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.
also illiteracy is a humiliating thing to admit to in our society and it isn’t rich kids not being taught to read. mocking illiteracy is classism
in this case it’s also rich kids. teachers/schools bought into the hype at all levels despite governments telling them no stop. the difference is the rich kids can afford private tutors when their parents realize they can’t read.
So in other words it’s not really also rich kids
what I mean is that rich school districts were also using this method. there’s a bit in the podcast where rich parents in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the US were going to the library to ask where they could get materials to teach their kids how to read.
Yeah my MIL used to be a public school teacher in a district that no one would ever call poor. Not the richest, but definitely not poor. For the last several years of her career all I ever heard from her was along the lines of “what the fuck am I supposed to be doing again? I have a room full of 9th graders who can’t read.” No idea what method they were using in the earlier grades, but well off suburban districts are definitely pumping out illiterate kids as well.
it’s probably the method outlined in the podcast. the people peddling the scam were “rockstars” in elementary education circles in anglophone world.
This attitude is surprisingly common. I remember a conversation with an older guy I had a few years ago about Afghanistan of all things, where he had said that Afghans can’t possibly do democracy because only 30% of them can read, and I tried to explain to him that just because they weren’t taught to read that doesn’t mean their intelligence is lower, and he just didn’t fukken accept it no matter how I tried to put it for him.
hmmm…I definitely am on the side that a functional democratic society requires literacy at high levels. Look at all the Communist countries for which one of the very first initiatives was literacy campaigns.
A literacy campaign could be started in Afghanistan, too. I’m not sure how that would look in Afghanistan specifically because I know nothing about their history and current context beyond US intervention and the Taliban being in power, but if a proletarian government took power I’m sure that’d be one of their first steps.
The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA),[a] renamed the Republic of Afghanistan[b] in 1987, was the Afghan state during the one-party rule of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) from 1978 to 1992. It relied heavily on assistance from the Soviet Union for most of its existence, especially during the Soviet–Afghan War.
The PDPA came to power through the Saur Revolution, which ousted the regime of the unelected autocrat Mohammed Daoud Khan; he was succeeded by Nur Muhammad Taraki as the head of state and government on 30 April 1978.[3] Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, the organizer of the Saur Revolution, introduced several contentious reforms during their rule, such as land and marriage reforms and an enforced policy of de-Islamization alongside the promotion of socialism.[4]
Education During communist rule, the PDPA government reformed the education system; education was stressed for both sexes, and widespread literacy programmes were set up.[149] By 1988, women made up 40 percent of the doctors and 60 percent of the teachers at Kabul University; 440,000 female students were enrolled in different educational institutions and 80,000 more in literacy programs.[150] In addition to introducing mass literacy campaigns for women and men, the PDPA agenda included: massive land reform program; the abolition of bride price; and raising the marriage age to 16 for girls and to 18 for boys. [151]
Never let the United States run Educational Aid in your country
Thank you comrade. Any book you can recommend to learn more?
I am not an expert I would check zerobooks or haymarket or verso books for the possibility of a non-brainwormed take. This one caught my eye - The forty year war on Afghanistan
But I dunno if it just comes down to both sideism or is there a more nuanced take on Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.
Hopefully someone will convince the taliban people need to be taught to read to study the Quran
Literacy campaigns provide a ton of benefits, but I think that if you endeavored to create a democracy among a still-illiterate populace you could do it. Focus the democratic process on the local level, use conventions and other methods of voting that aren’t casting a ballot, etc.
There probably is a reasonable argument to be made about it being very difficult to make reasonable democratic decisions if a person can’t read and therefore can’t seek information and views outside their immediate social circle.
Of course, also not surprising that some people would interpret that as “Afghans stupid.”
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Yeah, there are ways to mitigate the problem but widespread illiteracy is probably one of the factors that contribute to liberal democracy along the American model being an absolute shitshow when imposed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Not that American style democracy isn’t also a shitshow in America, of course.
But then you’d have to elect one of the 30% of people who can read.
Not the case. I worked a while ago with a couple of comrades who weren’t able to comprehend the texts we had to tackle in our union work and what they do might interest you. They did speak with people about it and were often better informed than those who read the texts but thought they understood them.
you see that with foreign workers the ones who can speak english have outsised status and influence among the others
That wasn’t the angle that person was coming from iirc, his argument was that everyone would just vote how their cleric told them to. In hindsight he was an evangelical and was probably just projecting.
Could he read Persian?
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
damn is that an actual thing ?
if so based
I have heard this anecdotally. That Zoomers don’t really know how to use like actual computers that well. I think when I was in high school ('10 to '13) having like a personal lap top and using it for everything Including school was more of a thing. Smart phones weren’t quite as ubiquitous people still did a lot of social media and stuff on an actual computer. Now social media and casual internet browsing and media consumption are so accessible through a phone that kids aren’t really having to use as much computer stuff. I barely use actual computers except for gaming and photo editing. Like how many Zoomers do you think know what the Command Prompt is and does, ya know. I’d guess not a lot.
You don’t? I taught myself how to read. How would you call that?
Depends. If we mean “without a personal teacher” sure, but no one is looking at a book of a language the don’t know and just suddenly learning it.
i would call that “I taught myself how to lie”.
How did you do it? What resources did you have, and how old were you?
I was about four or five, and I figured out that certain groups of glyphs in the book I was read to synchronized with the words I heard.
I did the same thing when I was 2 years old, though just because I could read them didn’t mean that I necessarily comprehended what they meant. I used to get particularly upset by ‘to let’ signs because I thought they were misspelling ‘toilet’. I complained to my mother about it on the way to nursery, and she realised that I could read well enough to notice an ‘incorrect’ spelling.
you’ve used the word taught, which implies reasoning. which is by definition not intuitive. reading was never innate to you or anyone else.