How is this number not 99.9%? Developed countries are at 100% or minus rounding error. Even Canada is at 99%, and that's next door. What is going on in the US?
As an example, for a long time Germany used a way to measure unemployment that yielded consistently higher numbers than most of the rest of the world. So any honest international comparison had to make adjustments.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
> In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.[3]
I think you got it right there. Be wary of cross-nation statistics without context.
13 million children face daily hunger, and politicians fight to take away school lunches. Hungry kids don't learn too good.
Fear porn is blasted over every corporate media outlet constantly, to the point where it saturates culture. People who feel unsafe don't learn too good.
Schools are funded based on local taxes. Neither political 'team' seems determined to change this. Teachers often have to buy school supplies out of their own meagre pocket. Kids in schools that don't have money don't learn too good.
School boards refuse to integrate modern understanding of best practices - homework is useless, school starts too early, multi-modal learning works way better, spaced repetition works great, bullying isn't a fact of life to be accepted and ignored. Bullied, tired kids don't learn too good.
Publishing monopolies charge hundreds of dollars for textbooks, altering 1984 and children's stories to be "safer", and holding back anything that might upset their comfortable position.
Hundreds of years of the world's most sophisticated anti-intellectual propaganda has allowed America to be world leaders in producing people that think education is scary.
Blaming poor people for their own problems is a national sport.
These attitudes have been with America for hundreds of years, and no amount of fight from Mark Twain, or Thoreau, or Einstein, or Bernie has changed those fundamentals of American culture.
There's no political motive to change any of this. As George Carlin put it so well: "Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation." America are undisputed world leaders in this (except in America, where this is seen as socialist talk and therefore safe to ignore).
Media, corporations and government conspire to prevent any third party or group from changing the social situation - look at what happened to OWS, or MLK, or Fred Hampton.
Any progression toward helping people get safe and educated is labeled communism, and the DNC conspires with media to mess up anyone too "radical" that runs as a Democrat.
Nobody on TV talks about how many teachers we could have trained with the 20 trillion dollars spent bombing Middle Eastern families - it's a lot.
So, a lot is going on in America. I didn't even mention the drugs, the housing situation, the bank crises, the environmental poisoning, the disconnection from nature, the lack of exercise, the poor quality food or God knows how much else.
Some will say I must hate America to write this stuff - people who say things like this get accused of being Putin's puppets, or worse, socialists. But I love America, which is why I hate to see what is happening to it and refuse to pretend these problems will be solved without even acknowledging them.
The trouble with your criticism is that you are focusing entirely on society’s failures, when a more complete analysis would consider what can be done on either side.
Yeah, we could blame the 5 year olds for their lack of grit and determination to create their foundation for their reading skills. Alternatively, we can look at what other societies achieve, and try to improve our own.
Also you are completely ignoring that plenty of people have functional difficulties learning to read and write. Anecdotally I would say over 10% based on my dyslexic or illiterate friends and family, some of which had professional focused help beyond what schooling provides. I agree with you that the education system has its faults, and some people “fail to capitalise opportunities”. However there is a large segment of people that are motivated, work hard, get good educational opportunities, and yet still struggle to read and write. There are people with denial or bullshit reasons too, but too many of my friends and family have symptoms that I have good reasons to believe they are not making anything up.
My 10% figure ignores functional meta-level difficulties for lacking motivation. Perhaps born without grit and determination; perhaps never taught it; perhaps other home problems trump it.
This is not to say that society is without blame, but I feel that personal responsibility is increasingly left out of the public discourse
It's not Brad's fault that he can't read good. It's not Chad's fault that he hasn't picked up a book. These hypothetical kids are 6, 7, 8 years old.
That's on us, and our willingness to allow their home lives to be miserable rather than pay for mental health supports and education as a society.
We can and should help the parents, and the first step is assessing the root of the problem, and sometimes that looks a lot more like laying blame than some folks are willing to do
This one is mostly a myth. States and federal grants will equalize money per pupil across different school districts. Some of the worst performing school districts in the country also have the highest per-capital spending.
I'm curious if you think the best path forward would be to keep pushing for the federal government to do better with education, or if it would be better to empower more local entities to improve. This could be state, county, or city governments, or even private school systems.
If we can afford $20 trillion on interest payments for illegal wars on the other side of the planet, we can figure out how to fund schools.
Not sure what you mean by "specific blaming and accusations" - there are real forces fighting back against educating children in a safe and happy environment.
They're not even that sneaky about it. Pretending that extremely well funded and organised and power groups are not, for example, banning books, abortion, cutting school funds, cancelling school lunch programs, giving millions in TANF funds to dried out quarterbacks, etc, etc, is like ignoring the termites eating away at the foundations of your house while spending all your money on grenades to protect from home invaders.
This assumes that schooling makes a difference.
See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/us-education-expenditure-... (as linked from https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is... )
Educational achievement in the US has been roughly the same as in the 1950s. It seems almost as if public education doesn't matter?
[0] Keep in mind that American real GDP per capital increased enormously over time as well. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA