A few related education questions
They should be answerable! I just haven't done the deep dive searches to answer them, but I want to write them down
I’ve had a few questions for a while, and just wanted to get them down before they vanish forever.
The first is: Are more Americans literate now than they used to be 100 years ago?
The reason I think about this is that I have two facts in my mind that seem kind of to push on each other. The first is that the median person in the US cannot read and write “at an eighth grade level”, with this (and the lower roots of it) as the citation: https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/08/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/. The second fact might be more of an opinion, but in W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, he basically says that education as a simple and direct path to equality has failed. I’d have to re-read more of it, but he talks about how armies of teachers more-or-less obliterated illiteracy, as the common theory was “end illiteracy and you’ll end poverty”, and the historical record revealed “well, you were a bit foolish to think it would be that easy”, though from DuBois’s point in time, the historical record also revealed “you racists that thought we could never be taught to read, that all black people were less intelligent than all white people, that we would never achieve at the highest academic summits, have been thoroughly proven wrong”. This is all put much more eloquently in Chapter VI: Of the Training of Black Men https://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm#chap06 But the key part for my question is:
This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could be founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that could be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.
Ok, so illiteracy is gone, but did it stay gone? Lots of the book is about the failure (or at least mixed results) of government infrastructure, and what definition did they use of illiterate? Lots of current education writing is about the failure (or at least mixed results) of government infrastructure. How does the 1900’s definition of illiterate match up to the 2013 definition of "eighth-grade reading level”?
This should be a question that I can just easily look up!
The related one is: I complain about journalism all the time, and I never know whether the person next to me complaining about journalism is at my cognitive level and complaining about the thing that I’m complaining about. I, as a person who likely reads and writes at close to the highest level, and who knows a reasonable amount of statistics, may be complaining about how the article distorts the underlying scientific study, or has faulty logic, or something like that, but perhaps the target audience for the article is fundamentally incapable of even detecting those issues. Or, perhaps the writer of the article doesn’t subscribe to an epistemic stance that even values a logical flow and a coherent argument.
I have no idea whether I’m simply not the kind of person that a writer at a mass-media organization would ever try to write for, but I think that the evidence is overwhelming that they would be better off not writing for people like me. I feel like someone should start a “news organization” that ONLY posts headlines, there is no article. In general, I think we’re at the point in online discourse that the article’s content matters so little, that the cost-savings are actually fully justified.
Another related one: Do we know enough now that we should be blackpilled on education for all. Harden, De Boer, Murray, and Caplan seem to think so, and I’ve read all but Caplan’s books. “Is higher than an eighth-grade reading level for the median person an attainable result at all?” should be the first question, and the second question would be “how much would it cost, and is that really the best use of our resources?”. I suspect that people are unwilling to even ask those questions. But again, I haven’t dove deep enough into it yet.