[karajorma]

And students and parents not caring about their education is somehow not part of the problem? There is plenty of blame to go to the school, sure, but the biggest problem with our system is that the students have absolutly no responsibility and just saying "the school is to blame" reinforces this.

If someone is leaving school as a graduate when they can't read that is the school's fault. They should be leaving school as a failure.

But that's the problem. The school system doesn't want to label these people as failures because that's not good for their self esteem or job prospects (or for the school's reputation as a good school) so instead they pass people only slightly more qualified than a trained chimp.

Once you stop entitling people who don't actually deserve it then you can address the fact that students and their parents don't care about actually getting that title. You can't while everyone gets it though.

[ShivanEmperor]

I find it hard to believe these figures, anyway, if they are true, America is not the only place. I have seen schools where all they teach children is how to play fun little adventures on a piece of paper with black and white pictures. Those who don't go to school AND don't get homeschooled won't ladt 5 minutes along the side of the road. Believe me, I know...

"The more man improved his surroundings to make his life easier, the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazerdous habitat they were born into."

Quote taken from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66pTPWg_wUw The funniest thing I have probably ever seen.

[Mongoose]

Karajorma has it exactly right.  It's this sickening concern over poor little Johnny and Susie's self-esteem that's the root of the problem, perhaps even far more so than the very real issue of underfunding in urban areas.  My mother teaches at a relatively well-off parochial school, and a few of the stories she's told me about some of the utter ****wit parents she has to deal with would make your head spin.  Graduation rates be damned...if someone's a complete failure, let them know it loud and clear.  The No Child Left Behind act was perhaps good-intentioned, but as I understand it, it creates more problems of its own by forcing schools to "teach to a test" or prompting states to lower standards in order to maintain the passing rates required to keep up funding levels.  There are days when I feel that true education died when we stopped letting nuns smack idiots on the knuckles with rulers.

[watsisname]

I'm sorry, you were saying something?

[Ghostavo]

I'm sorry, you were saying something?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

A five-year, $14 million study of U.S. adult literacy involving lengthy interviews of U.S. adults, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in September 1993. It involved lengthy interviews of over 26,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."

(...)

A follow-up study by the same group of researchers using a smaller database (19,714 interviewees) was released in 2006 that showed no statistically significant improvement in U.S. adult literacy. These studies assert that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn "significantly" below the threshold poverty level for an individual.

The World Factbook prepared by the CIA claims that the U.S. literacy rate is 99%, but defines literacy as being able to read and write when a person is 15 years old or older. A person who can only read a few hundred — or even a couple of thousand — simple words learned in the first four grades in school is only marginally literate.

Say what?

[watsisname]

Most interesting. I was not familiar with that study, will need to to some checking.  I do find the quote "These studies assert that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn 'significantly' below the threshold poverty level for an individual" to be particularly confusing though.  How exactly are they correlating literacy to income, and how are they defining the poverty line?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature with roughly 12% to 16% living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some time within a 10 year time span.

That said, I'd like to know what this study would discover about literacy rates on a global level.  Perhaps the way literacy has been defined and determined will need some refining.

[Ghostavo]

The definition for literacy varies from country to country (and even within the same country) obviously. I'd wager my own country should be yellow or orange rather than light blue as the map shows.

Regarding the confusing quote, perhaps I made a mistake not including the previous paragraph, it becomes somewhat clearer.

The study detailed the percentages of U.S. adults who worked full-time, part-time, were unemployed, or who had given up looking for a job and were no longer in the work force. The study also reported the average hourly wages for those who were employed. These data were grouped by literacy level — how well the interviewees responded to material written in English — and indicated that 40 million to 44 million of the 191 million U.S. adults (21% to 23% of them) in the least literate group earned a yearly average of $2,105 and about 50 million adults (25% to 28% of them) in the next-least literate of the five literacy groups earned a yearly average of $5,225 at a time when the U.S. Census Bureau considered the poverty level threshold for an individual to be $7,363 per year.

Basically they're correlating literacy levels with earnings for some rather obvious findings.

[Ford Prefect]

What a surprise, huh? You get what your property taxes pay for.

[Topgun]

Half my classes are useless, so I just teach myself whatever I need to know.

[Rick James]

If yu cn rd ths thn u cnt spl wrth a dmn.

[General Battuta]

He's been disemvoweled!

[Solatar]

The definition of literacy has to be considered. Is someone literate if they can read road signs and write letters? If they can't read American and British Literature, are they considered literate?

If somebody can't read Paradise Lost, for example, it doesn't necessarily mean they can't read.

[karajorma]

  My mother teaches at a relatively well-off parochial school, and a few of the stories she's told me about some of the utter ****wit parents she has to deal with would make your head spin.

Wouldn't surprise me. I've heard all kinds of stories where a parent has gone up to the school to complain at a teacher for telling off their child when they should have actually been having a go at their child instead. I have no doubt that there are teachers who go to far but there are more parents who don't go far enough.

There are days when I feel that true education died when we stopped letting nuns smack idiots on the knuckles with rulers.

I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem started when kids stopped being scared that they'd get punished a second time if their parents found out they'd been hit.

[Colonol Dekker]

That's what kept me on the straight and narrow when i was younger. Parents (should) control a childs life, revoke privilidges and discipline bad behaviour. As stated in previous topics. I'm the most leninet of father figures, mess up though and you'll wish you'd been born without nerve endings. I've got a few years til i have to worry about all that though.

[BloodEagle]

If yu cn rd ths thn u cnt spl wrth a dmn.

The mind tends to read words as a whole, rather than the actual makeup of the letters in words. Therefore, I have corrected the quote above, as can be seen below.

If yu cn rd ths thn u kw tht I cnt spl wrth a dmn.

 

[Polpolion]

People Easily Fooled by Propaganda

lol

Awesome on several different levels.

[Spicious]

If yu cn rd ths thn u cnt spl wrth a dmn.

Anyone who's spent time using a Unix based system should have no trouble reading that.

[Mobius]

If somebody can't read Paradise Lost, for example, it doesn't necessarily mean they can't read.

It'd be a shame, especially for a British adult. They should know Milton's most important work.

The definition for literacy varies from country to country (and even within the same country) obviously. I'd wager my own country should be yellow or orange rather than light blue as the map shows.

IMO age has its importance. Modern teenagers tend to be much more illiterate than their 60s-70s-80s counterparts...even people who make it to the University fail to spell certain words - something like that would have been impossible a few decades ago.

[General Battuta]

Do you have any statistics to back that up?

I'm not entirely sure I doubt it, but I'd want to see evidence.

[Solatar]

If somebody can't read Paradise Lost, for example, it doesn't necessarily mean they can't read.

It'd be a shame, especially for a British adult. They should know Milton's most important work.

I do agree; I was trying to make the distinction between "literate" and "educated". I would easily believe that 99% of people in most Western countries were literate. However, I would also believe that much less than 99% are educated. Hell, I read a lot of books in the 4th and 5th grade that were far above my reading level. I was literate at that age, however, it wasn't until I was further educated that I understood they were more than just "oh cool, a big white whale...I hope he catches him".

So, indeed it would be a shame for anyone to not be familiar with Paradise Lost. They could still be literate though. It would just be the bare minimum of literacy.

A lot of people seem to think that if 99% of people are literate, we're doing very well educating our population. 99% need to be educated, not just literate.