It cant add either.
My college-educated cousin went to jail for child support problems in a tussle with his ex-wife. He told me he was amazed that almost everyone in the jail was unable to read. This was in Iowa, the state with the highest literacy of all the 50 states! He said he tried to teach some of them as much as he could while there.
What America needs is a "Great Leap to the Past" which involves more self-reliance, less government intervention, lots of pain and suffering, and in the end makes this country more like it was 100 years ago.
Getting rid of government schools would be a good start.
50,000,000 illiterate adults in America.
Almost exclusively brought to you by the teachers’ unions, and the apathetic, crappy teachers the unions protect.
(Please don’t rant, I qualified the teachers the comment is referring to.)
“Okay, folks, place your bets. Was it clueless incompetence on a cosmic scale? Or, was it John Deweys collectivist wet dream turned Clockwork Orange? “
That’s easy. It’s Dewey’s fault.
He was one of the prime movers and shakers that wanted to move to universal gov’t schooling — not to improve the educational level of people in the country, but to indoctrinate children in how to be good citizens of gov’t. Back then the intelligentsia wanted a willing workforce to take factory jobs and make the robber barons rich and create more and more gov’t control over people’s lives. He visited the highly regimented Prussian school system and was in love with the prospect of bringing it to America. Two generations later his dream (our nightmare) has been realized.
It was his idea that this type of school system would eventually bring about ‘Social Utopia’.
The problem with gov’t schools is just that — they are gov’t schools. The current system does not line up with the ideals of a free country and can’t be fixed, it can only be replaced with something better.
“It is absurdly easy to teach a child to read with [phonics]. Most of the children in America could be taught to read in a few weeks or months at the age of five.”
It took me an average of 8 weeks for my kids to be able to read, all before age 4. But yes, you have to use phonics, and nothing else. In my case, I didn’t even use a program, I just wrote letters on a marker board and made the kids remember the sounds...then put the sounds together into words.
It is fast, easy, and practically free. The only reason 50,000,000 people cannot read is because we have people that simply don’t want them to read. That’s it.
They are too busy learning about Van Jones and social Indoctrination to learn about reading.
It was illegal to teach a slave to read because reading lead to knowledge and that lead to a desire for liberty.
That has not changed.
I can honestly say I have no memory of not being able to read. My parents figured out I could read when I was two and could read names on television without hearing them said.
The ability top read has nothing to do with intelligence. There are many assh0les with PhD’s who are educated and know a lot of wrong and useless garbage and theories and are just as stupid as the day they were born.
I was very fortunate to learn to read phonetically. It gave me the confidence to tackle works far beyond my ability at various times, for example, Milton’s Paradise Lost while a fourth grader and the best short stories of the old Saturday Evening Post.
So did I go to a fancy new school? No. Three grades in one room, a big coal stove in the back and no indoor plumbing.
But I had a teacher that knew what she doing and how to do it.
This was the plan all along...
“I believe that..education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform”
“I believe that...it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective instrument of social progress and reform...”
“I believe that...every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.”
“I believe that...when society once recognizes the possibilities in this direction, and the obligations which these possibilities impose, it is impossible to conceive of the resources of time, attention, and MONEY which will be put at the disposal of the educator.”
All of the above are from “Education Today” by John Dewey published in 1940. They were all originally published in 1897 as his “Pedagogic Creed”. He was also a signer of the “Humanist Manifesto 1” in 1933.
“The conditions of work, education, devotion, and play should be humanized. Alienating forces should be modified or eradicated...” From the “Humanist Manifesto 2” in 1973.
If you cannot read then you cannot learn on your own. If you cannot learn on your own then you are able to by “modified”. For those of us that can read and learn on our own...they want to “eradicate”...kinda sounds like Mao.
“Prisons are full of people who can’t read.”
I don’t suppose any of the blame can be placed on the people who are in prison, or on their families, broken families, pop culture that glorifies criminals, thugs and racial hatred. We will never make all schools great schools, but all schools would be exponentially better if parents would accept the responsibility of educating their children. Parents put their kids in school when they are six or younger, and that’s the end of their responsibility.
Even those who CAN read are pretty screwed up. Obozo is their poster boy.
“(…) the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.” — P.B. Medawar
The ultimate portable skill now missing from a large segment of our population is the capability of CRITICAL THOUGHT! It goes a long way toward explaining our current mess (the violation of the laws of economics) and almost certainly explains Obama.
So many can’t read...sounds like a great opportunity to have a commercial “Look for the Union Label” Since they were educated in union run government schools.
Uh, uh duh besides the 50,000,000 that can’t read we have a president who can’t read without a Teleprompter.
The Wisconsin teachers UNION reassure us that they are worth every cent of salary and outrageous benefits they can get!
It's not their fault!
< /sarc >
One quibble. Lots of people can’t learn to read using the phonics method. My wife learned to read by sight. My younger soon also. He doesn’t pick up information by ear. Why he can’t sing a lick. So he was in the 7th grade before he found a teacher who would LET him learn. He and my wife are good at “Wheel of Fortune”puzzles, because the whole word is in their heads.