2026-11-03 16:31 UTC
Replies (5)
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@LePoisson@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 16:45
As someone born and raised in the USA, like anything else in our country it’s a gradient and not black and white. There are plenty of people who speak eloquently and can engage with an expansive vocabulary. There also are, I’d wager almost certainly more, people who are borderline functionally illiterate for whom reading is a chore and who actively try to avoid it. Beyond that, the vast majority of folks can read and write but have a limited lexicon and have not attempted (and probably won’t) to grow their knowledge of English words. Most of us just get by and go along. I don’t know why I still am constantly surprised by just how stupid my compatriots are. Maybe I just want to believe in a better world. The sad reality is Americans, as a whole, are pretty goddamn dumb and ignorant and like it that way.
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@Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-03 16:51
How it was implemented is going to vary by state and even by school, but this system was used for years in every state. Anyone in their mid 30s and older doesn’t have that excuse, but kids being taught to read in the early 2000s and on were increasingly taught with three cueing alone and no sounding out words, because the theory was basically they just figure it out themselves. A lot of them did not figure it out themselves.
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@Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 16:58
Without an example of the text in question it’s a pretty unanswerable stereotype, but it’s possible. US literacy rate is an extremely complex topic, but it’s overall been trending up (until kids were kneecapped by COVID) and US advanced literacy tends to be heavily siloed towards jargon shaped by the prevailing regional industry with little mixing between areas. It’s a fascinating topic, really. Mild criticism for OP, as they’re kinda basing their complaint on the idea that MSV is exclusively what is taught in the US; this hasn’t been the case for decades. While they’re absolutely right that MSV as an exclusive method for learning to read is a horrible approach, it’s a very useful skill for inferring meaning from context, especially when combined with a foundation built on the standard vocab+definition+phonics framework.
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@ultranaut@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 16:59
Yes, if you are writing for the general public you need to keep it simple. A shocking number of people are barely literate, something like 1 in 5 adults in the US are illiterate.
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@djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-03 22:08
Oh yeah, Americans writ large read at a sixth grade level, even the ones with jobs. Hell, even the ones working in education! I’ve been joking a lot with my coworkers that we need to go back through all our public facing documents and rewrite them for a fourth grade level, just to make sure their meaning can be near universally understood. If you’re writing for Americans, you need to be writing for children.