The American Literacy Crisis, Explained

Let the willfully ignorant suffer I say

3:45 well, you can’t immediately jump to the conclusion of “college kids can’t read” when talking about how they “don’t read”. It’s just that reading is a form of entertainment, but so is online media content, and so they compete.

Changing w8ith the times. Another words, giving up on the kids and being to lazy to actually teach the students.

It’s majority black kids. 90% literacy rate

Professional math theory academic here. Here's a curveball: have you considered long form text may no longer be the optimal transmission strategy for complex ideas? That's what we are finding in math. It is much, much, much faster to learn even the most difficult mathematical theories by having a conversation with a strong LLM than it is to read a math textbook. It's so much better that it makes it annoying to be stuck with a textbook, because you know you could be digesting the theory so much faster.

So I would challenge you...are you sure your 18th century teaching method is still relevant? Are you sure kids aren't just...evolving? Maybe they're smarter than you think...just in ways you don't yet understand.

Personally, I think texts are basically done with. I think higher education will be unable to pivot, and will die. I think we will educate ourselves and each other via other new systems in the future that don't involve living and eating at a physical college campus. I certainly don't think anyone will pay $200,000 for a degree consisting of easily available free info. Even the PhD level, and yes, even post-PhD level info is easily LLM accessible. If you don't believe this or haven't noticed, the problem is that you don't know enough about LLMs to know which are powerful and how to use them. That would be a much more productive place to focus your attention. You're not going to be able to drive the population back to the "old ways". It just will not happen.

The example you give here of fear mongering— a good example, & thank you for that— is more than fear mongering, bc this fear mongering is not only deliberately misleading, but more than that it is effectively exploiting people simply for the capitalist gains of these con men: profit$. Not identifying such ongoing systemic exploitation & naming it as such blunts some people’s — especially younger people’s— opportunities to hone the kind of critical thinking capacities at hand in this discussion, while also providing cover for these shysters from full accountability. There is no innocence on the side of such dehumanizing exploitation.

Ive always wondered if american (lack of) literacy was because there is a political interest in keeping people stupid and easy to manipulate. The same happens in some countries here in Europe (like Hungary) where conservative politicians crack down on education because they know that their voter base is mostly uneducated factory workers

Do you think that's bad? 60% of the plant thing you're

Nobody said “they can’t read, period.”

It’s that they’re FUNCTIONALLY illiterate

Me who reads tomes that are greater than 1k pages "30k words? That's it!?"

Who cares about reading?
Teacher are doing more important things!
Like talk about their political views,
And trying to turn boys into girls and girls into boys.

I think those numbers are high. You can tell this guy doesn't deal with the public all day.

Fix incentives and the solutions will come. The incentive structure is optimized to be as bad as possible. Politicians have no long term incentives. Teachers are not incentivized to perform. Bad teachers get the same advancement and cant get fired. Parents are incentivized to work and turn over their kids to the state. Administration is just a growing cancer tha has no incentive to solve anything, just to get bigger.

After struggling so much during elementary with English because of my Spanish then becoming one the few kids who can’t still read with no problem in high school, I feel vindicated

The fact that professors are changing the assignment is part of the problem. If Hamlet is too long for you to read then you’re too incompetent to go to UT.

I'm just going to point out that kids couldn't read 30 years ago when I was one either.

We've had multiple waves of fixing the education system since then that I don't suspect would have happened if we thought things were doing great.

Just be happy we're not prescribing them all Ritalin anymore.

40% of all age groups in America can not read.

We're getting closer to the idiocracy movie than I thought we would

ai is going to shoot those numbers up.

I'm a shop steward, we have young guys that come in and when we give them an automotive bulletin or manufacturer recall they have a hard time understanding the instructions. So I think comprehension is the biggest issue I see with young adults.

Please delete this slop.

If everyone could think critically, wouldn't it be hard to distract the population with fiery arguments and fake news? It would be mutiny!

Sounds good to me. I've been a reader and will continue to read. Just increases my worth. Maybe one day I'll get paid just to read for people. Easy money.

THIS IDIOT HASN't SEEN THE CHILDREN failing to count and read the alphabet and basic words, the problem isn't 4th grade,its the 1st graders and before.. THIS FOOL IS NOT CONCERNED ABOUT THE REAL TROUBLE... the problem is parents giving their children cellphones and ip[ads, the dopamine from the devices is getting in the way of children learning, cause the dopamine of exploring in the ipad is competing with the dopamine they should get from the discovery of reading and math.. That's why there is a problem in the grades up from there, it is easy access to the internet and games, people using those devices to babysit their kids, and employers demanding too much for too little pay, people not getting enough rest or time to spend helping their children read and do math. Its all about STRESS, and where we go to get relief..

40% of (blank) kids can't read

How do I make wannabe John Lennon stop showing up in my feed

5:20 It's sad that you have to do as a college professor that my teachers from 2nd grade on up did repeatedly at increasing levels of difficulty until about high school.

2:35 Unfortunately focusing solely on the bottom is a recipe for suffering at the higher percentiles, including depression, anxiety, "failure to launch" after high school, or worse. They can't be abandoned because they're seemingly doing okay.

Here's a radical idea for college students who can't keep up with the assigned reading, now hear me out .... Fail them! If you can't read properly how oh earth can you have a degree. A degree is supposed to show you are proficient in a particular subject but if you can't read you, by definition can't be proficient in any academic subject. Maybe even have an entrance exam and tell the kids straight up you don't have the skills to get a degree, maybe don't put yourself in debt for the rest of your life for something that won't count for shit. Better to be a plumber or have a trade if you can't read well than taken on 100k debt for a job that AI will probably take before too long anyway. I can read just fine, got a degree Physics and Maths aged just 20, yes got moved up a year (P2 I skipped cos my dad had taught me to read and write before I started school) and how I get money now js selling weed and sitting in an empty room watching cameras that nothing happens on. Really didn't need that degree after all and if I had a marketable skill like plumbing, I would be on the same wage as a Doctor.

One problem is that school administrators just don’t care enough about students. They just treat it like any other job and not the future of our country

Literacy IS a serious issue, despite the severity being unclear. It IS bad, we just don't know if it's dire, or just abysmal. One need only look at texts, or at conversations online to know that reading for entertainment is in the toilet. It's not the overall picture that gives it away, it's the SMALL stuff. People don't even know how to properly spell CENTURIES-old COMMON words like "whoa" and "yeah" properly, instead spelling them "woah/whoah" and "yea". Individual words are the BASICS of reading. Reading is running. These people don't even know how to WALK properly. English is not "evolving" as apologists like to claim. It is in fact devolving to the level of the semi-illiterates. And Mississippi definitely did some heavy lifting for literacy. Many people's favorite PBS show, Between the Lions, had it's last 5 seasons ENTIRELY funded by the state of Mississippi.

my kids read way more than I did in 1998. I hated reading. I lied about reading books just for my pizza hut coupon.

I was a complete failure in the "wrote and test" environment of primary and secondary schooling, I never was able to achieve above a D average, and my only degree is 98.6! But I possessed two critical components in my brain: an insatiable curiosity about how everything worked in the world, and because I was taught in the first and second grade attending a parochial school, how to sound out words phonetically in reading and writing. When I began attending a LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) classroom in the third grade, my classmates could barely read because at that time, LAUSD was teaching students "sight reading", the memorization of whole words. It turns out that in LAUSD in my third grade class, I was reading at a sixth grade level, phonics is critical in learning to read. Reading, comprehension, and that insatiable curiosity or passion, provided me with my occupation as an inventor, designer, and manufacturer of custom tools for professionals working in the fields of mechanics, electronics, and optics, because of this at 74-years old, I'm semi-retired as a multi-millionaire! David riddle

You can solve this with 2 easy steps.

1. Let teachers actually fail students.
2. Being the parent of kid that is failing and/or can't read should be considered child abuse.

Problem solved. The blame is on the parents 100%, not the teachers, not the students.

The prison industry complex. There’s your answer that’s why I literacy rates are so low. Prisons and local governments uses school data to determine how many and how big the prisons should be. Lower test scores across the board? More prisons in the area. Slavery never ended it just transformed into a government backed institution.

I loved reading growing up but I don’t have time for it anymore. Now I listen to audiobooks which I’ve been really enjoying.

They can’t think either.

Redings fer nerds. Y wood i need to red.

The closest major city to where I live (Detroit) has a sub 50% literacy rate IN ADULTS, and those people have kids.

This dude is the reincarnation of Jim Henson.