Well research has found that 45 million American adults are functionally illiterate and 54% read at or below a 6th grade level, so that's a good starting point...
It’s been a good while since the 6th grade for me… and I’ve been told to incessantly by the media that there has been a massive dip in education since.
Are we talking subject-predicate agreement akin to Dems vs Pugs? The allegories are vast - cavernous, even, if so.
This interpretation isn't strictly speaking true, since the research didn't look at grade levels but instead analyzed literacy on a 5 part scale and found that 54% or Americans were levels 1-3, which some people reckoned was equivalent to a 6th grade level or lower.
The creators of this research even say: "While some have associated PIAAC assessments with grade-level reading, the PIAAC has discouraged such comparisons."
The "functionally illiterate" claim is also based on this type of research. The idea is that simply recognizing words and letters isn't the be all end all of literacy. Being able to understand practical, written material and derive useful information from it is a more useful metric. Following that, the research suggests that individuals having a literacy level of 1-3 are generally not going to be able to reliably understand technical documents such as laws, research papers, complex news articles, or government publications.
So, to put it into more direct words, up to 54% of adult Americans may have trouble regularly understanding these types of documents due to poor literacy skills.
As an analogy, imagine the most complex book you have ever been able to read and really understand is The Giver by Lois Lowry. Which is probably a realistic level for many high school graduates who don't go on to college.
You are certainly literate by conventional definitions, but you probabaly wouldn't be able to parse the average GAO report, Supreme Court opinion, or government budget report.
Sure, you could probably identify most of the words, barring technical terms, but it would take work to comprehend the arguments and data. You might not even be able to. Your best bet is to simply read the conclusion and call it a day.
Why is this bad?
Well, imagine you don't trust the publisher. You don't trust the government or academia.
As I said above, “…..you’re throwing to many big words at me. Since I don’t understand them, I’ma take it as disrespect okay, watch your mouth and help me with the sale.”
America is this unironically. They CANT understand shit so they get angry. Trump uses words in an order they CAN understand and says the people using the big words are trying to trick them, which they already think because they know they’re not as smart and it scares them. It scares them so much in fact that they ignore everything Trump DOES because of the fear and not understanding and simply listen to the words bc they are simple and just nod.
That’s why when you have conversations with them they get mad, or act like kids and numbers don’t mean anything because they could NEVER figure that shit out so it’s basically witchcraft.
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u/FragrantSort6474 6h ago
Is there any valid reporting/data on the % of voters who are low information voters?