Republicans at work. A dumb electorate is the easiest to manipulate.
If those Americans could read they’d be very upset about that!
To make it worse year by year the republicans continue to defund education, remove sciences, sex education and history from being taught in schools. While trying to force christian religion in public schools.
What a timeline America is going through.
Also to sloppify all media.
If all natural-born citizens has to go through the naturalization process before getting the right to vote, trump would never have been elected.
Not just because they don’t know the 100 (I think they changed it to 120 now?) questions, but also because they would not pass the:
“Have you ever been a member of any totalitarian party?
Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?
Have you ever advocated the overthrow of any government by force or violence?
Have you ever persecuted any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion?” Questions(Fun fact: They can revoke your citizenship after the fact if they catch you lying, or if you do any “terrorist” activity within 5 years of naturalization. Jan 6 riotor types would never pass this. As a naturalized citizen, I’m kinda dreading this since last November)
I mean yeah, all those topics are covered in HS civics class…… Which they skipped.
Skipped or failed… Either or.
School starts at home (for many parents, this is an unbelievable idea). I had a classmate who is an anti-vaxxer, even though we did biology together and learned how vaccines worked. My classmate is alright as a person, but I think her environment outside of school made her not one of the sharpest tool in the class and never paid attention to the lessons. My point is that, if the home environment is not conducive to learning, the person is less likely to be intellectually driven. I know there are exceptions and it boils down to “nature versus nurture”, but as mentioned already, an environment that does not foster learning makes the person less likely to pursue knowledge.
Why do you think Reaganomics was implemented? If both parents work, they aren’t going to be able to spend as much time teaching their kids to read.
Some parents are genuinely lazy. More often than not, a typical phrase some parents would use is “didn’t they teach you that in school?”
This is also a big thing. If I may add to it, the environment may also help add maturity needed for certain topics. My HS had a banking and personal finance class. Many kids just didn’t care, others didn’t have any way to visualize it as they didn’t really get an allowance, and those with jobs who would benefit the most were often not taking the class because they needed to work.
I was lucky to be there. Really that I was able to credit by exam some classes; which gave me space in my junior and senior year to fill.
This is pretty much all you need to know about the state of the United States. It’s being run by 10 year old imbeciles.
no, its being run by greedy, assholes, who know exactly what they’re doing. The 10 year old imbeciles are their republican voters and the yes-men they hire to do their bidding.
For clarity: this is based on piaac test results. The literacy test results are sorted into 6 categories (1-5 and <1) for comparing the distribution internationally. 54% of Americans score less than 3, compared to top-scoring Japan and top-english-speaking Australia at approximately 35% and 45%. The task description for level 3:
Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing. They can combine various processes (accessing, understanding and evaluating) if required by the task . Adults at this level can compare and evaluate multiple pieces of information from the text(s) based on their relevance or credibility. Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy, including continuous, noncontinuous, mixed. Information may be distributed across multiple pages, sometimes arising from multiple sources that provide discrepant information. Understanding rhetorical structures and text signals becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially when dealing with complex digital texts that require navigation. The texts may include specific, possibly unfamiliar vocabulary and argumentative structures. Competing information is often present and sometimes salient, though no more than the target information. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inferencing. Tasks at Level 3 also often demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate text content to answer accurately. The most complex tasks at this level include lengthy or complex questions requiring the identification of multiple criteria, without clear guidance regarding what has to be done
I could not find which source originally cited level 2 as “6th grade” equivalent, though the oecd recommends against drawing that parallel.
This reads like a description of the D&D PHB.
…is that why so many people think they get an extra attack when they do something other than an Attack action? Yes, that includes the Ready action. You get one hit if you ready an attack.
I cast 5th level numeracy on the goblins, integrating them by parts.
Hmmm so back in 6th grade when i would read the questions on the test and fond the answer to ome question in a different question on a different page was that level 3 reading?
TIL at least 46% of Americans can read.
It’s about 80% that can read. Only about 10% can understand the concept of a metaphor though.
The fact that some replies don’t understand the title of the article and some are trying to explain it is funny af to me, I’m sorry 😂
Me Fail English? That’s unpossible!
knew an old man who couldn’t read. he could write phone numbers in a notebook and remembered who it was by where it was written. no names. Fort Worth 1980.
As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
People want easy solutions, like “Have more people be born smart” instead of hard, complex, realistic ones like “Put time, effort, and resources into robust education of the population in stable familial and social environments to develop higher averages of generally recognized metrics of intelligence in the general population”
There was already a precedent for all this. After the Second World War, American jumped right into the Cold War with the Russians and wanted to take the lead in science, technology, rocketry, space and engineering. They quickly realized that their country at the time was ill equiped and not well trained or educated for all this … so they took the shortcut of using former Nazis to head their science and technology fields for a few years. Then to take up the slack, the government heavily invested in education and training to pump out the scientists, engineers and professionals they needed to gear up their technological war with the Soviets.
So the 50s, 60s, and 70s got filled with a lot of bright well trained, well educated and informed young people. They were able to power the American war machine but a side effect to all that was all these insightful young people became the backbone of a counter culture that fought against war, capitalism, inequality, conservatism and racism and supported black rights, Native rights, women’s rights, minority rights, animal rights and environmentalism.
Then they had to bring in people like Reagan and Thatcher to reign in these counter culture movements and swing the pendulum back again. Once they defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, conservative America had all the incentive to break everything down again and dumb down the population until it was a just a compliant pulp that could elect a clown.
Using former Nazis wasn’t because there was a shortage of educated people in general in the US after WW2. The vast majority of Nazi scientists who made major contributions to US progress (or Soviet progress, for that matter), were in rocketry, which the Nazis put disproportionate effort and funding into.
Agreed … but in order for the US to push through their rocket program, they needed scientists and researchers to develop, test, build, test, retest, and test some more all of the applied science that had been developed. The country needed to build an entire community of thousands of professionally trained technicians, scientists, engineers, professionals … and with them had to come teams of administrators, academics, trainers, bureaucrats, office workers … and with all of them had to come entire groups of trained builders, workers, electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, planners and all the people that came with … and all that had to be supported by an industry that needed to build and develop all the things that had to be needed to get this monolith moving, which meant that all these corporations and businesses needed their own teams of professionally trained people.
It was a massive investment in education in order to get the ball rolling in industry to build the rocket program. It wasn’t just building rockets … it was building an entire industry upon industry upon industry to get to the point of building a single rocket that could launch anything into orbit.
The reason why any of it happened was that the government heavily invested in educating and training an entire population to make it all possible.
Your analysis is spot on. (most of my career has been in aerospace)
I would also add that the training programs and apprenticeships that were developed have been gutted as they destroyed the unions.
The whole rebuilding American manufacturing through tariffs is a total pipe dream. I’m one of the few machinists that stuck through the great recession in my generation. There are no where near enough people like me to train kids and the guys that taught me are dead.
It takes minimum, four years, to grow a self-sufficent machinist on the job. Trade schools are pretty much worthless, kids come out of trade school and they’re fit to sweep floors or maybe punch a button if they’re real sharp.
It would take twenty years of consistent government and corporate support to rebuild and we all they are too greedy and short sighted for that.
I assume it is similar for a lot of other trades.
Oh yes, I strongly agree with all that. Just felt the need to nitpick that the contribution of Nazi scientists was relatively narrow.
I always respect and look forward to your opinion. You are a great contributor to Lemmy and I always learn something new from everything you share here.
The US literally beat the Nazis to developing fission technology, i.e. nukes (admittedly with a very international research community). It’s quite clear just from that, that the US had plenty of strong scientists before they brought in Nazis/Nazi collaborators from overseas.
As a complete side note: I believe it’s been speculated (by people who know much more about this than me) that Nazi research on nukes, among other things, was hampered by researchers like Heisenberg deliberately dragging their feet because they were forced to work on the projects but didn’t believe in the cause. I’m not meaning to clear the name of any Nazi collaborators, but pointing out that not all scientists working under the Nazi regime were necessarily nazis.
Nuke and atomic technology was one thing … and the Americans basically had that in their pocket regardless if they had Nazi scientists or not
The big leap that the Americans made with Nazi scientists was to pair atomic technology with ballistic missile technology.
When you just have a bomb and you need a big slow moving aircraft to deliver the bomb, then it is almost useless as there are plenty of ways to take down a jet in mid flight before it even reaches a target.
The unholy match that humanity came up with was to pair nuclear weapons with missile technology … which created a weapon that is nearly unstoppable and completely dangerous for all of humanity.
more like rich and powerful people want stupid masses
stop blaming these issues on individuals when the whole system is setup to fuck them into this mess
anymore than individuals can fix our plastics or fossil fuel issues
Yeah, the problem with Idiocracy is that it over plays the role of genetics and doesn’t differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.
Sure, genetics plays some role, but I’ve seen some very smart people that came from average parents and some very dumb people who came from smart parents.
Education plays a much bigger role than people give it credit for.
I feel like there are probably some very smart people out there who we don’t know about because of their lack of educational opportunities.
Pretty much my whole life (I’m 51) Americans have been talking about how bad our education system is compared to much of the world, yet nothing substantial was done about it. I think the current state of affairs is a reflection of that fact.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Idiocracy didn’t propose any solution at all. If I remember correctly, smart people not having kids was just a plot driver. Sadly, with the way things are that is how it’s gonna happen in our lifetime most likely. Education is getting worse over time, so the ones who’ll be able to educate their kids properly are those who are already educated.
Pretty sure the smart folks waited till they could provide for their kid well before finding out they couldn’t even have any. Implying that even if they did that kid would have been outnumbered by the mass breeding of fuckwits who’s only objective in life was rawdoggin after a good time.
It actually feels crazy that I know dudes who emulate the idiots from the beginning montage almost exactly. They didn’t used to be that way, it ramped up the last couple years
I don’t think that the movie was proposing that the issue or solution is eugenics based. I would argue that educated people are probably able provide a better education, and that uneducated parents are less likely to be able to provide their children with a quality education.
I don’t specifically remember Idiocracy really going into depth about “passing good genes”.
As unpopular this may be: With some, or probably some more, there are limits to what can be achieved with care and education.
Maybe, but those limits are extremely far from what we currently achieve…so there is that to consider.
The podcast called Sold a Story talks about how the school systems adopted a curriculum that doesn’t teach kids how to read. They are more like mimicking literacy. It gives appearances they they are reading but they aren’t comprehending.
Can we fix that by abolishing the department of education?
It’s only gonna get worse, isn’t it?I’m not disagreeing with you (I don’t know enough about the department’s operations), but I can understand why people are unhappy with the ED (Department of Education). It has existed for almost 40 years, and has spent tens (sometimes hundreds) of billions of dollars annually.
The result: Well, most Americans’ reading level, as highlighted in this post. Also, a shocking number of people can’t even name a single country in Africa – a big continent with more than 50 countries to choose from. Also, college borrowers in the US owe ~$1.5 trillion to the ED.
Should the ED be abolished? Honestly, I’m way to ignorant to even make an educated guess. But after so many decades, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and $trillions of debt owed by students, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that something should at least change.
What you’re describing isn’t really a failure of the education system. It’s a reflection of the average American mindset. I was born in the US and grew up in the public school system. I loved math and science, and while I struggled with the rules of grammar, I still loved reading. I have always had a love of learning new things.
But most people aren’t like that. Not just in America, but across the world. A true love of learning is rare, and I think that’s because learning is hard. It requires humility, effort, and the being able to admit that one might be wrong. It means questioning long held beliefs and sometimes changing parts of yourself completely. That’s a deeply uncomfortable prospect and many people avoid it.
I think most people fall sleep while leaning on the third tier of Maslow’s pyramid (belonging and social identity.) The next level, where self-reflection and self-actualization begins, is hard to climb because it means hanging question marks on their long-held ideas and beliefs. They choose the safety of clinging to comfort and routine.
The current controversy over dismantling the US Department of Education is a complex issue that can’t be fully unpacked in a short reply on the internet. But in my view, what’s driving the American zeitgeist toward authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism is this resistance to growth and change. Internalizing new ideas means re-evaluating what you’ve always believed. For many, that feels like a threat. And instead of rising to meet the challenge, they’d rather pull everything down to their level, where they feel safe.
But, at least for me, the climb is worth it. Continuing to learn means accepting discomfort. It means growing past who you were in order to become someone better. It’s how we find purpose, empathy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive.
By design. Learndt particular individuals tend not to vote for Nazis.
Only 54%?
X to doubt.
get out into the low income areas. if you spend a lot of time there, you’d probably be surprised to know the reading level is as high as it is.
In case you were wondering why we’re losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
