Growing up homeschooled, I read dozens of books per month for fun, and was shocked when my public school "peers" didn't enjoy reading or considered the books I read too advanced for them. As an adult, I am frequently taken aback by the mass ignorance, where just normal, oblique Bible or mythology references are completely unknown by college graduates. What, exactly, is their lifetime of debt buying them?
My college roommate once found me reading a novel in my free time and was puzzled. "You're reading for fun?" As it turned out, not only did he not read for fun, he hadn't read any of the books assigned in high school either. He just bought the cliff notes.
People often say this but I'm something of a reading enjoyer myself, and I found I usually enjoyed the books assigned in class. Not all of them certainly, but most. Maybe I actually did have better teachers than most.
If your stats in this essay are correct, then it’s likely that most of the teachers are not (or are barely) level 4 literate, so it’s hard for them to create engaging classes with challenging material. They themselves are just spitting the cliff notes (which they might struggle to write if they had to), so why should the students do more?
I had one really good literature teacher in high school and one really good history professor whose classes were excellent because they were basically book club. They lectured very little, just enough to provide useful context for the reading (that itself is a “high literacy” task!). The rest of the class was just a smallish group of engaged students (in the college course we literally rearranged our seats into a circle) talking about the ideas in the books - which were always dense and often dry.
But because the discussion was engaging and because we had self selected for interest in the topic (it was an advanced class in HS and an elective in college), everyone wanted to do the reading to avoid being left out. Still the smartest I’ve felt, and the most fun I’ve had, engaging with challenging writing.
I had a teacher for a couple of years who assigned us non-stop tragedy porn. In every book, rest assured, the main character's best friend would either die or end up in a mental hospital.
The High school lit was better, but we actually read fewer books in favor of essays and excerpts.
A lot of teachers teach literature in a very academic and abstract way, focusing on style and symbolic themes, and it gets in the way of appreciating the story on its own merits.
I was assigned plenty of tough reading in my high school curriculum and it didn't dampen my love of reading. It's an excuse for being bad at reading from the getgo. Which is, to be fair, the teachers' fault most of the time.
Same here. Homeschooled and read widely. In early childhood my mother read to us frequently.
I was not given access to the whole world of literature and, as a result, read everything we had in the house except Beowulf. I choked on that as an early teen, I need to pick it up again. The narrowed choice in reading material pushed me along a natural progression in difficulty and made focus non-optional.
I haven't reread that for years but I recall his translator notes being wonderful. The whole discussion about how the specific edged weapon in a passage gave the original audience insight into the character, how that doesn't have meaning for us, and ends with something like "Sometimes a sword is just a sword."
I had a teacher in middle school who read Beowulf in the original aloud to us during lunch break. No tests, just us listening. I loved it. Always liked Beowulf because of that. There is onomatopoeia in it, which is very cool. 😎
All true and well presented. I've discussed this subject with some very smart, but not very online friends and they seem incapable of accepting that this is the state of the world. I wonder what makes this so hard for so many smart people to accept?
Having tutored GED students in the past, it has always struck me as cruel to suggest they are just a bit more funding or perhaps a better sense of personal responsibility away from reading Aristotle. In my experience they were hard-working people and there was no shortage of resources available to them.
The social bubble is incredibly thick for most people.
My wife volunteered as a reading tutor in high school and was shocked to encounter high school sophomores who read at a first grade level, struggling to sound out the words on the page.
It's because the inherent physical equality of opportunity for all people is a modern religious value. Straight from Rousseau and his Enlightenment pals. Our whole society is built to an extent on this premise.
I agree, but unless you're functionally retarded, there's no reason you can't read and write well (mid level) other than sheer failure to apply yourself or horrendously bad teaching methods, or both.
I know several middling dim people, my sister included, who read quite well, simply because they were expected to. They're also mostly homeschooled and were read to a lot as children.
If you expand your vocabulary you expand your understanding. That counts for a lot until you hit your upper IQ limit and can't follow sentences with multiple clauses, let alone the implications of them. (More practice will help somewhat.)
But any high schooler still sounding out words like a first grader needs to have a legal guardian for life, because the only excuse for that is clinical retardation. Average reading skills is such a low bar. I'm not asking for calculus here.
I would add parenting to the list of barriers. In my experience, student success is about an even spread between parenting, student ability/motivation, and quality of instruction. Even with great instruction and great parents, some students will not succeed because they don't want to. Some kids are great but have terrible influence at home so will struggle much more than a student who is well supported but only mildly motivated.
This isn’t what Rousseau or any Enlightenment authors I’ve read say. I taught Rousseau to undergraduates (many who struggled to read the text, btw), and recall he’s pretty clear on the physical inequalities of humans.
What's that even mean?? The production of an Emile was for Rousseau, at best, a rare and difficult endeavor. The real Rousseauan norm was to put all your bastard children in orphanages. Hardly in praise of equality of opportunity.
I also know people who probably have reasonably high IQs. But they can’t grasp concepts well at all. Unless…the idea directly relates to them. Very solipsistic. Not impractical. But weird to me. One woman is ruthlessly logical and has a razor sharp mind if there is a gain or loss directly for her, but can’t follow anything abstract or complicated if she isn’t involved personally.
They read well enough to know how to regurgitate the right answer. And they have a facility for words and a much needed facility on how to play the game.
Maybe we need to stop dumping billions into education striving for an unattainable utopian goal, and just accept that people aren't blank slates. If 8th grade is the upper limit of someone's intellectual ability, there's no point in pushing them through to 9th grade and dumbing down the the system for everyone else. "You've reached the extent of your ability and pursuing further education would be a waste of resources" We'd have smaller class sizes at higher levels, better education outcomes, more resources to focus on high performers and fewer frustrated, resentful students being pushed and prodded through a system they're not equipped to thrive in.
I’m shocked to read this. You are okay with setting not only young adults but also social structures up for long-term failure just to relieve short-term pain? You’re willing to give up on large swaths of people on the basis of their teenage performance?
The last thing an 8th grader needs to hear is “you’ve reached the upper limit of your intellectual ability.” That alone, never mind all the lost education, the grit, the logic of learning, the emotion of dealing with other kids in cooperative and competitive environments, is enough to drastically change the direction of a person’s life for the worse.
There are many useful things you can do with an 8th-grade education. You don't need more than that to survive, even in the modern era. This hypothetical person needs to become a trade apprentice, not have people like you loose bowels on their behalf.
These people aren't going to get anything out of another 4 years of classroom instruction about English literature; the people who would get a lot out of English literature will be held back by their less able (& unwilling) fellows.
As a final note, the internet is an autodidacts paradise.
I think the suggestion would be to change streams after 8th grade if that is prudent. Not euthanasia if you hate English lit. "Diversity is strength" (it's not, but you know what I'm sayin).
My favorite anecdote to explain a lot of partisan mutual incomprehensibility and hostility is a conversation I had with my only far left friend, a tech adjacent worker in SF, born and raised in the Bay area. I don't know how it came up but after some prodding he conceded that he doesn't know a single person without a bachelor's degree, and he's never had a coworker without at least a masters. Your point about the actually literate 12 percent not understanding the limitations of the mass of their countrymen has been incredibly harmful to our country in both wasted money and energy spent on utopian nonsense and also in assuming that everyone can "learn to code" so we don't really need these low skilled high paying jobs now do we
The “bread vs. crackers” question makes me a little skeptical of the collection methods underlying these data. If you infer from the passage that crackers should also be wrapped to be kept fresh, how do you answer the binary question? I’m not actually sure how I would answer it, not out of uncertainty of what the passage was saying but out of uncertainty of what the question was asking. (On the SAT, as I recall, inference of the sort the question asks you to do is actually punished, and the correct answer to a reading comprehension question is almost always stated explicitly or directly logically implied by the text.)
I was briefly taken aback as well, then tried to focus on inference, in the case of physical instruction, more like a logical conclusion. These testers use it generally but I think inferences are better applied to human behavior, and logical conclusions for object operation. Anyway, for most of us: Bread soft, good. Hard bad. Happens after exposure to air. Crackers hard (“crispy”) good, soft bad. Happens after exposure to air. Conclusion: reduce exposure to air, good. But how? This is the part not specifically mentioned; hence the harder level. I felt my brain wiggle when I realized that reduction of exposure = wrapping, so “both”, albeit undesired results go in different directions (a distraction element added by the test creator.) having been told !no inferences on the SAT! could certainly mess one up for this in isolation, but I bet if you were learning foods in your kitchen you would just go and get the foil wrap.
I had the same reaction to this question. I distinctly remember a high school teacher drilling into our heads "never make inferences on the SAT" over and over. So when I answered this one in my head, I got it wrong. I have a PhD, but would probably be considered functionally illiterate based on this assessment.
I also have a PhD and I've noticed a lot of PhDs are indeed functionally illiterate. I once listened to a talk by a philosophy PhD who I'd swear didn't know what philosophy was. But there's texts and there's texts and clearly we're all of us somewhere on the spectrum of (dys)functional (il)literacy.
Regarding that last graph, I would like to see a “Baumol” adjusted figure. Of course spending has risen in real terms since the 1970s but so has everything involving a wage except high school educated men. It takes more money to educate a classroom of 20 than it did in 1970 even if we strictly use 1970 amenities. When you strip out salaries and overhead (like utilities and supplies), how much is the spending increased and on what?
Retired public school teacher here (also homeschooled my young kids and started a non-profit private school). Public school hasn’t taught reading with phonics for a generation. Add that to class sizes of 25+ kids, who enter first grade ranging from reading on a fourth grade level to barely knowing the alphabet, and throw in an iPad for every 6 year old, and you start to get the idea.
I wasn't homeschooled, but public schooling failed me so bad I might as well have been. The literature I read growing up (before the age of 18) included Heinlein, Herbert, Stevenson, Tolkien, Asimov, and Dickens. I also read some of the obligatory juvenile literature such as Cleary and Blume when I was younger. To the extent that I enjoyed reading, it was in spite of my school experience rather than because of it.
20% of the population has a very low IQ and struggles with almost any mental task. Forcing these people to engage in education beyond their capacities helps nobody. Teach them the basics, and a useful skill.
I'm an American medical student and I read "adult books" (nonfiction, genre fiction, literary fiction, and classics) at a rate of dozens per year. This is rare among professional students due to the demands of school and the low background rate of readership among young people, even intelligent ones.
None of my classmates are dumb and I'm sure all are in the 12%, but there are regular, notable failures of reading comprehension in every small group activity. It could be simple laziness or it could be truly decreased high-level literary skill. Many students use exclusively Cliff Notes-style resources to study. I just can't help but doubt that the medical students of 40 years ago would made the mistakes I see now & would have had this reduced vocabulary (not medical jargon, general "SAT words"). Could it be the decreased focus on literature in undergrad?
I'm no longer convinced that teaching everyone basic reading and writing really is an accomplishment worth boasting of. There is a fantastic level 5 author who was named Ananda K Commaraswamy who wrote (I think in the 40s) an essay called "The Bugbear of Literacy." It isn't all that long, and it's well worth your time.
The fact that spending doesn't move the needle on test scores? It's kind of an open secret, but mainstream policy discussion refuses to touch it with a 10-foot pole. The idea that spending more money will improve educational outcomes is an article of absolute faith.
What should be done is the exact opposite of what is being done. Accepting different people have different ceilings and educating them accordingly would be best for everyone.
Yep. The first time I went and looked at the actual questions on the PIACC, and what constitutes the different levels, it was unbelievably disturbing. To think that many adults can't even consisently read at Level 3 is scary. It was the final nail in the coffin of my formal education skepticism.
Growing up homeschooled, I read dozens of books per month for fun, and was shocked when my public school "peers" didn't enjoy reading or considered the books I read too advanced for them. As an adult, I am frequently taken aback by the mass ignorance, where just normal, oblique Bible or mythology references are completely unknown by college graduates. What, exactly, is their lifetime of debt buying them?
My college roommate once found me reading a novel in my free time and was puzzled. "You're reading for fun?" As it turned out, not only did he not read for fun, he hadn't read any of the books assigned in high school either. He just bought the cliff notes.
You can read Cliff Notes? Holy shit you're smart.
Mr. TL;DR
Something about formal reading classes actively stifles enjoyment and curiosity, and it's not as simple as IQ.
People often say this but I'm something of a reading enjoyer myself, and I found I usually enjoyed the books assigned in class. Not all of them certainly, but most. Maybe I actually did have better teachers than most.
If your stats in this essay are correct, then it’s likely that most of the teachers are not (or are barely) level 4 literate, so it’s hard for them to create engaging classes with challenging material. They themselves are just spitting the cliff notes (which they might struggle to write if they had to), so why should the students do more?
I had one really good literature teacher in high school and one really good history professor whose classes were excellent because they were basically book club. They lectured very little, just enough to provide useful context for the reading (that itself is a “high literacy” task!). The rest of the class was just a smallish group of engaged students (in the college course we literally rearranged our seats into a circle) talking about the ideas in the books - which were always dense and often dry.
But because the discussion was engaging and because we had self selected for interest in the topic (it was an advanced class in HS and an elective in college), everyone wanted to do the reading to avoid being left out. Still the smartest I’ve felt, and the most fun I’ve had, engaging with challenging writing.
I had a teacher for a couple of years who assigned us non-stop tragedy porn. In every book, rest assured, the main character's best friend would either die or end up in a mental hospital.
The High school lit was better, but we actually read fewer books in favor of essays and excerpts.
A lot of teachers teach literature in a very academic and abstract way, focusing on style and symbolic themes, and it gets in the way of appreciating the story on its own merits.
I was assigned plenty of tough reading in my high school curriculum and it didn't dampen my love of reading. It's an excuse for being bad at reading from the getgo. Which is, to be fair, the teachers' fault most of the time.
I read books in class that I enjoyed *before* having them in class, and *after* having them in class, but never *during* having them in class.
Same here. Homeschooled and read widely. In early childhood my mother read to us frequently.
I was not given access to the whole world of literature and, as a result, read everything we had in the house except Beowulf. I choked on that as an early teen, I need to pick it up again. The narrowed choice in reading material pushed me along a natural progression in difficulty and made focus non-optional.
I hated Beowulf as a 17 year old. Loved it at 40.
This version:
Seamus Heaney
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition)
I haven't reread that for years but I recall his translator notes being wonderful. The whole discussion about how the specific edged weapon in a passage gave the original audience insight into the character, how that doesn't have meaning for us, and ends with something like "Sometimes a sword is just a sword."
I had a teacher in middle school who read Beowulf in the original aloud to us during lunch break. No tests, just us listening. I loved it. Always liked Beowulf because of that. There is onomatopoeia in it, which is very cool. 😎
All true and well presented. I've discussed this subject with some very smart, but not very online friends and they seem incapable of accepting that this is the state of the world. I wonder what makes this so hard for so many smart people to accept?
Having tutored GED students in the past, it has always struck me as cruel to suggest they are just a bit more funding or perhaps a better sense of personal responsibility away from reading Aristotle. In my experience they were hard-working people and there was no shortage of resources available to them.
The social bubble is incredibly thick for most people.
My wife volunteered as a reading tutor in high school and was shocked to encounter high school sophomores who read at a first grade level, struggling to sound out the words on the page.
It's because the inherent physical equality of opportunity for all people is a modern religious value. Straight from Rousseau and his Enlightenment pals. Our whole society is built to an extent on this premise.
I agree, but unless you're functionally retarded, there's no reason you can't read and write well (mid level) other than sheer failure to apply yourself or horrendously bad teaching methods, or both.
I know several middling dim people, my sister included, who read quite well, simply because they were expected to. They're also mostly homeschooled and were read to a lot as children.
If you expand your vocabulary you expand your understanding. That counts for a lot until you hit your upper IQ limit and can't follow sentences with multiple clauses, let alone the implications of them. (More practice will help somewhat.)
But any high schooler still sounding out words like a first grader needs to have a legal guardian for life, because the only excuse for that is clinical retardation. Average reading skills is such a low bar. I'm not asking for calculus here.
I would add parenting to the list of barriers. In my experience, student success is about an even spread between parenting, student ability/motivation, and quality of instruction. Even with great instruction and great parents, some students will not succeed because they don't want to. Some kids are great but have terrible influence at home so will struggle much more than a student who is well supported but only mildly motivated.
This isn’t what Rousseau or any Enlightenment authors I’ve read say. I taught Rousseau to undergraduates (many who struggled to read the text, btw), and recall he’s pretty clear on the physical inequalities of humans.
What's that even mean?? The production of an Emile was for Rousseau, at best, a rare and difficult endeavor. The real Rousseauan norm was to put all your bastard children in orphanages. Hardly in praise of equality of opportunity.
I also know people who probably have reasonably high IQs. But they can’t grasp concepts well at all. Unless…the idea directly relates to them. Very solipsistic. Not impractical. But weird to me. One woman is ruthlessly logical and has a razor sharp mind if there is a gain or loss directly for her, but can’t follow anything abstract or complicated if she isn’t involved personally.
That just makes her a selfish asshole. Many such cases.
Maybe it is a lack of motivation rather than a lack of ability?
She’s a ditzy airhead on most things and then laser like on a few.
I know very stupid people that read well and knew how to get straight As in school. But dumb as posts.
They read well enough to know how to regurgitate the right answer. And they have a facility for words and a much needed facility on how to play the game.
Maybe we need to stop dumping billions into education striving for an unattainable utopian goal, and just accept that people aren't blank slates. If 8th grade is the upper limit of someone's intellectual ability, there's no point in pushing them through to 9th grade and dumbing down the the system for everyone else. "You've reached the extent of your ability and pursuing further education would be a waste of resources" We'd have smaller class sizes at higher levels, better education outcomes, more resources to focus on high performers and fewer frustrated, resentful students being pushed and prodded through a system they're not equipped to thrive in.
I’m shocked to read this. You are okay with setting not only young adults but also social structures up for long-term failure just to relieve short-term pain? You’re willing to give up on large swaths of people on the basis of their teenage performance?
The last thing an 8th grader needs to hear is “you’ve reached the upper limit of your intellectual ability.” That alone, never mind all the lost education, the grit, the logic of learning, the emotion of dealing with other kids in cooperative and competitive environments, is enough to drastically change the direction of a person’s life for the worse.
There are many useful things you can do with an 8th-grade education. You don't need more than that to survive, even in the modern era. This hypothetical person needs to become a trade apprentice, not have people like you loose bowels on their behalf.
These people aren't going to get anything out of another 4 years of classroom instruction about English literature; the people who would get a lot out of English literature will be held back by their less able (& unwilling) fellows.
As a final note, the internet is an autodidacts paradise.
You're arguing like a woman.
You’re not arguing at all. Your logic is weak.
I have no interest in debating your feelings. Cry about it.
I think the suggestion would be to change streams after 8th grade if that is prudent. Not euthanasia if you hate English lit. "Diversity is strength" (it's not, but you know what I'm sayin).
My favorite anecdote to explain a lot of partisan mutual incomprehensibility and hostility is a conversation I had with my only far left friend, a tech adjacent worker in SF, born and raised in the Bay area. I don't know how it came up but after some prodding he conceded that he doesn't know a single person without a bachelor's degree, and he's never had a coworker without at least a masters. Your point about the actually literate 12 percent not understanding the limitations of the mass of their countrymen has been incredibly harmful to our country in both wasted money and energy spent on utopian nonsense and also in assuming that everyone can "learn to code" so we don't really need these low skilled high paying jobs now do we
The “bread vs. crackers” question makes me a little skeptical of the collection methods underlying these data. If you infer from the passage that crackers should also be wrapped to be kept fresh, how do you answer the binary question? I’m not actually sure how I would answer it, not out of uncertainty of what the passage was saying but out of uncertainty of what the question was asking. (On the SAT, as I recall, inference of the sort the question asks you to do is actually punished, and the correct answer to a reading comprehension question is almost always stated explicitly or directly logically implied by the text.)
We'll mark you down as "level 2"
What was binary? The answer was "both".
Right you are. Ternary. I guess what I had in mind is that the question form acts as though the passage either says to wrap crackers or doesn’t.
I was briefly taken aback as well, then tried to focus on inference, in the case of physical instruction, more like a logical conclusion. These testers use it generally but I think inferences are better applied to human behavior, and logical conclusions for object operation. Anyway, for most of us: Bread soft, good. Hard bad. Happens after exposure to air. Crackers hard (“crispy”) good, soft bad. Happens after exposure to air. Conclusion: reduce exposure to air, good. But how? This is the part not specifically mentioned; hence the harder level. I felt my brain wiggle when I realized that reduction of exposure = wrapping, so “both”, albeit undesired results go in different directions (a distraction element added by the test creator.) having been told !no inferences on the SAT! could certainly mess one up for this in isolation, but I bet if you were learning foods in your kitchen you would just go and get the foil wrap.
I had the same reaction to this question. I distinctly remember a high school teacher drilling into our heads "never make inferences on the SAT" over and over. So when I answered this one in my head, I got it wrong. I have a PhD, but would probably be considered functionally illiterate based on this assessment.
So from "never make inferences on the SAT" you infer "never make inferences" ?
> I have a PhD, but would probably be considered functionally illiterate based on this assessment.
Perhaps rightly so.
I also have a PhD and I've noticed a lot of PhDs are indeed functionally illiterate. I once listened to a talk by a philosophy PhD who I'd swear didn't know what philosophy was. But there's texts and there's texts and clearly we're all of us somewhere on the spectrum of (dys)functional (il)literacy.
Crackas be racyzz and sh*t, yo.
Regarding that last graph, I would like to see a “Baumol” adjusted figure. Of course spending has risen in real terms since the 1970s but so has everything involving a wage except high school educated men. It takes more money to educate a classroom of 20 than it did in 1970 even if we strictly use 1970 amenities. When you strip out salaries and overhead (like utilities and supplies), how much is the spending increased and on what?
And then, in real life, noöne lets you make inferences from what they say without accusing you of putting words in their mouth.
Retired public school teacher here (also homeschooled my young kids and started a non-profit private school). Public school hasn’t taught reading with phonics for a generation. Add that to class sizes of 25+ kids, who enter first grade ranging from reading on a fourth grade level to barely knowing the alphabet, and throw in an iPad for every 6 year old, and you start to get the idea.
I wasn't homeschooled, but public schooling failed me so bad I might as well have been. The literature I read growing up (before the age of 18) included Heinlein, Herbert, Stevenson, Tolkien, Asimov, and Dickens. I also read some of the obligatory juvenile literature such as Cleary and Blume when I was younger. To the extent that I enjoyed reading, it was in spite of my school experience rather than because of it.
the only reason they obsess about teaching people to read is so they can feed them propaganda
Okay, that’s funny! I guess that means TikTok is a Godsend, then.
20% of the population has a very low IQ and struggles with almost any mental task. Forcing these people to engage in education beyond their capacities helps nobody. Teach them the basics, and a useful skill.
I'm an American medical student and I read "adult books" (nonfiction, genre fiction, literary fiction, and classics) at a rate of dozens per year. This is rare among professional students due to the demands of school and the low background rate of readership among young people, even intelligent ones.
None of my classmates are dumb and I'm sure all are in the 12%, but there are regular, notable failures of reading comprehension in every small group activity. It could be simple laziness or it could be truly decreased high-level literary skill. Many students use exclusively Cliff Notes-style resources to study. I just can't help but doubt that the medical students of 40 years ago would made the mistakes I see now & would have had this reduced vocabulary (not medical jargon, general "SAT words"). Could it be the decreased focus on literature in undergrad?
I'm no longer convinced that teaching everyone basic reading and writing really is an accomplishment worth boasting of. There is a fantastic level 5 author who was named Ananda K Commaraswamy who wrote (I think in the 40s) an essay called "The Bugbear of Literacy." It isn't all that long, and it's well worth your time.
http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=The_Bugbear_of_Literacy_by_Ananda_Coomaraswamy.pdf
I think that last graph is shocking. Didn’t expect that.
The fact that spending doesn't move the needle on test scores? It's kind of an open secret, but mainstream policy discussion refuses to touch it with a 10-foot pole. The idea that spending more money will improve educational outcomes is an article of absolute faith.
Because doing anything else would be too hard, requiring things like creativity. Throwing money at a problem is easy.
What should be done is the exact opposite of what is being done. Accepting different people have different ceilings and educating them accordingly would be best for everyone.
It's always, "Yay! We got funding!" and not "Yay! We got outcomes!"
For all the struggling level 2s, the answer is both, bread, both.
Yep. The first time I went and looked at the actual questions on the PIACC, and what constitutes the different levels, it was unbelievably disturbing. To think that many adults can't even consisently read at Level 3 is scary. It was the final nail in the coffin of my formal education skepticism.