4 ms·

People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to

People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to convince most of the education system (public and sometimes private) to use a teaching method based on junk science. The end result is that there are many millions of adults in the current workforce who can barely read, and many of them work in office settings. Some of those would install anything that would help them through text-based communications. [1]: "How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers" https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho... [2]: "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong" https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ [3]: "According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level" https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rqulik/til_that_according_to_the_us_department_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rqulik/til_t...

mardifoufs 3y ago
I'm not sure that's specific to the US, and I don't even think that particular teaching method has been used here in Quebec, yet we still see broadly similar literacy rates and levels. Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. Maybe that's outdated though, I'll do my research.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  That’s definitely outdated. Literacy rate of my “third world” country is %16 higher than US atm.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Be careful trying to compare countries or even historical numbers when standards vary. The US has a 99% literacy rate based on some metrics, but as often happens when metrics become useless the people tracking them raise the bar. Thus the US’s “Level 1” literacy rate, which represents being able to follow basic written instructions, was 92% in 2014. But in 2020 the standard changed yet again to: “54% of adults in the United States have English prose literacy below the 6th-grade level.” Noticeably being literate in a non English language suddenly doesn’t count, the prose at 6th grade level is also higher than it’s been in the past. Or as Wikipedia puts it: In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    What's the functional literacy rate though?
- gumby 3y ago
  > Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. US is at the bottom of the OECD PISA rankings (as it is with life expectency too), though on a global basis you're right (better than Morocco or Indonesia on both criteria). Shockingly Australia has fallen quite a bit from the initial PISA study where it was ranked #4, now almost as bad as USA. https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/pisa-scores-by-country https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/pisa-scores-by-country
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Honestly what surprised me the most from your very informative link was that France is lower than the US! I'm probably biased but I've always considered the French education system to be quite rigorous and well rounded, with a few different education paths to fit different student profiles from a pretty early stage. Especially compared to canada, which in my experience has a rather weak and rigid curriculum. (Though I dislike the way french and European higher education in general works. You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. The choices you make in high school basically define what you can even study in, and thus what you can do for the rest of your life. I think that's one thing the US does super well, even more so considering that degrees are less important there in the first place.)
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. This was true 50 years ago but hasn't been true since the 90's or so. France may well be the exception in this, but then again, France is an exception in many ways.
      - mardifoufs 3y ago
        Isn't it still true in Germany? With the different high school tiers that can even make it impossible to enroll for a university degree? Though you are right that I shouldn't say that Europe as a whole is like Germany or France even if it's sometime easy to assume so haha.
akira2501 3y ago
It's odd to read the story of an adult who believes they're a poor reader, still to this day apparently, because of what happened to them 30 years ago. Odder still that the article leaves itself the only conclusion of going all the way back to grade school and trying an entirely different strategy and hoping that just "works out" in the end. The lack of "continuing education" in the era of the internet is baffling to me.
- thaumaturgy 3y ago
  I think about this a lot, too. My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I? I think there are two reasons: a lack of focused effort, and the steadily increasing demands of adulthood. I do reasonably okay at self-guided education when I want to, but there's definitely a difference vs. a structured secondary education environment, where there is accountability and other people to guide each other through the process. And, that's coming in to those subjects with already a better-than-average literacy and numeracy; I have to expect that for people who struggle with grade school reading comprehension or math, trying to bootstrap those abilities alone would be daunting. Also, there's just less room for pursuing those now. Lots of people are getting squeezed by concerns that aren't part of most childrens' awareness -- housing costs, bureaucracy, the treadmill of maintaining all the machines that get us through daily life. Those add enormous pressure to dedicate more time towards professional development and "getting ahead", or at least not falling further behind, and that has been eroding all of the unstructured time that I would spend working my way through a textbook (or online class). People with poor literacy are probably more likely to have lower-paying positions, so all of those demands are even more severe. Not that it's impossible. Lots of people do manage to self-educate their way out of poorer circumstances, and certainly the internet has made that far more accessible than it was before the turn of the century. But, let's not underestimate how challenging it is, either.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I? My suspected culprits: 1) The massively increased complexity of ordinary living is overconsumining our personal resources. and 2) For post-GenX and later, the erasure of childhood (free-roaming & peer-only hours) sabotages[1] the reward systems (joy) that supercharge early learning. The less joy there is to facilitate learning, the more effort is required (from otherwise overly depleted resources). [1] similar to what abuse and neglect do
NautilusWave 3y ago
Between the whole language approach to literacy and undiagnosed ADHD, I was very slow at learning how to read. Fortunately, my parents were able to force my grade school to put me into special ed for a couple of years and I rapidly acquired the skill. I have no idea how the teaching methods differed though, beyond classes being half the size and the special ed teacher being accompanied by an aide
mckn1ght 3y ago
I didn’t see a direct mention of it in the links, but is the junk method referred to called Reading Recovery? First I’ve ever heard of it, at least by name. Found it by googling the name Marie Clay that I did see mentioned in one of these links. (Annoying how hard they work to bury the lede.)
- thaumaturgy 3y ago
  If I remember right (it has been a while since I dived into this topic), Reading Recovery was one of the programs mentioned. It was supposed to be a supporting approach to teaching reading to kids who were struggling otherwise. The mainstream approach that really made a hash of things though was "Whole Language" learning, largely commercialized by Fountas and Pinnell, which eventually provided the program and associated materials to classrooms around the world. This program relied, in part, on guessing: if a child got stuck on a word, they would be asked to guess what word might fit in the sentence. Sometimes they were given context clues, like a picture on the page. Any efforts to associate individual letters or letter combinations with sounds was abandoned. Wikipedia has something of a watered-down overview of this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language, but I really recommend listening to the podcast in the second link in my parent comment (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/), APM Reports put together a compelling examination of what happened, and it's explained well. (I do wish it was also available in a more typical article format.)

mardifoufs 3y ago

I'm not sure that's specific to the US, and I don't even think that particular teaching method has been used here in Quebec, yet we still see broadly similar literacy rates and levels. Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. Maybe that's outdated though, I'll do my research.

Aerbil313 3y ago
That’s definitely outdated. Literacy rate of my “third world” country is %16 higher than US atm.
- Retric 3y ago
  Be careful trying to compare countries or even historical numbers when standards vary. The US has a 99% literacy rate based on some metrics, but as often happens when metrics become useless the people tracking them raise the bar. Thus the US’s “Level 1” literacy rate, which represents being able to follow basic written instructions, was 92% in 2014. But in 2020 the standard changed yet again to: “54% of adults in the United States have English prose literacy below the 6th-grade level.” Noticeably being literate in a non English language suddenly doesn’t count, the prose at 6th grade level is also higher than it’s been in the past. Or as Wikipedia puts it: In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  What's the functional literacy rate though?
gumby 3y ago
> Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. US is at the bottom of the OECD PISA rankings (as it is with life expectency too), though on a global basis you're right (better than Morocco or Indonesia on both criteria). Shockingly Australia has fallen quite a bit from the initial PISA study where it was ranked #4, now almost as bad as USA. https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/pisa-scores-by-country https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/pisa-scores-by-country
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Honestly what surprised me the most from your very informative link was that France is lower than the US! I'm probably biased but I've always considered the French education system to be quite rigorous and well rounded, with a few different education paths to fit different student profiles from a pretty early stage. Especially compared to canada, which in my experience has a rather weak and rigid curriculum. (Though I dislike the way french and European higher education in general works. You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. The choices you make in high school basically define what you can even study in, and thus what you can do for the rest of your life. I think that's one thing the US does super well, even more so considering that degrees are less important there in the first place.)
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. This was true 50 years ago but hasn't been true since the 90's or so. France may well be the exception in this, but then again, France is an exception in many ways.
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      Isn't it still true in Germany? With the different high school tiers that can even make it impossible to enroll for a university degree? Though you are right that I shouldn't say that Europe as a whole is like Germany or France even if it's sometime easy to assume so haha.

akira2501 3y ago

It's odd to read the story of an adult who believes they're a poor reader, still to this day apparently, because of what happened to them 30 years ago. Odder still that the article leaves itself the only conclusion of going all the way back to grade school and trying an entirely different strategy and hoping that just "works out" in the end. The lack of "continuing education" in the era of the internet is baffling to me.

thaumaturgy 3y ago
I think about this a lot, too. My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I? I think there are two reasons: a lack of focused effort, and the steadily increasing demands of adulthood. I do reasonably okay at self-guided education when I want to, but there's definitely a difference vs. a structured secondary education environment, where there is accountability and other people to guide each other through the process. And, that's coming in to those subjects with already a better-than-average literacy and numeracy; I have to expect that for people who struggle with grade school reading comprehension or math, trying to bootstrap those abilities alone would be daunting. Also, there's just less room for pursuing those now. Lots of people are getting squeezed by concerns that aren't part of most childrens' awareness -- housing costs, bureaucracy, the treadmill of maintaining all the machines that get us through daily life. Those add enormous pressure to dedicate more time towards professional development and "getting ahead", or at least not falling further behind, and that has been eroding all of the unstructured time that I would spend working my way through a textbook (or online class). People with poor literacy are probably more likely to have lower-paying positions, so all of those demands are even more severe. Not that it's impossible. Lots of people do manage to self-educate their way out of poorer circumstances, and certainly the internet has made that far more accessible than it was before the turn of the century. But, let's not underestimate how challenging it is, either.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I? My suspected culprits: 1) The massively increased complexity of ordinary living is overconsumining our personal resources. and 2) For post-GenX and later, the erasure of childhood (free-roaming & peer-only hours) sabotages[1] the reward systems (joy) that supercharge early learning. The less joy there is to facilitate learning, the more effort is required (from otherwise overly depleted resources). [1] similar to what abuse and neglect do

NautilusWave 3y ago

Between the whole language approach to literacy and undiagnosed ADHD, I was very slow at learning how to read. Fortunately, my parents were able to force my grade school to put me into special ed for a couple of years and I rapidly acquired the skill. I have no idea how the teaching methods differed though, beyond classes being half the size and the special ed teacher being accompanied by an aide

mckn1ght 3y ago

I didn’t see a direct mention of it in the links, but is the junk method referred to called Reading Recovery? First I’ve ever heard of it, at least by name. Found it by googling the name Marie Clay that I did see mentioned in one of these links. (Annoying how hard they work to bury the lede.)

thaumaturgy 3y ago
If I remember right (it has been a while since I dived into this topic), Reading Recovery was one of the programs mentioned. It was supposed to be a supporting approach to teaching reading to kids who were struggling otherwise. The mainstream approach that really made a hash of things though was "Whole Language" learning, largely commercialized by Fountas and Pinnell, which eventually provided the program and associated materials to classrooms around the world. This program relied, in part, on guessing: if a child got stuck on a word, they would be asked to guess what word might fit in the sentence. Sometimes they were given context clues, like a picture on the page. Any efforts to associate individual letters or letter combinations with sounds was abandoned. Wikipedia has something of a watered-down overview of this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language, but I really recommend listening to the podcast in the second link in my parent comment (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/), APM Reports put together a compelling examination of what happened, and it's explained well. (I do wish it was also available in a more typical article format.)