this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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A friendly reminder that half of all Americans have the literacy skill of a 12 year old or younger.
We should be precise. 7th grade reading skill is roughly where uou should be at 12 years old. A 7th grade reading level is literate, able to read and understand most words, and able to derive meaning.
Adult illiteracy is nothing to be ashamed of. More adults should seek help with their literacy skills, and people should not be made to feel stupid just because the educational and social support systems failed them in one way or another.
Celebrating ignorance is the real problem. Trump is not just illiterate, he's incoherent. His statements are gibberish, and his followers revel in the confusion and consternation he evokes in others.
This concerns me more than the rest. It's like Nostradamus: it invites one to draw conclusions from complete nonsense. And like the literary equivalent of a Rorschach test, the reader inevitably sees a piece of themself reflected on the page, and the experience is distinct yet repeatable by everybody.
That's a problem even with proper English with good grammar. There's a certain bias in the assumptions of the speaker and listener, which contributes to misunderstandings which are easily observed in almost every human interaction. The ambiguity of language is hard to avoid. The fact is that the speaker makes many unconscious assumptions about the listener understanding the context under which they are making their statements, and the listener must make assumptions on the context under which the speaker is making their statements.
The trouble is that, unless you're incredibly verbose, the likelihood that every reader/listener has the same context in mind as the speaker, is incredibly small. We as humans have a natural set of assumptions for the context of any given statement; those assumptions are not necessarily the same from person to person, state to state, country to country, and regional geography to regional geography.
This isn't to mention the nuance of idioms and cultural references that are invoked in many conversations, to which, if you don't understand the underlying story/contexts in which that idiom or reference exists, misunderstandings are inevitable.
With all that being said, I find that most people at least put in adequate effort to ensure their thoughts are portrayed in a comprehensible way. Most of the misunderstandings which result from that effort are detailed above (as far as I've seen). What Trump is saying, however, shows no effort to explain our even make mention of what context this string of words should be taken under, and the only concepts I can derive from his incomprehensible word vomit are so generalized that it has left the majority of the message to whatever context you wish to install for it.
Depending on what context you choose to use for it, this string of words could be a powerful call to arms, or it could be the nonsensical drivel of a madman. I fall more into the latter category, since I have worked hard to remove as much assumption and personal bias from my active listening, and thus, in the absence of any indicators of context from the speaker, the statement does not make any sense at all.
In my highschool journalism class, we were taught to write to the level of our readers, and that the average reading level for adults in the US is 6th grade. I think 3rd grade is the target now.
I agree that celebrating ignorance is the problem.
I work in tech and the number of people who outright refuse to even listen to a very high level technical explanation, or follow instructions poorly with the excuse that they "don't know tech" is very high IMO. I can usually see when people disconnect from a very very basic discussion about an issue. If it's more complicated than "I'm working on it" then they don't want to hear it.
I usually refer to this as "willful ignorance", aka, people who are otherwise smart, and capable of learning, who actively put in the effort to not learn anything new. Usually, willful ignorance is more effort than simply listening and trying to understand.
A lot of the people you're referring to seem to not only be willfully ignorant themselves, but also desire to celebrate people who are willfully ignorant and celebrate people who are blatantly ignorant.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against anyone who doesn't know something, or people who don't want or need all the details; I certainly don't have anything against persons that don't have the ability to understand. But if you can't even entertain the summary of something, you're the problem.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it think.