sotonye.substack.com
SS: I make a case for drastically cutting back on education. I argue that education doesn’t achieve its desired goals. The material is irrelevant and students forget much of the material. Most information taught in schools is quickly accessible with a smartphone. Education might be warranted if it boosted cognitive ability but it appears to be increasing IQ scores rather than actual ability to think.
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Fully agree. In addition, many people somehow graduate school whilst being 'functionally illiterate'. This suggests that they're a massive waste of time, failing their supposed goals.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
I've heard people argue that clearly the sixth-grade level of literacy is too high or that it's an unrealistic standard - but then what is the point of the seventh grade? What is the point of teaching people Shakespeare if they can't understand it? I think Shakespeare was a huge waste of time, yet I can appreciate parts of it, there's some interesting wordplay.
20% are functionally illiterate. I suppose this includes a great many people who don't know English at all since they weren't born in an English speaking country. Even so, this is pretty bad. I've seen too many videos of Americans being asked basic questions and knowing nothing. For example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g2oMv93EUpY or https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmcubp2szg or https://youtube.com/watch?v=wu7RXlIEbog
Eagle eyed viewers may notice that white men are not prominent in these clips, there's obviously a cherrypicking process where the people who answer correctly aren't included. Hbd is clearly a factor here. But still, I would've thought it would've thought stuff like 'what country did the US gain independence from' would be universally known in the US. It should be all but impossible for our youtuber to find a native English speaker who doesn't know what country the US got its independence from.
(As an aside, ChatGPT has human intelligence - there's no doubt about it. Issues with anagrams and making funny jokes pale in comparison with the gaping stupidity and categorical ignorance 'Asia is a country' of many Americans.)
There ought to be a slash-and-burn approach to education. It's not just America, other parts of the Anglosphere are deteriorating in a similar fashion. In the immortal words of Donald Trump, we need to shut everything down until we know what is going on.
... Say you're in a car accident. A dozen bones broken, you're driven to the nearest hospital unconscious. After eighteen hours of tireless work by surgeons and two weeks of medical support, you wake up - you've lost all sensation in your left arm, and can barely walk. A year of physical therapy later, you can walk well enough to get by, but not much else has improved. Does this suggests that surgery and physical therapy were "massive wastes of time, failing their supposed goals"?
No, because without surgery, you'd be dead, and without PT you wouldn't be walking. "Functionally illiterate" means you can't pass literacy tests, but probably still understand written language well enough to read instructions at your job and math well enough to count money. School helped with that! These matter for dumb poor people who want to earn money or survive. This doesn't make school great, maybe it should be entirely replaced with something better, but it isn't a waste of time compared to 'staying home, playing video games, job at mcdonalds at 14'.
“Functionally illiterate” means the exact opposite: that you CAN pass literacy tests (they kind they give up to grade 6, anyway) but can’t read well enough to read and understand something in day-to-day life.
It looks like functional illiteracy is a badly defined term anyway.
From wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy
“ A reading level that might be sufficient to make a farmer functionally literate in a rural area of a developing country might qualify as functional illiteracy in an urban area of a technologically advanced country.”
Because they can’t understand how to RTFM? I think there’s a weird standard here, not everyone needs to understand anything above a 6th grade level to do many jobs, in my mind these people are literate enough for what they need.
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Bleh my bad for mixing ideas without paying attention. I don't think that impacts the point though - I'm pretty sure even level 1 and below adults (22%) can read significantly more than they could if school was simply abolished, and L2 + L3 (32% + 33%) "can perform simple tasks based on the information they read".
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