60% of the time, our pillaged, underfunded public education system works every time.
Also, on a serious note, it’s against the capitalist’s interests to have a well informed society capable of critical thinking and true understanding of how badly they’re being fucked by big capital. An ignorant populace is a compliant, controllable, easy fo manipulate populace.
That’s why the owners never send their kids to their livestock’s schools that they spent years defunding into today’s ruins. Well, that and they don’t want their kids to inadvertently develop… barf…empathy or comradery with their future cattle herd.
In conjunction with this, I fully believe that Big Capital are the ones that are absolutely pushing the abortion bans, by proxy of “religion”. Sure, there’s niche groups that support it, but that money is coming from SIGNIFICANTLY RICH people pushing that shit through.
They want uneducated people. They absolutely want an uneducated labor class as people are cheap.
And about 26% of voting age adults voted for Donald Trump in 2016/2020.
Almost like there’s an intelligence threshold that keeps manifesting that ~30% number…
Functional illiteracy is a different measure than illiteracy. You are talking about functional illiteracy, and proved such with your examples.
It’s a fairly important distinction tbh.
Isn’t part of the US illiterate population perfectly literate in a language other than English?
Isn’t part of the US illiterate population perfectly literate in a language other than English?
Honestly it’s kinda impressive that more than half of Americans have read a book in the last 12 months. I mean I read a book, but that’s just so I have an answer in case anyone asks if I’ve read any books lately.
I also hate “reading a book” as a proxy metric for intelligence. I know plenty of cultured smart people who watch documentaries but don’t read. And I know some dense, not that bright people who read a lot of Twilight style books.
Reading Twilight demonstrates the ability to focus on a task for a long time, which is more that can be said for people watching documentaries (I watch a lot of them).
Sure. but there are plenty of reasons to not read other than “uneducated”. And associating ability to focus with intelligence and education isn’t fair either.
If an American couldn’t tell me how many states there are, I would question their intelligence or education.
If an American told me that they don’t read books, I would just assume they find books boring.
This will be an incredibly dated reference, but back in the '80s there was a comic who would ask the crowd who the black girl in The Facts of Life (TV show) was and there’d be a chorus of people yelling “Tudy! Tudy! Tudy!” Then he’d ask who the secretary of defense was.
Not a damn clue. And I would argue that it’s not a terribly important thing for your average American to know, either. Just because I’m curious, I’ll look it up…
Lloyd Austin. Never heard of him.
