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The worst part is: yes! Tons of studies come to that conclusion. Be it reading comprehension, lead poisoning, or the active dismantling of the US education system for the last eight decades, it's all part of the same picture. But what can you do about it if the group of preteens is self governing and won't see the problem?
The average American is as literate as a 5th to 6th grader.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
5th to 6th graders are 10 to 12 years old, normally.
So uh... yep, mhm, the average American is about as stupid as a 12 year old, that's a bit on the optimistic side though.
Dude's theory isn't really wrong, Americans are dumb and immature as fuck, and yes the statistics exist to back that up.
Honestly it terrifies me when I think about this.
I'm too stupid to be smarter than this many people.
Sadly, nope, if you can read at a high school level, there's roughly a 75% chance you are smarter than any rando you meet.
For the last 5 or 10 years, more and more kids graduate highschool with middleschool or worse reading / writing abilities.
People even make tiktoks about going off to college and admitting they literally cannot understand the words in their assigned texts, start going through some kind of literacy crash course...
Some people even make videos like that explaining that even after a Bachelor's or Associates degree, nope, still can barely read.
I am starting to notice this in the slop youtube throws at me that I am sometimes dumb enough to click on.
Somebody reading some article to give commentary on it, and you can just tell they are reading one word at a time, misunderstanding what 15% of them mean, have to actually stop on 5% of the words because those ones they've never read before, and then they start complaining that the author must have just been using a thesaurus... because a few of the vocab words in the article are 8th grade or above.
... I picked up reading quickly, so quickly that when I was in 2nd grade, I was assigned to go out into the hall when I was done with my classwork (I always finished rapidly) and then go help a 4th or 5th grader who was behind in reading skills, go sit with them and have them or me read aloud, help them with words they didn't know, etc.
Everyday, even on the net, I encounter more people who... are beyond graduating high school age, who barely read better than 5th graders with dyslexia.
some kind of literacy crash course...
I love how today actual literacy isn't even a thing. No one talks about teaching readimg and writing (in the EU, at least). It's all about financial literacy, digital literacy, social media literacy, hell, even (and bear with me here) AI literacy. Yes, really. There's probably 800 of these fake literacies floating around.
Whoever thought of this is an idiot. The word literacy means one thing: the ability to read and write (and perhaps understand what you read/wrote). Nothing more, nothing less.
It isn't just stupid, it's also malicious. Kids all over the globe are suffering from poor literacy, and instead of fixing the problem you quite literally shift the goalposts.
Why be able to read and consult a dictionary when I can just consult AI or social media to explain it to my borderline-illiterate brain?
DON'T LOOK
Obligatory /s for the final paragraph
Yet 54% of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level
So US was a 3rd-world country all along?
3rd world country with a knock off gucci belt.
Middle eastern terrorism?
Nah, we got ya'll qaeda right here at home, no need to travel, proud boys all joined ICE, gonna be 4th of July every damn day for the forseeable future.
As an American, this is accurate. I had a conversation with my wife not too long ago about how until I met her, I felt like I was always surrounded by idiots. I don’t mean that in a hyperbolic way. I did not know one person who continued any sort of self education in adulthood. Once they were out of school, that was it. It blew my mind. Life should be a daily striving to learn more. They seriously would not pick up a book, or research any topic outside of headlines.
Curiosity is as important as raw intelligence, and curiosity can be encouraged. Mostly it's discouraged.
Ya, that struck me as real truth. It's a nice summary, gets quickly to the root of the problem. If you are facing yet another moron, this elucidates what's going on. People do not aspire to mature beyond 5th grade anymore. Adjust your strategies accordingly.
Twelve year olds are more advanced, make it 8.
Sounds like something a president on a list would say.
He does keep drawing the line at 12...
This is very accurate. In my twenties, I worked on myself relentlessly to try to become "grown up". Eventually I looked around and realized that hardly anyone else was doing that, and people twice my age were still acting like children. Then they elected a man-boy King in their image.
I too passed the self-imposed ritual. It has not made me happy, but it helped me understand why I wasn't.
This concept could be an entire Lemmy community.
build it. i will join.
c/YeahButYoure12
When I was 12 I wanted to send the worst criminals to live in prisons in Somalia so that Somolies could have jobs and we would never have to see criminals…
And now there is a literal version of that idea from a 12 year old
Although Hanlon's razor says "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", I'd argue never misjudge malicious intent for stupidity. The first makes you just look a bit dumb, the second makes you a victim.
i'm introducing Marx' Flaming Laser Sickle, which says that i don't give a fuck about the underlying cause if the effect is fascism.
What if the stupidity is caused by decades of malicious dismantling of the education system?
After a certain tipping point, stupidity en masse becomes indistinguishable from malice. The result is more important than the intent.
Well that's basically the premise of populism. Your policy is doing whatever most of your audience would first think of doing (with no subtlety at all so as not to seem too smart or distant to them) then you just ignore the consequences when they come to bite you in the ass and most people won't think all those bad things are a result of your own stupid policy, because they believe it was perfectly logical and flawless to begin with.
Can we try populism+? We just get one guy, like a really smart good dude. Like a heavenly super person. We get them to look at all the ideas we have for stuff and tell us if there will be any consequences. If he says it's good, we do it. If it turns out bad, we kill him and try again.
We would need a name for this person. Something powerful right? Maybe "EMPEROR"
I think 12 may be too high. Most kids I've knew who acted like that were like 6.
I think you're underestimating 12-year olds here.
The group I play D&D with has three 12-year olds in it and I would put any of those kids in charge of this country over any of the current administration and those kids are morons.
i mean, i would put the liz truss cabbage in charge of the american government at this point
Now that I think about it, the situation in the US really does play out like an unconscionable large version of Lord of the Flies.
This is pretty spot on.
Ralph was just trying to help organize and make everyone's lives better. He was ignored and his life was threatened.
Simon, the insightful one, was trying to get people to see reason to quell their mania. He was murdered.
Piggy, the intelligent and compassionate one, was murdered.
Intelligent, compassionate, and a vessel for the author's racist worldview.
Don't mind me. I hate that book, and I hate that it's taught in every school as if it has anything important to say. We've run the Lord of the Flies experiment, both accidentally and very intentionally. Every time, we've demonstrated that humans are better than that, and the author's beliefs about human nature were both very incorrect and very racist.
I still resent being forced to debate my classmates about whether human nature was intrinsically "good" or "evil," directly after reading that book, even though it was 25 years ago. I was the lone voice on the side of "good," for lack of a "good and evil are subjective terms, but nonetheless humans are empathetic and this book is horseshit" team. I got dogpiled by 20 some other students for about 45 minutes. Fuck you Ms. Brown, and fuck you William Golding. That book has nothing important to say other than exposing its author's racist insecurities.
I mean i just want to note for a second that the aging retardant properties of humanity are one of the great miracles that puts us above other species.
Most other mammal species, including dogs, cats, camels, zebras, horses, cattle, sheep, whatever farm animal/pet you can think of typically lives no longer than 20 years, while for humans it's routinely 80 years, about 4x as long.
That, it turns out, is one of humanity's great strengths. We age significantly slower, and that includes a significantly longer childhood. Most feral animals grow up and reach puberty within 1-3 years, while for humans it takes at least 12 years (even longer if you wait to be socially accepted as an "adult"). This gives us more time to play, figure things out, learn, and develop. It is for this reason that we're able to pull off more amazing things than other species, because our long lifes warrant that getting a long, proper education is worth it. Because if we only lived for 20 years, it would hardly be worth it to study till you're 25 years old.
So, aging slower, and staying childish for longer, is actually one of humanity's great strengths. It is unfortunate, i believe, that we're trying to remove that human specialty in these days and trying to make people grow up faster.
that puts us above other species.
What, why? Axolotls can regrow limbs and a jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) is biologically immortal. Try that as a mere human.
And btw, please stop with that "we are above animals" thinking. That's what makes us think the world is ours alone and leads to destruction and shrinking bio diversity. And we are animals too anyway.
I like your perspective.
Thanks.
With that reasoning, turtles, parrots, should be put above humans?
True. When I was young I thought why don't we use the military domestically. Yeah it doesn't work.
It actually works really well, if your goal is fascism.
This lines up with what I've been shouting into the void whenever I read a news article. "Where are the fucking adults?!"