Which means 54% cannot write a competent book report hitting the major plots and themes.
And forget about picking up on allegories.
Lord of the Rings is a story about a long hike gone wrong. It has nothing to do with East/West dynamics, the question of power, masculinity, or the simple things of life.
What are you talking about? That’s like saying Patrick Bateman, of American Psycho and Rules of Attraction, is not an aspirational alpha male figure!
/s
In case you were wondering why we’re losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
Is this real? And what’s 6th grade for someone who isn’t American?
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
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.
Are you allowed to refer back to the text?
I believe so. Otherwise you’re testing memory as well, which would make the results very confounded.
I can’t find the one I did, but https://www.varsitytutors.com/6th_grade_reading-comprehension-problem-440865 seems free.
https://www.k12reader.com/subject/reading-skills/reading-comprehension/6th-grade-reading-comprehension/ also came up.
Not great. Sixth graders would be the 11-12 year old kids. It’s been a while since I was in school(I’m 38) and when I was in sixth grade I was considered “advanced” in reading level due to reading Tolkien.
34 here, 8th I was required to take German and Spanish. Small town Minnesota. It’s crazy to me this many are not educated. It does explain Trump though he’s probably in that category
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.
There are various rating systems, but it boils down to comprehension. 6th grade reading level is about the level to be able to follow the plot of Harry Potter.
About 11-12 years old. Educational standards should be a base understanding of simple novels and ability to write a basic page or two length essay on it. Math skills should be late arithmetic or early algebra. Or at least that’s what I remember from the time.
Good chance for me to learn, what would it be called in your country? What country are you from?
If they are using the data that has been perpetuating this for a while now, they don’t have a single source for the percentage given.
It does say NEW STUDY though, so I could be wrong.
I recently watched a YouTube video about this exact percentage, I’ll try to find it and link it.
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I mean yeah, all those topics are covered in HS civics class…… Which they skipped.
Skipped or failed… Either or.
School starts at home (for many parents, this is an unbelievable idea). I had a classmate who is an anti-vaxxer, even though we did biology together and learned how vaccines worked. My classmate is alright as a person, but I think her environment outside of school made her not one of the sharpest tool in the class and never paid attention to the lessons. My point is that, if the home environment is not conducive to learning, the person is less likely to be intellectually driven. I know there are exceptions and it boils down to “nature versus nurture”, but as mentioned already, an environment that does not foster learning makes the person less likely to pursue knowledge.
This is also a big thing. If I may add to it, the environment may also help add maturity needed for certain topics. My HS had a banking and personal finance class. Many kids just didn’t care, others didn’t have any way to visualize it as they didn’t really get an allowance, and those with jobs who would benefit the most were often not taking the class because they needed to work.
I was lucky to be there. Really that I was able to credit by exam some classes; which gave me space in my junior and senior year to fill.
Why do you think Reaganomics was implemented? If both parents work, they aren’t going to be able to spend as much time teaching their kids to read.
Some parents are genuinely lazy. More often than not, a typical phrase some parents would use is “didn’t they teach you that in school?”
It took thirty years of cutting education spending but they are almost to a fully ignorant populace.
We’ve even hit the point where they don’t have to pretend to be pro education
Wait another 30 years and all the ‘educated’ people who are running the country now will start dying off leaving behind the generation that had little, limited or no education.
Sure you’re always going to have your best and brightest running the country … but they’re going to be severely outnumbered by an entire nation full of people who are dumb as bricks who raised children and grandchildren who are dumb as bricks.
As much as I worry about this I think the real scenario will be the rich keep their kids educated at proper levels and they start to look smarter than the poors. If this trend keeps up it will be easy to convince a population of uncritical thinkers that being rich makes you better.
I think it’s even sadder than that … a rich elite who believe they are raising more intelligent children but are in fact just raising slightly smarter kids that are one step brighter than an entire population of completely stupid people.
Money and wealth doesn’t make you intelligent … because often what happens is the wealthy get to the point of just buying or purchasing the credentials and diplomas like they do houses or cars because they see them as titles rather than academic achievements.
For us foreigners, 6th grade is around 10 / 11 years old?
Yes, about. Ten years is peak reading for most Americans. And we wonder why they f-ck up the world.
Yep. God help us.
A little older. I was 11 in grade 6, but I was also the youngest student.
I’m curious what it is for other countries so off to do a little searching…
Update:
Right, it’s better but not wildly so when spread across the EU and lower in some places. This page is from the Irish Central Statistics office with 2023 numbers and puts us at 21% at or below the level 1 (at or below a grade 6 equivalent). On that page (2023 numbers) the US is at 28% so that 54% statistic in the OP smells a bit.
The main difference between Ireland and the US is that we’re only 5% below level 1 where the US is at 12%.
For reference, Portugal has 15% below level 1.
Here’s the definition of level 1:
Here’s the relevant graph with all levels in picture format but you can get the individual numbers by going to the page and hovering over the individual levels.
Japan and the Nordics crushing it to nobody’s surprise.
FYI, Portugal has a massive disjunction in educational and reading level between people who grew up before the Revolution that overthrew fascism and those who grew up after.
Fascism definitely kept people ignorant: mandatory education back then - and Fascism lasted until 1974, so we’re not talking about the first half of the XX century - was only 4 years, which is just about enough to learn to read and that barely so, and access to anything beypnd that was nearly impossible for most people as the country was very agrarian and dirt poor.
I’m Portuguese and some of my older aunts are functionality illiterate, whilst most of my generation in my extended family (so around 14 people in our 40s and 50s) have degrees - which shows the veritable chasm in the availability and quality of Education before and after the Revolution.
The point being that minus that bulk of illiterate and near-illiterate old people who grew up during Fascism, the picture for Portugal changes a lot and, frankly, any 1st World country which is close to present day Portugal without having a whole generation that lived under a dictatorship which denied Education beyond the very basic to most people, doesn’t really have an excuse for it.
That’s an absolutely fascinating insight. Thanks!
Some years ago I saw some graph that showed the proportion of people in each country of Europe whose maximum formal education level was Primary Education, Secondary Education and Tertiary Education an Portugal had lots of people with only Primary Education, then few with up to Secondary Education and then lots again with Tertiary Education, and having that gap in the middle is quite unique in Europe.
The difference between the importance of Education for the Fascists (earlier, none at all, later just about enough to make them cheap factory workers) and for the post-Revolution governments (which were all leftwing), is like night an day, and Portugal definitelly shows how it’s possible to invest in Education and undo many decades of severe under-Education of the population though you can’t really undo the damage to the older generations (even with Adult Education, which was available if you lived in cities, but only used by a fraction of those who could’ve benefited from it).
This is pretty much all you need to know about the state of the United States. It’s being run by 10 year old imbeciles.
no, its being run by greedy, assholes, who know exactly what they’re doing. The 10 year old imbeciles are their republican voters and the yes-men they hire to do their bidding.
Yep, going to report this. It’s not a meme … it is actually fact and documentation for our eventual Idiocracy future.
Just kidding about the report of course.
Op would be very upset if he could read this.
If those Americans could read they’d be very upset about that!
Can we fix that by abolishing the department of education?
It’s only gonna get worse, isn’t it?By design. Learndt particular individuals tend not to vote for Nazis.
I’m not disagreeing with you (I don’t know enough about the department’s operations), but I can understand why people are unhappy with the ED (Department of Education). It has existed for almost 40 years, and has spent tens (sometimes hundreds) of billions of dollars annually.
The result: Well, most Americans’ reading level, as highlighted in this post. Also, a shocking number of people can’t even name a single country in Africa – a big continent with more than 50 countries to choose from. Also, college borrowers in the US owe ~$1.5 trillion to the ED.
Should the ED be abolished? Honestly, I’m way to ignorant to even make an educated guess. But after so many decades, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and $trillions of debt owed by students, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that something should at least change.
What you’re describing isn’t really a failure of the education system. It’s a reflection of the average American mindset. I was born in the US and grew up in the public school system. I loved math and science, and while I struggled with the rules of grammar, I still loved reading. I have always had a love of learning new things.
But most people aren’t like that. Not just in America, but across the world. A true love of learning is rare, and I think that’s because learning is hard. It requires humility, effort, and the being able to admit that one might be wrong. It means questioning long held beliefs and sometimes changing parts of yourself completely. That’s a deeply uncomfortable prospect and many people avoid it.
I think most people fall sleep while leaning on the third tier of Maslow’s pyramid (belonging and social identity.) The next level, where self-reflection and self-actualization begins, is hard to climb because it means hanging question marks on their long-held ideas and beliefs. They choose the safety of clinging to comfort and routine.
The current controversy over dismantling the US Department of Education is a complex issue that can’t be fully unpacked in a short reply on the internet. But in my view, what’s driving the American zeitgeist toward authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism is this resistance to growth and change. Internalizing new ideas means re-evaluating what you’ve always believed. For many, that feels like a threat. And instead of rising to meet the challenge, they’d rather pull everything down to their level, where they feel safe.
But, at least for me, the climb is worth it. Continuing to learn means accepting discomfort. It means growing past who you were in order to become someone better. It’s how we find purpose, empathy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive.
I saw that “3min read” tag on the screenshot and thought, “Not for 54% of American adults.”
Republicans at work. A dumb electorate is the easiest to manipulate.
TIL at least 46% of Americans can read.
It’s about 80% that can read. Only about 10% can understand the concept of a metaphor though.
To make it worse year by year the republicans continue to defund education, remove sciences, sex education and history from being taught in schools. While trying to force christian religion in public schools.
What a timeline America is going through.
Also to sloppify all media.
