I found this podcast from this 
post:
I subbed today for a 7th and 8th grade teacher. I’m not exaggerating when I say at least 50% of the students were at a 2nd grade reading level. The students were to spend the class time filling out an “all about me” worksheet, what’s your name, favorite color, favorite food etc. I was asked 20 times today “what is this word?”. Movie. Excited. Trait. “How do I spell race car driver?”
I’ve only listened to one episode so far, but it’s really well produced, seems well-researched and very well put together.
From what I gather so far, the ways that the American public school system “teaches” kids how to read is not only completely wrong, but actually saddles them bad habits which fundamentally hinder their reading comprehension.
A huge swath of American adults are functionally illiterate, and I think I’m starting to understand why.
A lot of people are commenting about how, so what, lots of people can read and are also stupid. Except this isn’t about being stupid. Or dumb. Reading and writing is a skill you gotta be tutored into. You won’t learn it through intuition. You won’t learn it through osmosis, guesswork or because the Holy Ghost descended from the heavens to enlighten your soul. You have to be taught, step by step, how to decode writing in order to then develop it into other skills, like different levels of reading, making annotations, making summaries, prose writing, and so on. All of these things should ideally become second nature to you through a long process of ‘scholarization’, one that is formulated with full understanding of what kids of different ages tend to need, and what kids in particular may require of their teachers.
Think about it. This isn’t like zoomers being unable to use Windows because they have phones. It’s like not having a school system in the first place. Good god, the districts that keep this scam pedagogy in place are gonna create a lost generation.
Literacy is a communist conspiracy
MILLENNIA of funny SQUIGGLES on stone tablets, papyrus, and PAPER
There are only THREE sounds in the word “EIGHT”, why are there FIVE letters???
They have played us for FOOLS
That reddit thread is full of people (hopefully not teachers) insisting that it’s actually a parent’s job to teach their children to read. Ignoring the ‘fuck poor or undereducated parents’ attitude on display, I have to ask, what’s the point of early education then? My first few years of school were all about literacy and numeracy skills. If these aren’t the responsibility of the education system at that age, then what on earth is? I guess it’s just daycare to these people…
People have just accepted that American public education is a failure and the parents have to do the real teaching. And yet so many parents don’t even know there’s anything wrong until way too late. Even if the schools are passing kids despite not being able to read, an engaged parent should be able to notice it very early on as long they read with their kid at home. My mom read to me nearly every night until I could read on my own. She would read a page and then have me read a page after a while. Eventually, I was reading whole books to her and I loved reading so much that when I got in trouble one time she took my bookcase away, leaving me with a TV that sat unused, while I bawled my eyes out.
when I got in trouble one time she took my bookcase away,
Giga Chad mom casually lifting up an entire book case and moving it out of your room.
“…at all. The more one read, the more one was subject to indoctrination, which is something which of course I experienced myself. This is the reason why achieving “literacy” is always the first aim of communist regimes. Elementary.”
I was thinking about this in the context of the UK the other day, and it makes sense to wear down the educational system as much as possible, mainly for two reasons.
Quality isn’t necessary. The education system up to 14-ish years old serves essentially as free(ish) daycare so parents don’t have an excuse not to work. This then allows rent/house prices to inflate up to what a couple can pay, rather than a single parent.
The uneducated masses are easy to control. I work/live in a very well-educated environment, but have regular contact with less educated people. It’s insane the things they’ll believe in.
I think adult illiteracy is pretty high in the U.S. as well. I have had multiple middle managers who cannot write a coherent paragraph to save their lives, to the degree that I have had to go literally ask them what they mean because otherwise it would be reading tea leaves.
Even worse is people who are lifer manual laborers, they can be very smart and great with their hands, but ask them to read something above very basic text and their eyes just glaze over. Something has gone seriously wrong here.
Insert Parenti Cuban literacy quote here
this one?
You can look at any existing socialist country— if you don’t want to call them socialist, call them whatever you want. Post capitalist— whatever, I don’t care. Call them camels or window shades, it doesn’t matter as long as we know the countries we’re talking about. If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways. One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling. That’s what so compelling about Cuba, for instance. When I was in Cuba I was up in the Escambia, which is like the Appalachia of Cuba, very rugged mountains with people who were poor, or they were. And I said to this campesino, I said, “Do you like Fidel?” and he said “Si si, with all my soul.” I remember this gesture, with all our souls. I said “Why?” and he pointed to this clinic right up on the hill which we had visited. He said, “Look at that.” He said “Before the revolution, we never saw a doctor. If someone was seriously ill, it would take twenty people to carry that person, it’d go day and night. It would take two days to get to the hospital. First because it was far away and second because you couldn’t go straight, you couldn’t cross the latifundia lands, the boss would kill you. So, you had to go like this, and often when we got to the hospital, the person might be dead by the time we got there. Now we have this clinic up here with a full-time doctor. And today in Cuba when you become a doctor you got to spend two years out in the country, that’s your dedication to the people. And a dentist that comes one day a week. And for serious things, we’re not more than 20 minutes away from a larger hospital. That’s in the Escambia. So that’s freedom. We’re freer today, we have more life.” And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.” Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?” I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. He opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, don’t worry about that. I mean I wrote it for you, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you have people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were treated like animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read. So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.
—Michael Parenti
