Jerry Pournelle notes:
Civilization is more fragile than most believe. Note that a true dark age comes not when we lose the ability to do something, but forget that we ever had that ability: as for instance no university Department of Education seems aware that in the 1930’s to the end of World War II, essentially the only adult illiterates in the United States were people who had never been to school to begin with (see the Army’s tests of conscripts). My mother had a 2-year Normal School degree and taught first grade in rural Florida, not considered a high intelligence population. I once asked her if any of her students left first grade without learning to read. She said, “Well, there were a few, but they didn’t learn anything else, either.” The notion that a child could get out of elementary school unable to read was simply shocking up to about 1950 when new University Education Department theories of reading emerged. Now a majority of students read “below grade level”…
Oh, it’s far worse than that, Dr. Pournelle, if the results of the Adult Literacy Survey of 2003 aren’t reversed soon:
Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation…
The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading — such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as “proficient” in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts — down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient — compared with 40 percent in 1992.
Do note the simplicity of the tasks tested. Other text samples in the test were extracts from a bus schedule, a newspaper editorial and a prescription med label, all of which proved too daunting for an overwhelming majority of college graduates.
With a basic reading skill set like this, is it any wonder that the ISI’s survey of civics literacy indicates such a abysmal grasp of basic civics in our adult population–most especially in college graduates?
More interesting, although I have posted similar posts for five years or so now, I have yet to read a defense of public education here–even when my traffic was regularly in quadruple digits several years ago–that was… literate.
See “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy” (PDF file) for more–especially if the background data is still available (I didn’t check, but sometimes such things are… redacted, shall we say, to be less embarrassing when the actual data isn’t as rosy as the particular government department wishes to portray. If such proves to be the case, I may be able to find a copy of what I read several years ago.)
Addendum: I debated using this linked info in my comments above but decided against it because of the subliterate use of terms I found in it, for example, “Over all [sic], the average prose and document literacy scores for Americans were basically flat between 1992 and 2003… ” The proper term for discussing the limits of the scores between the denoted boundaries of “1992-2003” is “overall” not “over all”. *sigh* But still, I find the following paragraph delicious:
Based on their scores, participants in the survey were deemed to have “basic,” “intermediate” or “proficient” literacy (Whitehurst noted that a National Research Council committee that recommended the literacy levels initially called the highest level “advanced,” but that department officials ultimately concluded that the skills required for that category — comparing viewpoints in two editorials, for instance, or calculating the cost per ounce of different grocery items — weren’t really all that advanced.)
“[W]eren’t really all that advanced”? Indeed. And that’s the level that only 31% reached. Barely above mouth-breathers who’ve been chemically lobotomized.
Who needs to be able to do anything like reading in today’s society? After all, the talking heads on television tell you what to think. If you need information like a bus schedule some one will not only read it for you, they’ll even tell you what bus to get on and where to get off. Fast food eliminates the need for reading recipes. Pictures in menus show you what’s offered, no need to read there. If that’s too much intellectual exercise you can alwas get the daily special or soup of the day.
You only need skill in such esoteric diciplines as reading, writing, and arithmetic if you plan to think for yourself. Why would any modern “educator” want to promote that?
Actually, Perri, there are quite a few teachers still in public schools (I make a distinction between those whose fragile egos demand a penta-syllabic “buff-up” word and those who simply want to teach) who are being prevented from doing a good job teaching by a system that militates against both teaching and learning anything useful. Remote educ rats, professors of “education” (and the schools they rode in on), administrators, politicians and… woefully subliterate parents and “educators” all conspire against the children’s future and against the (waning) population of teachers who want to aid learning.
That’s how I see it, anyway. My Wonder Woman is swimming against the tide–along with some few colleagues–in the schools where she works–hard!–to try to advance learning. Sadly, the forces conspiring against real schooling are great and the teachers who are both capable and willing to swim against the tide are fewer and fewer, it seems.
Yes. I’m aware that some real teachers are out there fighting the decay. It wasn’t my intention to malign them by omission. That’s why the quotes around “educators”.
Oh, I assumed that, Perri. The scare quotes were a dead giveaway. 😉 I just have that rant always on tap. *heh*
Oh man. Just this morning I was looking through comments in Dead Guy and DL had posed the question that the Dead Guy was Jeff Davis. My son (22) happened to be in the room and asked me who that was. I was simply astounded and took him to task. For one thing he was born and raised in Texas. Good God Man! You’re a Southerner. He tried to pass it off as not paying attention to the South’s part in that war as he was not prejudiced and thought everyone should be free etc. Such a load of BS. He did come up with Lincoln though as the North’s president and finally admitted he thought R.E. Lee had been president of the South. Give me a break.
*sigh*
Not an uncommon occurrence, Diane. Actually, in the ISI’s surveys, more people know who Paula Abdul is than know where the words, “of the people, by the people, for the people” come from. Seriously. I can recall a Lincoln hagiographer–my fourth grade teacher who had bought, hook, line and sinker, the myth of Lincoln’s “freeing the slaves” and etc. and pushed those things [“published”] them into receptive young minds–requiring us to all learn and recite the Gettysburg Address. Think that happens today? Even such subliterate hagiography includes little actual content nowadays.
I had to inform myself about the real history of the so-called “Civil War” later, but I had the advantage of two great grandparents who had memories of its aftermath and memories of relatives who had fought in the War of Northern Aggression (also appropriately called, IMO, The Great Unitarian-Baptist Shootout) to pique my interest, too. Even though the more content-filled propaganda I was fed in pubschool was (deliberately?) misleading, I still had enough actual dates and data to start with to find the Rest of the Story (as Paul Harvey was wont to put things *heh*). Nowadays, kids have a bigger hill to climb: poor reading skills and less actual content knowledge to start out with before they can dig out the truth behind the lies they’re told.
And that’s even assuming they care to find out and haven’t been lobotomized by years of classroom educational abuse to the point of not being able to do their own research…
I’m handing him Brave New World and asking for a book report. LOL I KNOW he can read because he passed the ABSVAB, but I wonder what he’ll make of Huxley.
Oh. Dear. Spring Huxley on him. How cruel. *heh*
It has always astounded me how illiterate people graduate high school. And it always saddens me to see specials on TV when they ask random strangers on the street who the vice president is, and they don’t know (and other similar questions.)
Even sadder is if they actuallyknow that Cwazy Uncle Joe is the current VP, Mel… 😉
The arrogance of the illiterate astounds me. The fact that those that know so little have so much of nothing to say. We see it in our elected officials, the media, many of the new books published of late. People are zombies. Instead of thinking for themselves they allow others to think for them. Remember that original segment on the Twilight Zone? This world is a huge twighlight zone and it I doubt it or the people in this world will improve anytime soon.
Reality has a way of biting even the most clueless in the fundamentals… 😉
I actually saw Jay Leno ask people two questions.
1. Who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.?
2. Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
People struggled with the first question, but Spongebob Squarepants was out of their mouths almost before the question had left Jay’s lips.
And these people vote?
Yes, Perri, these people are allowed to vote. In fact, here’s a YouTube video I’ve posted before of just this class of people after they had voted for Obama in 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm1KOBMg1Y8
Scary, eh?
BTW, Perri, another lil American Government quiz–extremely short–that, IMO, ANY eighth grade student should be able to ace is here:
http://www.testprepreview.com/american-government-questions.html
Those are sample questions for students seeking to CLEP out of a college level American Government course. *sigh*
Of course, my freshman level American Government course was taught by an OU (Oklahoma University) adjunct prof on loan who was also (of course) a lawyer, a State Senator, later governor and then U.S. Senator. By his own account, he got almost as big a charge out of me handing him every exam with a flip, “Here’s your key,” as I did. (I was right: he could use my test papers as keys for his exams. *heh* I
wasstill am a bit of a stinker, eh?)The sad thing even then is that I was coasting through the course, because my high school sophomore American History class had already covered everything that was in the college syllabus, and my high school class? Mostly a review of eighth grade American History in another district… *sigh*