April 16, 2006

The real problem : illiteracy

When it gets down to it, the problem in current amerika is literacy. There are too many people that wouldn't know a book from a shoe and do not seem to understand the written word. The spoken word makes perfect sense, but the theories and practices that we use are all built on the basis of picking up depth of understanding from the background reading materials. And if you can't read, you just can't grasp the arguments for those concepts. So as long as they were explained in a manner that can be grasped, the concepts seem to make sense, but often are grossly misapplied. Way too often by people who we expect should know better, but maybe don't know because they will not admit they can't read.

And now we move to Alice speak, where the definitions of words are exactly as i means them to be. People can use any word in any context, and the interpreter has to be aware of the context to connect the thought. But when enough people are illiterate, who can't read well enough to evaluate what they are reading, then Houston, we have a major problem. I wonder what the true literacy level is - and how we can unbiasedly test for it!

The problem is more complicated by the fact that the schools pretend that people have been taught to read and people pretend that they can read, but they 'prefer not to'. Ah, Melville's Bartlebey comes back to haunt yet again. Fact is that reading is so fundamental to being, that people that can think enough to manipulate the written word can pull the wool over the eyes of most of the common masses. The readers here can use this for whatever it is worth, but to grasp this means you are not part of the problem. In chemistry, that either makes you part of the solution, or part of the precipitate (we the offended who live in fear might just pretend to be precipitate, because being solution draws all sorts of unwarrented attention).

The net effect is that we will not only end up dividing this society into tribal factions (initially formed for self-protection), but also we will lose a great deal of the practical knowledge that we take for granted is readily available on demand. It will not be local, unless now we work to make it be local. When communications go down and the ability to travel is contained by the high costs of fuel, then the immediate level of accomplishment will be simple survival. But after it all shakes howdt, then many enclaves of ability will co-exist independently and these galt's gulches should be enabled to work to accomplish - but few of them will have all the bases covered.

Take the time to verify that the people you love can read, and if they can't, help them to learn. It may be embarrassing to them to admit that they cannot read, but it is worth the effort to phonetically work with them to grasp the letter sounds and make the words - a sharp person that doesn't read will discover the world they were missing, and hopefully we can restart thinking and debating ideas as a normal course of action again.

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