Neither could read the word “magnetic,” and they had no phonetic tools to help them out. They looked at me and, at first, I didn’t understand the problem. Finally, I realized they expected me to read it to them, so I did.

I’m sure I had read _Tom Swift and His Magnetic Silencer_ by their age, I had read just about all of them by fourth grade. These kids have probably logged a lot of time on the video games, not so much on the books.

I don’t think we need more kids in college, I think we need a higher percentage of those who go making it to graduation.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by kriley19: Joanne Jacobs: Send more kids to college http://bit.ly/35Vg6f Full http://bit.ly/1vdPvB...

“Released in serial format once a month or once a week, the novels were cheap and accessible—analogous to today’s best serial TV shows. Victorians of all classes read them aloud in groups and passed the pages from hand to hand. ”

(http://shass.mit.edu/research/literature_hyperstudio)

The dissenters in that decision stated that the courts were not the solution to every problem which plagues society, and that children in the US illegally were free to obtain an education from their nation of citizenship.

That being said, the United States will fall into decline over the next 10-30 years due to the incessant dumbing down of our population (A population which cannot think for themselves is quite easy to control).

Something to think about folks…

the classics in the slums

“Most of the population was highly literate. They read in detail as a normal part of daily life,…”

How do you know that that is true? Because Postman says so? If you can reference statistical data then I’m ready to acquiece to your point.

The complexity of the language was richer in past generations, but were “most” people really accessing it? Or was it the same 30% or so that now consumes literature and more complex non-fiction?

One error in how we think about modern literacy is projecting the expectation of the truely literate class of past generations onto the working classes of our modern world.

Well, although I feel old as the hills and my students like to tell me I came from a cave, I have to admit I was not around to act as a first hand witness

I am stealing here from Neil Postman, but one of the best ways to understand the literacy of a previous era is to read through the speeches that were delivered to and actually worked on regular people. Wildly popular literature from past eras points in the same direction. Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death gives plenty of examples.

That the printed page could be seen as a competitor rather than a complement to ordinary life would have stunned such people, and their language, attention span, and background knowledge on a variety of topics would be stunning to us today.

If you are saying that 70% of the people were not academic in those eras, you are certainly accurate. Most of the population was highly literate. They read in detail as a normal part of daily life, in much the same sense as most watched TV over the past decades and most young people are now fluent at texting. Print was the dominant mass medium, and, in order to take part in the culture, people read, they read quite a lot, and they read well, certainly as compared to today. Reading did not compete with real life, it WAS real life. However, that does not mean that they were academic.

This changed gradually at first, perhaps with photography, certainly with increasingly sophisticated movies, and then, dramatically, as TVs came into the home.

Almost every demand of a history, math, science, or English class is a greater stretch for the mind raised on screen media than it is for the mind raised on print — even if that print was not at all academic.