their stated goal is to "support Christian educators by producing textbooks and materials that shape a biblical worldview"?

Boothroid 9y ago
That's another logical fallacy. There are stacks of references available on this.
- ivanbakel 9y ago
  Could you then find another one?

icebraining 9y ago

I find that article to be in need of review by someone with good literacy. It presents single datapoints and talks about "this decline", despite not actually presenting past data to compare with the current numbers. The largest timespan it shows is the literacy from '92 to '03, and they explicitly quote the report saying that "average prose and document literacy did not differ significantly". They also fail to mention that the 2003 report showed no decline except for Hispanics. Maybe, just maybe, immigration by people with non-English backgrounds was the cause, not textbooks? It'd be nice to at least see that discussed.

zimpenfish 9y ago
> they explicitly quote the report saying that [...] Which ignored the part immediately before that citing an 8 point rise in quantitative literacy between '92 and '03. Also blatantly ignored the following sentence showing +6 for prose and +8 for document literacy for POC. And the one about Asian/Pacific Islanders getting +16 from '92 to '03. It is a shoddy piece of work picking only those points that bolster their existing conclusion.

jcranmer 9y ago

You could do better than a reference that lies about the contents of its citations. For example, there is no evidence that "over 50% of American adults over the age of 16 were functionally illiterate." The actual number is 14%, if I'm taking the cited source's statistic of "below basic prose literacy" as the definition of "functionally illiterate." Actually, upon reading the whole article, this feels a lot more like the same millennium-old whining "kids aren't appreciating the same classics I did and therefore they're stupid idiots." Kids these days read and write a lot--text messaging, twitter, facebook, social media. If you want to convince someone that it really is the case that people are getting dumber, you need to find references that don't read like the same age-old complaints: you need to show that it's dumber on an objective measure of intelligence, not "they don't show appreciation for the classics," which is what you usually find instead.