Like, in a practical sense? Do you have any stories or examples from your life?
I am certainly not immune to this. I struggle to read theory and find it difficult to understand. ADHD does not help.
I love to read but also struggle to read theory, and then the smug theory obsessed leftists use that as a gotcha.
Leftist theory is extremely dense reading and mostly in language from 100-170 years ago. Of course it’s mostly impenetrable to the public of today.
To be fair, I struggle hard with reading anything not in current language. I can’t do Shakespeare, for example. Have a hard time with poetry too.
I had a brain injury, and then I have ADHD possibly from the brain trauma or possibly prior, and I suspect I’ve had autism all along. Being female is bullshit, growing up in the 90s girls couldn’t have those things so we just ended up having our needs neglected.
Years ago I wrote here using an alt about how I had yelled in public at one of my chud neighbors because he put a trump sign on his lawn. I stalked him later on facebook (which I no longer use) and saw his writing about the encounter. I could barely understand what he was even talking about. This is a white boomer who works as a school bus driver. Becoming a school bus driver now is super hard actually, it requires six months of full-time training/education where I live, but I suspect that he got into school bus driving before all of that, because his writing looked almost like he had just smashed his keyboard with his hands. No punctuation, many spelling and grammatical mistakes. I remember he wrote “I’m” when he should have written “I am”—it was something like: “He doesn’t know how nice of a guy I am,” but he wrote it “He doesn’t know how nice of a guy I’m.” This guy also speaks with a heavy accent and only in short, simple sentences. I’ve worked as an ESL teacher for years, and I tell students now—many of them are perfectionists—that they already speak English better than some native speakers.
I don’t know what level his literacy is at. I guess he is barely capable of communicating in writing and also able to sign and cash checks and buy things at the grocery store?
Another story: I work in a blue collar field which requires us to enter about four houses each day. 95% of houses have absolutely no books at all. Of the remaining 5% of houses with books, the vast majority are only bibles and cookbooks. 1% has books that are mostly for decoration. Another 1% or so has books that appear to have been read. I have only found a handful of houses with communist texts. Most of the houses with books that seem to have been read are just filled with liberal nonsense. (One Mormon landlord I met, who owned so many houses I think he was confused about the number, had dozens of Mormon-themed books in his basement, including even one book about overcoming doubt about Mormonism.) A coworker and I once entered the very rare American house that seemed to have hundreds of books. My coworker (white, in his thirties, has a high school education at best) didn’t even notice them. I guess I just found this stunning. I was fascinated with the books’ existence and wanted to examine them all, even if they were almost certainly all liberal nonsense (the owners were retired academics, one book I remember seeing there was something like “Hitler and Stalin”), but my coworker was still just glued to tiktok on his phone (and not communist tiktok). He’s actually an okay guy. He so desperately wants to be a normal American, but he has two trans kids whom he seems to love, so it’s basically impossible for him to be as reactionary as he would like to be. I talked with him for about a hundred hours when we worked together, never revealing that I was a communist and always avoiding obvious Marxist language, and only made modest progress at best. When we finished working together a few months ago, he had expressed interest in voting for RFK. He had also never heard of long covid and seemed to be concerned about it when I mentioned it. Then he went back to normal. As for me, I have trouble watching videos to learn things because they’re just too slow, sometimes even if I set them at double speed. I prefer reading, although I do listen to a lot of books and podcasts, although I’m usually listening while I’m doing something else. Not to denigrate learning from videos since I know they can be useful and some people really get a lot out of them (especially when it comes to learning blue collar shit), but in my opinion, a random book is going to have a lot more information than a random youtube video.
Oh man. I’d love you to judge my bookshelf. I have a bunch of half read fiction books from popular authors as well as short story compilations, I have a bunch of Harry Potter books (1-5, 6 and 7 came out when I was in college, and this was pre JK Rowling being a dick), some classics and nursery rhyme children’s books, a couple of George Orwell’s, a bunch of Rhode dahls, and then… I have books about the patriot act, about blackwater (the military contractor running wild in the Middle East), some anarchist writings, some hustle culture design related books (I tried…), a Hebrew Bible and some books about Judaism (I was raised Jewish and am ethnically Jewish), books about art history, and then a bunch of snowboard and skateboard magazines.
If you’re actually reading any books at all, that places you above 99% of American households.
it means using plain language, visual aids, and keeping things concise will get you far in the states.
boom, gottem. #pithy
Part of literacy is analysing texts like presentations. If a politician gives a half hour speech, what are they actually saying? That sort of thing.
This thread has much more been about graphical written word. Like, if someone listens to an audiobook or reads a physical book in the same way, their literacy level determines what they can get from either.
Or at least, that’s what I thought I was asking >.> idk
for about a decade or so, i had an official role generating resources for informal adult education based on published research within the academic structure as part of it’s 100+ year old “service/outreach” mission. over the last century, resources have been stripped from this mission, probably because it was structured so that communities had a big say in what sort of education they wanted delivered, preventing a full blown top-down approach to community development that powerful people deploy to maintain uneven development.
what i took from my time working in this sphere is that advancing the cause of literacy means meeting people where they are. among other skills, this requires creativity and humility which are two abilities that are not particularly valued by the PhD research or academic publishing processes resulting in an overall abdication by the “highly educated” of their responsibility to their communities. most prefer to scoff at the great many who lack the training they received and instead stand idle above the crowd as experts.
while the adversarial stripping of resources from our institutions that provide a basic, universal right to a broad education has lead us to the current situation, too many of our “public intellectuals” are reinforcing the problem by refusing to see their enhanced duty and responsibility to disseminate knowledge to their communities broadly, instead of gatekeeping it behind credentialism and careerism. there are obviously exceptions to this, as individuals, but they are the cranks and the burnouts with derailed careers. the elitist sociopaths are running the departments and colleges and they would happily disenfranchise everyone without a college degree before they’d advocate for a right to universal higher education.
I see it here sometimes, and also in myself. Trying to undo the snobbishness of academia.
To be clear, American illiteracy is something that is done to working class Americans. I’m probably not going to shed a tear if an illiterate fascist gets fucked over by policies they supported, there are better people to focus on, but it is tragic.
I’ve said for the longest time that my 7th grade self could accomplish all of the day to day admin tasks I’m assigned at work and still stand by that statement. You can’t effectively read without knowing how to interpret what the author/speaker expressed
I also could be too literal so ehh
Someone has a story below about the South Korean President and their coworker just taking the President’s statement of North Korea is invading at total face value even though the article was about how he was trying to create the crisis. Just a bonkers level of finding a single sentence in an article that you vibe with and then making the conversation about that (or rather about how you’re on that side).
I think people understand allegiances and power much better than they can express it, and in fact struggle to express why they agree with “powerful person on their side” when pressed for a reason. Like, I could say to the same coworker “Trump said that communism rules”, and they would immediately be able to engage their critical thinking abilities and disbelieve that or ask for a source.
I had a coworker who was writing a note to the boss and misspelled several common words, including “house”.
Often times people just avoid writing or typing in general, in favor of speech-to-text.
