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Limiting or undermining literacy remains important to those who benefit from it.
by j45 3y ago
Limiting or undermining literacy remains important to those who benefit from it.
- nox101 3y agowhat logic leads to this conclusion? I tend to lean to the rising tide lifts all boats. who benefits from illiteracy?
- Root_Denied 3y ago> who benefits from illiteracy? Those already on top. They can afford to educate their own line and hoard resources across generations doing so. They can fail as many times as it takes before they finally succeed because of this. They throw the bodies of the world at their problems until they are solved, which necessitates an uneducated populace that doesn't realize they're chattel and canon fodder to this purpose. A populace that fear collective power, that fears community beyond immediate family, that shies away from actions that would better the world in favor of actions that are less risky personally.
- grepLeigh 3y agoUNESCO published a report on the beneficiaries of illiteracy at global, national, and regional levels (1989): https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000085962 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000085962
- yunohn 3y agoElites are always worried about the labor crisis - “nobody wants to work”. Usually this is about blue collar work, and their desire to underpay and overwork service/laborers. Globally, this class of people definitely wants to reduce literacy to keep a stream of manual labor inflowing.
- bumby 3y agoThis is a strong claim that needs some data to back it up.
- animex 3y agoPeople who want to control the illiterate and subjugate their voting power to their own ends.
- Karellen 3y agoThe number of vastly unequal societies throughout history who have banned the lower classes from learning how to read, or from any kind of education at all - beyond whatever narrow training will make them better perform their specific duties for those on top. ...and not just historically. Some societies where significant minority groups are banned from getting an education, in order to further perpetuate their marginalisation, still exist today.
- boringg 3y agoThe response to your comment thread here is some pretty high flying conspiracies. The thought that those in power would try and make the country illiterate is straight up ridiculous. That would completely undermine the competitiveness of the country AND the time line to get any benefit for the "elites or whomever is behind it" would be significantly long. Now if you are talking about a country like India - sure I could see Modi doing that. In that case it would be more about restricting growth and investment into education then dismantling an economy built on knowledge.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoNo one is suggesting billionaires are rational.
- j45 3y agoI don't think I said anything about making people illiterate. Undermining literacy means so they are not as literate as they could be to improve their lives. For example, there are more than a few studies on literacy and education levels of the political spectrum for better and worse. India is a different world. The crime against humanity that is the caste system all but forbade 1-3% of the population to be permitted to learn how to read. 95-98% of Indians were not permitted to learn how to read, and had to rely on the interpretations of the less populous castes. Ironically it is a minority that largely broke this logjam and helped push literacy for the many forward. I'll gladly take the downvotes for speaking the truth about caste being a divider between people and society.
- no_exit 3y ago> what logic leads to this conclusion? Any decent book about Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
- cafard 3y agoThe advocates of "whole-language" learning as against "phonics" seem to do a fair job of limiting or undermining literacy. Yet how it benefits them I don't see. And what is the reference of "it" in the last sentence? Literacy, or limited or undermined literacy?
- j45 3y agoI should have said and, instead of for. Undermining is a form of limiting, and limiting is a form of undermining.
- creole_wither 3y agoA literate population that reads what you want them to read is even better.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoHence book bans and torching, although it's backfiring because they're being too general to try and avoid coming across as too totalitarian, so things like bibles are being banned too. Whoops.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]