memes

People want easy solutions, like "Have more people be born smart" instead of hard, complex, realistic ones like "Put time, effort, and resources into robust education of the population in stable familial and social environments to develop higher averages of generally recognized metrics of intelligence in the general population"

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Idiocracy didn’t propose any solution at all. If I remember correctly, smart people not having kids was just a plot driver. Sadly, with the way things are that is how it’s gonna happen in our lifetime most likely. Education is getting worse over time, so the ones who’ll be able to educate their kids properly are those who are already educated.

Around 12 years old or so. I've been hearing something similar to this my whole life. I didn't understand how true it was until I started recruiting in 2009.

Not that it started with Bush, but after 'No Child Left Behind' act schools were incentivized so pass all students. They tied school funding to graduation rates and passing students. Teachers taught more just to the test and not comprehending the material.

I'm sure it's gotten worse COVID.

I think 6th grade is reading for plot. Just a basic plot with a few characters. No complex themes. No unreliable narrators. Limited vocabulary.

I found an online test for it somewhere and it was like

"Sally was born in Canada and lived there until she moved to the United States when she was thirteen. She spends summers in Canada with her aunt and uncle, but spends the rest of the year in Boston. This year, she's graduating from high school and planning on attending college. She wants to see more of the country, so her top picks for college are in California and Chicago."

"Where does Sally live during the winter?"

"Where did Sally spend her childhood?"

"Where do Sally's aunt and uncle live?"

You're not going to find as many people who read badly on a majority text platform like this.

Not great. Sixth graders would be the 11-12 year old kids. It's been a while since I was in school(I'm 38) and when I was in sixth grade I was considered "advanced" in reading level due to reading Tolkien.

Sadly, yes. It is largely a consequence of two things: constant right-wing efforts to destroy public education and neoliberal profiteering. The first requires little explanation. The second is something that I only learned about because LeVar Burton (Geordie LaForge in Star Trek TNG) has produced a documentary on it and has been participating in activism to try to fix the damage.

Basically, with the neoliberal philosophy that profit is more important than anything else, education fell into the sights of profiteers. Through connections and back-room deals, schools have been forced to adopt proprietary "literacy" methods and tools that were initially developed explicitly to allow people with diminished cognitive capacity to somewhat function in society. This means that there's a whole generation that only learned how to do things like guess what a word is based on its shape, rather than understanding its phonetics or figuring out its meaning from its constituent roots.

This profiteering, as a side effect, also harms education overall as it has robbed people of their ability to engage in self-learning. Something that is only helping to cause further harm with people off-loading cognitive efforts to LLMs, and not having the skills to differentiate between when they spout pure bullshit and output something that is useful or factual.

There are various rating systems, but it boils down to comprehension. 6th grade reading level is about the level to be able to follow the plot of Harry Potter.

Yes, about. Ten years is peak reading for most Americans. And we wonder why they f-ck up the world.

Yep. God help us.

Op would be very upset if he could read this.

God, no. Even tabloids are generally written at an 8th grade+ level.

you mean president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho?

Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.

Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.

Did you start reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the instant you learned to read?

This might help. https://smcl.org/blogs/post/making-sense-of-reading-levels/