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This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or w

• hugh 18y ago
  Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them. Try reading the comments on youtube. I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts. A car mechanic has enough brains to grasp some pretty complicated mechanical concepts, but for whatever reason he can quite easily fail to grasp a simple literary concept no matter how well it's explained. In the same way, I'm sure I can find you plenty of professors of English who are incapable of grasping how an engine works. In both cases, I'm not sure whether they're genuinely incapable, or whether they just have psychological barricades set up which lead them to think that this kind of knowledge is "beneath" them. You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. Most people out there probably just don't think that commenting intelligently on The Wizard of Oz is a worthwhile thing to do.
  • edw519 18y ago
    ...whether they just have psychological barricades... I'm convinced that this is the bulk of the problem. Perhaps I'm still an idealist, but I have always believed that almost anyone can learn almost anything. Ever think of asking a parent how many times they'd let their baby fall before they gave up teaching him to walk? They'd look at you like you're from another planet. They'd probably answer, "He'll keep trying and falling until he walks." Think how far ahead everyone would be if all teachers were like parents of one-year-olds.
    • oz 18y ago
      Aha, but walking is an inherent human capability, waiting to be learned. I honestly don't think that everyone can learn anything. we can certainly do better than the status quo, but expecting the average layman to grasp advanced physics seems a bit of a stretch. There's something to be said for raw talent.
      • edw519 18y ago
        I was careful to use the word "almost" twice. The interpretation of "almost" is obviously up to the reader. With that in mind, if you could teach many "average laymen" to grasp advanced physics, I really wouldn't be all that surprised. Of course, there is something to be said for raw talent, lots of which remains hidden because of many factors. The power of human capability never ceases to amaze me, even under the most difficult circumstances.
        • MaysonL 18y ago
          I have a feeling that almost all three-year-olds could be brought (over time) to an understanding (by age 12-15) of a reasonable portion of advanced physics. However, after a few years of indoctrination in most schools, almost all of them will have become almost incapable of doing so.
          • edw519 18y ago
• neilk 18y ago
  Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? Yes. 21-23%. Or, higher, depending on how you count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. Correct again. The wikipedia article notes the high correlation of illiteracy to delinquency and crime. However, a counterexample. One of my first programming jobs was to create a data entry terminal in an industrial setting, replacing the giant paper sheets they used to fill out. When it was ready I beta-tested it on selected people from each shift. The interface was super simple, it just asked you a series of questions and you typed in the numbers -- I figured the guys in the plant would at least know how to deal with ATMs, so that was my metaphor. And it worked well. The best foreman in the plant brought a friend along -- I shrugged and let them take the test together. He interacted with it in a really weird way and required multiple repeats of the entire session before he understood it. I only realized later that he was illiterate. And, let me just restate: best foreman in the whole plant. He knew what numbers were, and he'd trained himself to fill out the correct numbers in the correct spots on the paper sheet. So that's when I added big icons and pictures to each screen, diagramming what bit of data we wanted at each stage.
  • edw519 18y ago
    Nice story, neilk. My favorite system development anecdotes have always come from factory floors. Not quite sure why. Maybe because producing vs. not producing was always so much more visible than in a typical office.
  • mechanical_fish 18y ago
    Yep. And if that illiterate foreman was suddenly required to pass a college English 101 class in order to keep his job... the world would lose a perfectly good foreman. For some reason your story reminded me of Captain Bill Eddy, television pioneer of the 1930s and 40s. Here he is in his own words (from one of my favorite books: The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920 - 1961): "I started losing my hearing as a kid and was deaf when I entered the Navy, but I had learned to read lips, so every time they put me through the audio tests, they said I had perfect hearing. With the great knowledge of the Navy I was assigned to be sound officer on the submarine. I couldn't hear the signals coming from the enemy submarines, so I went to Kresge's department store and bought some parts and devised an amplifier where the sound signals came out as a movement on a dial. By looking at the dial, I knew if we were on target for an enemy ship and could fire a torpedo. It worked very well, and our submarine was the only one that was scoring hits. Soon, so many people had these amplifiers and were scoring hits that the Navy Department heard about it, and they asked me to develop a model of this amplifier using the finest parts. I put it together and it didn't work. In desperation, I went out to Kresge's and bought these cheap tubes and transformers and put together the Eddy Amplifier and it worked. It became a very interesting patent because it only worked with Kresge parts. That's how I got into electronics." "In 1934 the Navy finally tripped me up by changing to an electronic system of measuring hearing. I was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for retirement." Fortunately, the Navy's loss was Philo Farnsworth's gain...
• dfranke 18y ago
  How old are you? The baby boom generation seems mostly literate, but my generation, gen Y, is basically incapable of constructing a sentence. In my senior year high school English class I had a teacher who liked me, so she had me grade papers in lieu of some other work. In particular, I remember proofreading drafts of my classmates' college admissions essays. They were deplorable. The best one was grammatically tolerable, adhering closely to the rigid five-paragraph "keyhole" format that we'd all had drilled into our heads, but was all about how much the author loved playing Counterstrike and the lessons it taught him about teamwork. The worst few were outright incomprehensible. I handed those back to the teacher unedited and asked her whether their authors spoke English as their native language. They did. And this was an honors class at what is generally considered the strongest public high school in Florida.
  • emmett 18y ago
    The data seem to suggest that, while those students were certainly deplorable, average literacy is actually at an all time high: http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
    • dfranke 18y ago
      Those statistics end at 1979, but I don't doubt that you're correct. The problem here is not literacy per se: these students would have no trouble transcribing between written and spoken English. The problem is with composition and comprehension.
      • emmett 18y ago
        I completely agree that's a huge problem. I just don't think things were any better in the past in composition or comprehension.
  • gambino 18y ago
    I'm Gen X - the High School I attended, and ultimately received my GED from was inner city. While we had more Ivy League acceptances from our student body than any other local public school, we also had on-campus murders, armed police officers roaming the halls, and a bathroom that no one but drug dealers and users went into. I left school my senior year, and went into a career in computers. I had been a part of the "computer underground" since 12 or 13, and knew UNIX better than most admins. I couldn't speak or write properly however. Turns out employers, weren't too keen on odd combination of l33+ sp34/<, and street slag. I relied on two co-workers over my first several years of work to teach me English. I think I've been free of "tooken" for nearly a decade. Thank God. It wasn't the school's fault, I made a choice. I could of easily gone to a decent college, but laziness and lack of priorities could have derailed my life. I was lucky enough to have these guys take an interest in me.
• Andys 18y ago
  Have you turned on a TV lately?
• yummyfajitas 18y ago
  I'm just curious, what does it mean to "comment intelligently" on a literary work? It's a skill I never learned (1), nor could I even explain what the skill consists of. It hasn't really impeded my (non-corporate) career, although I did need to learn how to write when I got to grad school (note: I learned to write based on Principles of Software Engineering, not Strunk&White). (1) I took english 101-102 at a community college, similar to what author describes. But the professor neither explained how to write literary papers, nor read student papers before giving out grades.
• sdurkin 18y ago
  You should take a job at Wendy's for a week. The vast majority of society functions at a cognitive level that is so low as to be shocking. What's even more amazing is that these people are able to hold a job, earn a living, and have a family. People who have higher thinking skills live in an entirely different world from the mainstream of humanity. It turns out that intelligence is a lot less necessary to leading a normal life than you and I might think.
  • rms 18y ago
    >People who have higher thinking skills live in an entirely different world from the mainstream of humanity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch
• anamax 18y ago
  > I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains How many things in your life can you fix by yourself? The typical car mechanic is far less dependent on others to keep things running. > Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large No. In fact, even in the areas where you'd expect academia to be most relevant, half of the genius' are academic failures. (The academics do dominate the middle, but that's probably because academia is used as a filter and that keeps out all but the best of the academic failures.) > the educational system is a massive failure Not massive, but anything else that "succeeded" as well would be considered a failure. However, the bigger failure may be outside the educational system, expecting things from it that it can't deliver. Then again, that may be academia's fault. Who else would think that the ability to comment intelligently on the wizard of oz has broad predictive power. FWIW, the guy who wrote Babylon 5, which is full of literary representation and symbolism, ie abstraction, says that he can't handle "let X = 5".