We're learnding.
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Is this real? And what’s 6th grade for someone who isn’t American?
I think 6th grade is reading for plot. Just a basic plot with a few characters. No complex themes. No unreliable narrators. Limited vocabulary.
I found an online test for it somewhere and it was like
"Sally was born in Canada and lived there until she moved to the United States when she was thirteen. She spends summers in Canada with her aunt and uncle, but spends the rest of the year in Boston. This year, she's graduating from high school and planning on attending college. She wants to see more of the country, so her top picks for college are in California and Chicago."
"Where does Sally live during the winter?"
"Where did Sally spend her childhood?"
"Where do Sally's aunt and uncle live?"
You're not going to find as many people who read badly on a majority text platform like this.
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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.
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Is this real? And what’s 6th grade for someone who isn’t American?
Good chance for me to learn, what would it be called in your country? What country are you from?
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It took thirty years of cutting education spending but they are almost to a fully ignorant populace.
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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"
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Is this real? And what’s 6th grade for someone who isn’t American?
Sadly, yes. It is largely a consequence of two things: constant right-wing efforts to destroy public education and neoliberal profiteering. The first requires little explanation. The second is something that I only learned about because LeVar Burton (Geordie LaForge in Star Trek TNG) has produced a documentary on it and has been participating in activism to try to fix the damage.
Basically, with the neoliberal philosophy that profit is more important than anything else, education fell into the sights of profiteers. Through connections and back-room deals, schools have been forced to adopt proprietary "literacy" methods and tools that were initially developed explicitly to allow people with diminished cognitive capacity to somewhat function in society. This means that there's a whole generation that only learned how to do things like guess what a word is based on its shape, rather than understanding its phonetics or figuring out its meaning from its constituent roots.
This profiteering, as a side effect, also harms education overall as it has robbed people of their ability to engage in self-learning. Something that is only helping to cause further harm with people off-loading cognitive efforts to LLMs, and not having the skills to differentiate between when they spout pure bullshit and output something that is useful or factual.
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God, no. Even tabloids are generally written at an 8th grade+ level.
I had to look it up because of your comment. It's been over a decade since I dealt with anything in the AP Style Guide or adjacent. Fortunately, you are correct.
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How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
This might help. https://smcl.org/blogs/post/making-sense-of-reading-levels/
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That's good news! ... it means they're improving! USA! USA! USA!
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How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
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How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
Did you start reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the instant you learned to read?
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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.
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.
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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"
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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 American 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.
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Around 12 years old or so. I've been hearing something similar to this my whole life. I didn't understand how true it was until I started recruiting in 2009.
Not that it started with Bush, but after 'No Child Left Behind' act schools were incentivized so pass all students. They tied school funding to graduation rates and passing students. Teachers taught more just to the test and not comprehending the material.
I'm sure it's gotten worse COVID.
In my high school they were passing people who were functionally illiterate to keep funding up. It was pretty much assumed those kids were a lost cause so they never got any extra help either. School would just look the other way as someone was lost in the cracks and passed on paper. The very rare ones that did manage to get extra help would take tests in a different room and it was well known the aids would just give them answers if they took too long. Everyone hated it especially the kids being passed through. They got ostracized for "having it easy" while also being frustrated they're spending all day being told to focus on stuff they don't understand and aren't getting real help with
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That's higher than I thought. Aren't newspapers written at around third or fourth grade levels?
At this rate, in about a decade, tabloids will be formatted like comics with more pictures than words to make it easier for people
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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 American 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.
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That's higher than I thought
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And they all get votes
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
Who is that sexy mother fucker in the picture?
