With 94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

With 94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

Our educational system has made Americans only capable of flipping burgers, that's why.

The software engineers who built IBM, MS and Oracle were burger flippers?

You mean those engineers who are pretty much all gray haired and retired now? He's talking about today's work force, stupid, not the one from the 1970s.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

So WHY ARE WE BRINGING IN MORE GUEST WORKERS WHEN AMERICANS CANT GET TRAINED AND HIRED FOR THESE JOBS INSTEAD?

Can they?

From what I've observed Americans are pretty ******* stupid compared to our other first world counterparts.

 

[NLT]

94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

Because a majority of those american are getting an obama check not to work

 

[Asclepias]

94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

Because a majority of those american are getting an obama check not to work

I thought welfare was created back in the Great Depression.

 

[NLT]

94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

Because a majority of those american are getting an obama check not to work

I thought welfare was created back in the Great Depression.

Yea but obama has turbo charged it

 

[rightwinger]

With 94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

Our educational system has made Americans only capable of flipping burgers, that's why.

The software engineers who built IBM, MS and Oracle were burger flippers?

You mean those engineers who are pretty much all gray haired and retired now? He's talking about today's work force, stupid, not the one from the 1970s.

Facebook, Google, Amazon

 

[MisterBeale]

Go ahead and hand a second grade class the book, "The Wizard of Oz" and see how many can read it.


Better yet, hand fifth grade class the book, "The Last of the Mohicans" and see how many of them can tackle it.


Both of those books was written for those age groups respectively. Today's kids can't hack those books.

In second grade they are now reading "Cat in the Hat," and "Curious George," and that's just the kids that are keeping up.

Getting fifth graders to read Harry Potter is easy, it's a snap. The vocabulary and sentence structure is sophomoric compared to "The Last of the Mohicans". I doubt the same class could handle such a book in this day and age.

I seriously doubt you have ever even read any of Gatto's work because it is a threat to your very world view.

Where did you get your expertise on reading levels?

The Lexile reading level for Last of the Mohicans is 1350 which is 11th to 12th grade.

The Last of the Mohicans - Lexile® Find a Book | The Lexile® Framework for Reading

Why don't you just stick to whatever you are good at doing and leave education to the professionals?

Naturally "professionals," will claim that, they need to justify their existence, don't they?


"Public schooling hasn't even improved literacy, Gatto demonstrates -- it's considerably eroded it.

By 1840" (more than a decade before the opening of the first tax-funded government schools on the modern model, in Massachusetts) "the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent. ... In Connecticut only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: 'Last of the Mohicans,' published in 1818, sold so well a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, politics, geography, astute analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?

"By 1940 the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites. 80 percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the 20th century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled," despite the fact that "we spend three or four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago."
Could They Really Have Done It On Purpose?, by Vin Suprynowicz

Your claims of literacy in 1840 sound like bullshit. I know a large percentage of civil war soldiers could not read. Same in WWI

They aren't my claims skipper.

Sorry if you don't believe reality.

Think about it. No radio. No TV. No Internet. What else was there for the idle mind to do?

In the world's first truly free society, literacy was essential. Men did not go to war and get impassioned to fight w/o knowing why they were fighting. They didn't get impassioned about issues with out reading about them. Everyone knew how to read. From the smallest child, to the oldest man, to the bum on the street.

I know it is hard for you to conceive of in this age of passive media consumption, but it was an essential survival skill.


The only people that were kept from this skill were servants, slaves and poor ultra orthodox religious cult type back water women and girls.


It's why the United States went from a colonial possession to a world power in little under 100 years. Never in the history of the world has that ever happened.


This is why the elites decided to inflict forced schooling on us. In the beginning, they even replaced the way we taught our children how to read to PURPOSELY reduce literacy rates. This type of reading is still taught today in a lot of schools, it's called the "Whole Language Method." It made controlling and pacifying the masses easier.

This forced schooling disadvantaged the black and minority communities in the harshest and most heinous way, because the minority communities didn't have family traditions of teaching their young how to read using the phonics method.They were stuck with the "see and say" wrote memorization of the "Whole Language Method." , we all know this style of learning to read.

Remember when you entered kindergarten and first grade and got your first introduction to the "Dick and Jane" books? That type of reading was about memorizing words, not learning the sounds of letters and sounding words out.

Early Reading Methods - Phonics vs. Whole Language | Teach Reading Early

National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy

Percentage of persons 14 years old and over who were illiterate (unable to read or write in any language), by race and nativity: 1870 to 1979

Year Total White Black and other
Total Native Foreign-born
1870 20.0 11.5 – – 79.9
1880 17.0 9.4 8.7 12.0 70.0
1890 13.3 7.7 6.2 13.1 56.8
1900 10.7 6.2 4.6 12.9 44.5
1910 7.7 5.0 3.0 12.7 30.5
1920 6.0 4.0 2.0 13.1 23.0
1930 4.3 3.0 1.6 10.8 16.4
1940 2.9 2.0 1.1 9.0 11.5
1947 2.7 1.8 – – 11.0
1950 3.2 – – – –
1952 2.5 1.8 – – 10.2
1959 2.2 1.6 – – 7.5
1969 1.0 0.7 – – 3.6 *
1979 0.6 0.4 – – 1.6 *


Illiteracy drops from 20% in 1870 to .6% in 1979

I don't know? Perhaps literacy went down after the founding, or as settlers moved out west they lost literacy, or the NAAL isn't an unbiased source. I couldn't tell ya.


Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?
http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/01/were-colonial-americans-more-literate-than-americans-today/
"Today’s equivalent is 60 million copies. On Wikipedia’s list of bestselling books, all books that have sold that many or more copies have done so over a much longer time. The shortest time is 8 years, for The Da Vinci Code; several others, such as Heidi, were published in the 19th century.


Another surprise arrives upon opening Common Sense: the sophistication of the writing and reasoning. Here are a few sentences:


As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his Own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.


The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is The Author.


Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries By a Government, which we might expect in a country Without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.


Each sentence is longer than a whole soundbite of today.


Furthermore, in 1776 literacy was not universal. Therefore, many colonial Americans had the book read to them. The sales figure of 500,000 copies thus underestimates the number of people who attended to its message.


And what a message! Can you imagine a book with such a complex style today selling 60 million copies in one year? To ask the question is to answer it. To make the comparison concrete, here are data from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which measures the English literacy of adults across the United States. Prose literacy, defined in the study as the ability to “search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts,” is categorized into four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. Proficient, the highest level, is defined as “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences.” As an example of this level of performance, they cite comparing the viewpoints in two texts. This level seems to be roughly the level required to read Common Sense.


In the extensive NAAL survey, only 13% of adults attained this level. Thus, the proportion of Americans today who are able to understand Common Sense (13%) is smaller than the proportion that bought Common Sense in 1776 (20%). Are we a nation in decline?"


You tell me why the average citizen at the time of founding was deserving of a constitutional republic and we are deserving of a bureaucratic police state. Most folks seem happy to reject good 'ol Tom Pain and opt for a tyrannical nanny state, don't they?

 

[Indeependent]

With 94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

Our educational system has made Americans only capable of flipping burgers, that's why.

The software engineers who built IBM, MS and Oracle were burger flippers?

You mean those engineers who are pretty much all gray haired and retired now? He's talking about today's work force, stupid, not the one from the 1970s.

Sure, we all know that EVERY engineer working for MS was 60 years old post 9/11.
How ******* stupid are you?

 

[Indeependent]

So WHY ARE WE BRINGING IN MORE GUEST WORKERS WHEN AMERICANS CANT GET TRAINED AND HIRED FOR THESE JOBS INSTEAD?

Can they?

From what I've observed Americans are pretty ******* stupid compared to our other first world counterparts.

Wow! You must know TONS of people.

 

[JakeStarkey]

Compared to Europeans with some higher education, Americans look pretty weak.

 

[OldLady]

Where did you get your expertise on reading levels?

The Lexile reading level for Last of the Mohicans is 1350 which is 11th to 12th grade.

The Last of the Mohicans - Lexile® Find a Book | The Lexile® Framework for Reading

Why don't you just stick to whatever you are good at doing and leave education to the professionals?

Naturally "professionals," will claim that, they need to justify their existence, don't they?


"Public schooling hasn't even improved literacy, Gatto demonstrates -- it's considerably eroded it.

By 1840" (more than a decade before the opening of the first tax-funded government schools on the modern model, in Massachusetts) "the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent. ... In Connecticut only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: 'Last of the Mohicans,' published in 1818, sold so well a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, politics, geography, astute analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?

"By 1940 the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites. 80 percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the 20th century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled," despite the fact that "we spend three or four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago."
Could They Really Have Done It On Purpose?, by Vin Suprynowicz

Your claims of literacy in 1840 sound like bullshit. I know a large percentage of civil war soldiers could not read. Same in WWI

They aren't my claims skipper.

Sorry if you don't believe reality.

Think about it. No radio. No TV. No Internet. What else was there for the idle mind to do?

In the world's first truly free society, literacy was essential. Men did not go to war and get impassioned to fight w/o knowing why they were fighting. They didn't get impassioned about issues with out reading about them. Everyone knew how to read. From the smallest child, to the oldest man, to the bum on the street.

I know it is hard for you to conceive of in this age of passive media consumption, but it was an essential survival skill.


The only people that were kept from this skill were servants, slaves and poor ultra orthodox religious cult type back water women and girls.


It's why the United States went from a colonial possession to a world power in little under 100 years. Never in the history of the world has that ever happened.


This is why the elites decided to inflict forced schooling on us. In the beginning, they even replaced the way we taught our children how to read to PURPOSELY reduce literacy rates. This type of reading is still taught today in a lot of schools, it's called the "Whole Language Method." It made controlling and pacifying the masses easier.

This forced schooling disadvantaged the black and minority communities in the harshest and most heinous way, because the minority communities didn't have family traditions of teaching their young how to read using the phonics method.They were stuck with the "see and say" wrote memorization of the "Whole Language Method." , we all know this style of learning to read.

Remember when you entered kindergarten and first grade and got your first introduction to the "Dick and Jane" books? That type of reading was about memorizing words, not learning the sounds of letters and sounding words out.

Early Reading Methods - Phonics vs. Whole Language | Teach Reading Early

National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy

Percentage of persons 14 years old and over who were illiterate (unable to read or write in any language), by race and nativity: 1870 to 1979

Year Total White Black and other
Total Native Foreign-born
1870 20.0 11.5 – – 79.9
1880 17.0 9.4 8.7 12.0 70.0
1890 13.3 7.7 6.2 13.1 56.8
1900 10.7 6.2 4.6 12.9 44.5
1910 7.7 5.0 3.0 12.7 30.5
1920 6.0 4.0 2.0 13.1 23.0
1930 4.3 3.0 1.6 10.8 16.4
1940 2.9 2.0 1.1 9.0 11.5
1947 2.7 1.8 – – 11.0
1950 3.2 – – – –
1952 2.5 1.8 – – 10.2
1959 2.2 1.6 – – 7.5
1969 1.0 0.7 – – 3.6 *
1979 0.6 0.4 – – 1.6 *


Illiteracy drops from 20% in 1870 to .6% in 1979

I don't know? Perhaps literacy went down after the founding, or as settlers moved out west they lost literacy, or the NAAL isn't an unbiased source. I couldn't tell ya.


Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?
http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/01/were-colonial-americans-more-literate-than-americans-today/
"Today’s equivalent is 60 million copies. On Wikipedia’s list of bestselling books, all books that have sold that many or more copies have done so over a much longer time. The shortest time is 8 years, for The Da Vinci Code; several others, such as Heidi, were published in the 19th century.


Another surprise arrives upon opening Common Sense: the sophistication of the writing and reasoning. Here are a few sentences:


As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his Own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.


The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is The Author.


Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries By a Government, which we might expect in a country Without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.


Each sentence is longer than a whole soundbite of today.


Furthermore, in 1776 literacy was not universal. Therefore, many colonial Americans had the book read to them. The sales figure of 500,000 copies thus underestimates the number of people who attended to its message.


And what a message! Can you imagine a book with such a complex style today selling 60 million copies in one year? To ask the question is to answer it. To make the comparison concrete, here are data from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which measures the English literacy of adults across the United States. Prose literacy, defined in the study as the ability to “search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts,” is categorized into four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. Proficient, the highest level, is defined as “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences.” As an example of this level of performance, they cite comparing the viewpoints in two texts. This level seems to be roughly the level required to read Common Sense.


In the extensive NAAL survey, only 13% of adults attained this level. Thus, the proportion of Americans today who are able to understand Common Sense (13%) is smaller than the proportion that bought Common Sense in 1776 (20%). Are we a nation in decline?"


You tell me why the average citizen at the time of founding was deserving of a constitutional republic and we are deserving of a bureaucratic police state. Most folks seem happy to reject good 'ol Tom Pain and opt for a tyrannical nanny state, don't they?

You don't write like good 'ol Tom Pain (sic) and neither does anyone else. Nor does anyone use Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing style. It is not our preferred style of writing anymore. If you grew up reading it in 1760, 1830, sure it got familiar to you. It doesn't mean we're stupid that we don't use long, convoluted sentences and flowery language anymore. If you need to ask "Are we a nation in decline," look around you and compare it to the daily life Thomas Paine had. He didn't even have indoor plumbing and no one knew how to save a life from typhoid fever or what caused it. We are doing okay. It is alright that things change.

 

[JimBowie1958]

You don't write like good 'ol Tom Pain (sic) and neither does anyone else. Nor does anyone use Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing style. It is not our preferred style of writing anymore. If you grew up reading it in 1760, 1830, sure it got familiar to you. It doesn't mean we're stupid that we don't use long, convoluted sentences and flowery language anymore. If you need to ask "Are we a nation in decline," look around you and compare it to the daily life Thomas Paine had. He didn't even have indoor plumbing and no one knew how to save a life from typhoid fever or what caused it. We are doing okay. It is alright that things change.

Prior to the age of radio, most Americans got their entertainment and information from reading. That is all they had. People over a lifetime developed a lot of skills along with literacy; the ability to focus on a task for long periods of time, linear logic and also the ability to comprehend complex concepts that few today seem to be able to handle. For example Transubstantiation and the Trinity were often debated among the well educated and most college graduates knew ancient Greek and Latin as well.

So almost by definition, these people were 'more literate' than we are today because we get our information and entertainment from so many other sources and there is less need of using our literary skills.

 

[Unkotare]

.....


Real reform would require teachers to think, challenge themselves and their students, and that would be difficult. It would require risks and creativity, and teachers would have to earn what they are paid. .....

And you think teachers don't do all that already?

Nope. They go to University, learn one way to teach, go to teacher education training days, get the curriculum, and force feed it to all students the same.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

 

[Asclepias]

94 million Americans Out of the Work Force, Why Do We Have 25 Million Foreign Guest Workers?

Because a majority of those american are getting an obama check not to work

I thought welfare was created back in the Great Depression.

Yea but obama has turbo charged it

How so? Are you getting more foodstamps or more money?

 

[Indeependent]

Compared to Europeans with some higher education, Americans look pretty weak.

Perhaps, but Europeans aren't hired by Tech companies either; only Indians.

 

[MisterBeale]

.....


Real reform would require teachers to think, challenge themselves and their students, and that would be difficult. It would require risks and creativity, and teachers would have to earn what they are paid. .....

And you think teachers don't do all that already?

Nope. They go to University, learn one way to teach, go to teacher education training days, get the curriculum, and force feed it to all students the same.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

 

[Unkotare]

....


Obviously you didn't read or scan the article. I didn't plagiarize anything. It was a VERY LONG article. I only quoted relevant parts in a different font. .....

"A different font" isn't how quotations are cited, plagiarist.

There are no hard fast dogmatic rules on the internet. I'll do it however I please......

You mean you'll plagiarize as you please, criminal.

 

[Unkotare]

.....


Real reform would require teachers to think, challenge themselves and their students, and that would be difficult. It would require risks and creativity, and teachers would have to earn what they are paid. .....

And you think teachers don't do all that already?

Nope. They go to University, learn one way to teach, go to teacher education training days, get the curriculum, and force feed it to all students the same.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Is that all you're doing? Why not say so earlier?

 

[MisterBeale]

Naturally "professionals," will claim that, they need to justify their existence, don't they?


"Public schooling hasn't even improved literacy, Gatto demonstrates -- it's considerably eroded it.

By 1840" (more than a decade before the opening of the first tax-funded government schools on the modern model, in Massachusetts) "the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent. ... In Connecticut only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: 'Last of the Mohicans,' published in 1818, sold so well a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, politics, geography, astute analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?

"By 1940 the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites. 80 percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the 20th century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled," despite the fact that "we spend three or four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago."
Could They Really Have Done It On Purpose?, by Vin Suprynowicz

Your claims of literacy in 1840 sound like bullshit. I know a large percentage of civil war soldiers could not read. Same in WWI

They aren't my claims skipper.

Sorry if you don't believe reality.

Think about it. No radio. No TV. No Internet. What else was there for the idle mind to do?

In the world's first truly free society, literacy was essential. Men did not go to war and get impassioned to fight w/o knowing why they were fighting. They didn't get impassioned about issues with out reading about them. Everyone knew how to read. From the smallest child, to the oldest man, to the bum on the street.

I know it is hard for you to conceive of in this age of passive media consumption, but it was an essential survival skill.


The only people that were kept from this skill were servants, slaves and poor ultra orthodox religious cult type back water women and girls.


It's why the United States went from a colonial possession to a world power in little under 100 years. Never in the history of the world has that ever happened.


This is why the elites decided to inflict forced schooling on us. In the beginning, they even replaced the way we taught our children how to read to PURPOSELY reduce literacy rates. This type of reading is still taught today in a lot of schools, it's called the "Whole Language Method." It made controlling and pacifying the masses easier.

This forced schooling disadvantaged the black and minority communities in the harshest and most heinous way, because the minority communities didn't have family traditions of teaching their young how to read using the phonics method.They were stuck with the "see and say" wrote memorization of the "Whole Language Method." , we all know this style of learning to read.

Remember when you entered kindergarten and first grade and got your first introduction to the "Dick and Jane" books? That type of reading was about memorizing words, not learning the sounds of letters and sounding words out.

Early Reading Methods - Phonics vs. Whole Language | Teach Reading Early

National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy

Percentage of persons 14 years old and over who were illiterate (unable to read or write in any language), by race and nativity: 1870 to 1979

Year Total White Black and other
Total Native Foreign-born
1870 20.0 11.5 – – 79.9
1880 17.0 9.4 8.7 12.0 70.0
1890 13.3 7.7 6.2 13.1 56.8
1900 10.7 6.2 4.6 12.9 44.5
1910 7.7 5.0 3.0 12.7 30.5
1920 6.0 4.0 2.0 13.1 23.0
1930 4.3 3.0 1.6 10.8 16.4
1940 2.9 2.0 1.1 9.0 11.5
1947 2.7 1.8 – – 11.0
1950 3.2 – – – –
1952 2.5 1.8 – – 10.2
1959 2.2 1.6 – – 7.5
1969 1.0 0.7 – – 3.6 *
1979 0.6 0.4 – – 1.6 *


Illiteracy drops from 20% in 1870 to .6% in 1979

I don't know? Perhaps literacy went down after the founding, or as settlers moved out west they lost literacy, or the NAAL isn't an unbiased source. I couldn't tell ya.


Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?
http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/01/were-colonial-americans-more-literate-than-americans-today/
"Today’s equivalent is 60 million copies. On Wikipedia’s list of bestselling books, all books that have sold that many or more copies have done so over a much longer time. The shortest time is 8 years, for The Da Vinci Code; several others, such as Heidi, were published in the 19th century.


Another surprise arrives upon opening Common Sense: the sophistication of the writing and reasoning. Here are a few sentences:


As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his Own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.


The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is The Author.


Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries By a Government, which we might expect in a country Without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.


Each sentence is longer than a whole soundbite of today.


Furthermore, in 1776 literacy was not universal. Therefore, many colonial Americans had the book read to them. The sales figure of 500,000 copies thus underestimates the number of people who attended to its message.


And what a message! Can you imagine a book with such a complex style today selling 60 million copies in one year? To ask the question is to answer it. To make the comparison concrete, here are data from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which measures the English literacy of adults across the United States. Prose literacy, defined in the study as the ability to “search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts,” is categorized into four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. Proficient, the highest level, is defined as “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences.” As an example of this level of performance, they cite comparing the viewpoints in two texts. This level seems to be roughly the level required to read Common Sense.


In the extensive NAAL survey, only 13% of adults attained this level. Thus, the proportion of Americans today who are able to understand Common Sense (13%) is smaller than the proportion that bought Common Sense in 1776 (20%). Are we a nation in decline?"


You tell me why the average citizen at the time of founding was deserving of a constitutional republic and we are deserving of a bureaucratic police state. Most folks seem happy to reject good 'ol Tom Pain and opt for a tyrannical nanny state, don't they?

You don't write like good 'ol Tom Pain (sic) and neither does anyone else. Nor does anyone use Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing style. It is not our preferred style of writing anymore. If you grew up reading it in 1760, 1830, sure it got familiar to you. It doesn't mean we're stupid that we don't use long, convoluted sentences and flowery language anymore. If you need to ask "Are we a nation in decline," look around you and compare it to the daily life Thomas Paine had. He didn't even have indoor plumbing and no one knew how to save a life from typhoid fever or what caused it. We are doing okay. It is alright that things change.

Here I write informally, conversationally.

Naturally tone and diction evolve over the centuries, this doesn't mean complex ideas and communication need to whither as well.

I write to the educational level of a ninth grader on the forum here to reach a broader audience. To do otherwise I have found is to lose the interest of readers. In fact, I already find my posts are too lengthy and verbose for most, don't you?

Even still, I find the concepts and ideas I present are far too advanced for about 25-30% for the forum membership to grasp. Others are so entrenched in their world view, or have cognitive dissonance, it would be too painful to read the sources presented and be open to thinking of alternate paradigms which their universe operates on.

If conflicts with government indoctrination and with MSM repeated troupes, it's easier to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm "a conspiracy theorist," I'm off my meds., etc. Pick your ad hominem. Attacking the messenger is far easier than engaging in critical thinking. That is how dumb our society has become.



Livestock were shepherded much differently a millennium ago than they are today as well.

VS. Today.

This doesn't mean that modern humans produced in the modern society for their owners are of any superior quality. The farm product we consume are inferior to their forebears, and so are we.


Your logic quickly breaks down. Modern living conditions does not necessarily mean the whole of humanity knows what the hell is going on. What lessons did you take away from "1984," "Animal Farm," and "A Brave New World?"


If this post was too hard on you, just go take a dose of your Soma. . . .

 

[Unkotare]

Compared to Europeans with some higher education, Americans look pretty weak.

Perhaps, but Europeans aren't hired by Tech companies either; only Indians.

Less than half of H-1B visa holders are Indian. Get over your obsession.