Comment by PittleyDunkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PittleyDunkin | Hacker News Reader

I'm much more worried about literacy, frankly. Understanding numbers is quite important but this understanding doesn't mean much if you can't interpret their meaning in context.

I live in an extremely poor city and I would estimate about half the adults I interact with cannot read, write, or articulate anywhere near the level you'd expect from the high school I went to twenty years ago. And I believe the problem is getting much, much worse with the rise of youtube and the collapse of diction into a shared set of social-media memes—if you can't express yourself through those memes, you may not be able to communicate well at all.

Some portion of this can be written off to being a very attractive immigration target for those, like most, who don't speak english as their native language. I don't want to entirely write this off to a money/social/government/education problem—it's more complicated than any single narrative can convey. But I am firmly convinced we are looking at decades of literacy continuing to fall. If we can't figure out a way to collectively parent each other and resolve this, I can't imagine this is going to result in the kind of social and economic stability most people generally desire.

Public schools have been teaching "cueing" instead of phonics for a couple of decades, despite research showing that it...makes kids worse readers. This is finally changing. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

Public Schools near me in SF Bay area are more focused on political ideology than improving kids ability to attain Literary, Math, and Science education. There is a push for Equity over Achievement, by bringing the top performers down to raise the bottom. However the top performers have left for private school, and Public institutions declined. It's a downward spiral. There's hope it'll change either through full dissolution of the public institution (voucher programs) or through the dissolution of such "equity at all cost" political ideology.

This situation, where it is true at all, is a vanishingly small minority when accounting for these across-the-board downward shifts in national data. Oppose it locally if you wish but extrapolating your local situation to a national level doesn't hold up.

Whereas at least 75% of elementary students nationwide are learning cueing, so starting there makes more sense.

Local changes can spread like a virus.

San Francisco Unified School District implemented math sequencing changes that failed. District Leadership claimed they worked. Those changes were then cited by the authors of the latest California Math Framework.

Because California is a big state (and with some popular state universities), the California Math Framework will influence curricula and teaching methods far beyond California.

That's a future hypothetical and we're discussing specific data about a nationwide trend that has already occurred.

The experiment in San Francisco has been widely reported (in education circles) since this opinion piece in 2018: https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-how-one-city-got-math-ri...

It has had a nationwide impact already. It's not a hypothetical.

Jo Boaler and her organization have done consulting not only in SF and not only in California.

Her impact on K-12 math education is directionally the same as Lucy Calkin's impact on reading instruction.

This is specious. Can you show me direct evidence that these policies have been adopted nationwide to the broad degree necessary to explain the data as presented in the original post?

  Can you show me direct evidence that these policies have been adopted nationwide to the broad degree necessary to explain the data as presented in the original post?

No, not 'to the broad degree necessary to explain the data'. But no one in this thread is claiming that these policies alone explain the data.

You say it's a local thing only. I explain how local things expand. You say it's a hypothetical. I say no these things have expanded already. You say that doesn't fully explain the data.

If you will dismiss any hypothesis that doesn't fully explain the data, you will never receive a satisfying answer.

I would need something more than a link to an opinion piece and a thumbtack and yarn on pinboard, yes.

I have not seen any evidence that this policy, loosely defined, has spread in any considerable way nationally.

You've been downvoted, probably due to the opinions/hopes in the last sentence. Many people strongly believe that government-funded education must be government-run.

I won't comment on those opinions, but what you've written earlier in the paragraph is broadly correct, at least in San Francisco.

However, private schools are not a panacea. Most of them still group kids by age and do not tailor content to each kid's level, or even do single-subject acceleration.

This was basically only in NYC from my understanding. Everyone Ive asked learned via phonics

Not just New York, but also California and parts of the North East.

Nope it was widespread.

Phonics certainly doesn't _feel_ like the best way to teach English, but hopefully we now have enough data to show that it is at least acceptable. A big factor too is "can it be taught at scale". You don't only have to teach the students, you have to teach the teachers how to teach the new methods. Much like NCLB, these changes are well-meaning but we really need to stop rolling things out nationally only to find out they harm outcomes.

> Phonics certainly doesn't _feel_ like the best way to teach English

Phonics is not about "teaching English" in some fuzzy generic sense, it's specifically aimed towards teaching English written orthography, starting from its phonetics. I.e. teaching fluent speakers of English to read.

Why doesn't phonics _feel_ like the best way to teach English? This is a minority opinion I would think.

Probably because English is so very non-phonetic. To repeat an ancient joke, "Hookt awn fonix werkt fer mee".

I could also see it resulting in more subvocalization, but my assumption is that subvocalization is actually a very important short-term strategy that almost always goes away quickly.

It'd be super cool if English orthography were allowed to keep up with the times, but we've never been more anal about spelling than we are right now, lol.

Those are the non-English words mixed in.

Individual letters don’t have sounds, but trigrams do.

Given that that's something like half of our lexicon, you're going to have a heck of a time reading if you can't process any of them, but okay, let's look just at words that come from Old English:

food, good

rough, dough

two, to, too

I mean, that was easily read.

If you go read old documents, you'll note they spelled English much more phonetically .

It's a fairly modern thing to use these standardized spellings

English is fairly phonetic. There's a few options for each phoneme and a few common words, but the vast majority follow obvious phonetic structures.

Yes, of course it was easy to read. It was spelled phonetically. That's the point.

Calling English "fairly phonetic" is laughable. In most languages, they don't have spelling bees because they don't understand the concept. How would you not know how to spell the word after someone speaks it?

I'd like to see how much time kids waste learning reading/writing in countries with non-phonetic languages compared to sane languages.

My understanding (mostly from my speech pathologist brother ranting about this) is that we end up with reading/writing tending to lag about two years behind due to it.

Exhibit A: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/12/10/a...

It's a nearly global trend that literacy and numeracy are decreasing and not just in students, but in adults. I can only wave my hands and say "pandemic" otherwise I have no clue what's going on.

Ability to read does not correlate interest to read or more importantly ability to understand

Why is literacy important ? I don't think it is important at all.

it is overrated today, it was far more important in the days when mass communication was largely written. It is not longer the case, cost and ease of video and audio publishing is extremely cheap.

The issues in written communication are beyond production cost of writing, there are limits what can be described and how difficult it is do so for a large audience to understand, there is a reason why good authors historically were very influential.

It is also more volume limited than say even speech/audio, you can say lot more with lot more meaning(using non verbal and non lingual sounds) in the same time it takes to read.

Don't get me wrong, it is a wonderful format, but is no different than painting versus photography and now animation, you can do great art by working with the limits of the medium, but it depends on the consumer to use his "imagination" to understand. Just as paintings were actual tools of communication in a bygone era and are art today and can be appreciated as such so is written communication, it is not essential mass communication tool that people need to really learn anymore.

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It is far important to be able to critically think for yourself and question the information presented to you and be able to understand the mathematics needed to do the above and navigate life.

The need for widespread literacy is relatively new, of only few hundred, and was result of drop in the cost of written publishing which made it the most popular form of mass communications. More effective means of communication including speech and video have become cheaper and becoming even more cheaper with AI.

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This association of intelligence or critical thinking skills to literacy is flawed and frankly elitist it is merely a function of schooling.

I grew up in a country where literacy is a still a problem particularly amongst older generation not because they didn't learn properly in school because they didn't ever go to one.

I know just as many smart thinkers, world aware, inventors who are illiterate as I know dumb, idiotic literates. The country is larger, poorer than America yet has more robust political process that is diverse, with more involved electorate even if what the people want is at times authoritarian , there is no denying the robustness of democracy itself.

The difference is the uneducated would likely picked up literacy if they had the opportunity, what we have in America is people failing to learn despite given the opportunity to do.

The issue is deeper than literacy as a skill, it is a poor proxy for other skills actually needed in life and becomes more weakly correlated in the future .

> Ability to read does not correlate interest to read or more importantly ability to understand

It may not correlate, but it does condition.

That is to say, one can have 100% interest in reading, but if you can only read 1% of published works, you will be just as good as someone who is a perfect reader but only 1% interested in reading.

Similarly, with comprehension.

Reading well is necessary to be interested enough to read more and to comprehend.

To play devil's advocate: why does it matter? The purpose of language is communication, so it could be argued that if people feel they're able to understand and be understood sufficiently, classic ideas of literacy aren't really a useful metric. I suppose what modern language usage lacks in depth it makes up for in brevity and clarity, which seems like a natural correction to the low signal to noise ratio of a heavily interconnected world.

Edit - I don't mean to challenge the value of literacy so much as speculate whether falling test scores necessarily indicate the loss of that value. Language, how it's used, and how changes spread are all very different in the information age. How do we know traditional literacy tests accurately measure the role it plays in people's lives now?

As an example, written communication used to primarily take the form of writing letters. With instant communication, ability to put thoughts into words quickly has a higher relative impact on communication compared to being able to spend as much time as needed to find the perfect words to convey a message.

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”

the bar of being a productive member of society is much higher than "sufficient communication" (which I would argue the illiterate aren't capable of anyway)

> they're able to understand and be understood sufficiently

Communication isn't all or nothing. The more expressive power you have, the wider the scope of ideas you can communicate. It may be minimally sufficient to be able to communicate "me hungry" or "that crazy", but more is probably still better.

To add to this, expressive power also makes it possible to communicate nuance and discuss biases and fallacies.

It matters because of entropy. How many people can society carry before it suddenly can’t? Civilization doesn’t persist from inertia.

> The purpose of language is communication

It isn't this simple. Literacy plays an important role in information assessment and in decision making. It's strongly associated with health, success in personal finances and career path, and relationship satisfaction, to name just a few areas that have published papers readily accessible online.

To get a look at the ugly side of this, high demand religious groups are a fascinating case study. Constant circulation of repetitive cliches is a key mechanism for isolating their members and making them easier to manipulate.

I should have made my point clearer that I believe low literacy rates hurt your ability to articulate yourself and to understand others and even engage in basic reasoning well outside the written word, and that this is (often) detrimental to your ability to navigate the world. I certainly enjoy engaging in memes and jargon and slang too—in fact it's a great joy in life to find new words and manners of expression and to look beyond what worked yesterday—and much of this is just as expressive as formal or classically-analytical english, if not more so given the baggage words tend to acquire over time. But that's not what I was referring to at all.

I should have made my point/question clearer too; I agree that literacy is valuable for all the reasons you outline.

Tests are only as useful as what they measure. The qualitative changes to communication could have impacted the quantitative changes we're seeing (i.e. lower literacy rates). How much, in what ways, I have no idea; I was hoping to learn more by sparking discussion.

Unfortunately (and ironically) my poor choice of words has instead led to my apparent taking of an anti-literacy stance. Oh well.

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