chapotraphouse

Before I even read this article I just want to say that I read hundreds of pages of bleak house, but couldn’t finish it because I just thought it was really boring.

Edit: okay I’m reading the article now. I always liked the beginning of bleak house though. It’s depressing that so few people seemingly have the ability to enjoy it.

Spoiler alert, but I remember that there’s a character in this novel who proves he can read by writing a single word on a chalkboard, and then later in the novel he just randomly explodes, I think.

I'll be honest, I only read this article to make sure I was literate. Can report, I am one of the smarty pants who can read Bleak House. this system of measuring literacy by levels 1-5 seems most common in Britain, and the test was done on Americans at two Kansas universities. The Dicken's passages seem to contain some culturally specific clues, though would the results be an different if they used Melville instead of Dickens? Maybe not.

Level 5 Literacy is basically the same, but across multiple sources at once while being critical: "Adults can search for, and integrate, information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Adults understand subtle, rhetorical cues and can make high-level inferences or use specialised background knowledge."

I expect this competency to be demonstrated by a graduate with a Bachelor degree, this sort of literacy is equally important in STEM. I think my friends when I studied Engineering could do it, but I was friends with strivers, and I met a lot of idiots in random assigned group projects, and they graduated in the same class as me.

I feel like I've encountered this phenomenon enough times to discern a pattern but not enough to figure out what's going on. The phenomenon is this: some medium blogger gets linked on here writing a fairly cohesive critique of Americans and I click on some of their other posts to discover their politics are a little off.

In this case I can't tell you if Iron Council is tendentious and bad but I'm really wondering where the hell this brainwave is coming from:

What constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people. My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art. We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.

In conclusion, yes I think literacy and reading comprehension are in crisis but on the other hand the author of this blog is weirdo.

Not shocking for a country where education isn't exactly prioritized.

It was really muddy

This explains a lot of the behavior of the lost libs that stumble in here like the guy yesterday demanding exhaustive sources and when provided with such simply said "I ain't reading all that".

More than 80% of Americans are functionally illiterate

Honestly, doing any amount of reading will put you a solid 50% ahead of literally anyone in any industry. I am in computers and I genuinely think that most computer science majors didn’t do any of the reading whatsoever. It’s becoming abundantly more clear as I’m going back for my masters that of my class of say 20 maybe seven actually read part of our required reading.

Dickens feels like an odd choice to display functional illiteracy, given that while it's technically written in modern English it's also marred with the cultural baggage of Victorian England; "wonderful," for example, is meant in this passage to mean that it produces awe or astonishment, but that's not how the word is used by anyone in modern times. The dinosaur portion is part of a larger metaphor using Noah's Ark which is only really going to pop to someone with decent familiarity with Christian mythology, and worded in a way that still takes someone literate a moment to digest and understand it.

I'm not entirely sure the form of the study helps either; most of the responses seem like they threw a passage at an undergrad and immediately demanded their interpretation in a clinical (read: atypical and somewhat uncomfortable compared to normal reading) setting. How many of the readers would have re-parsed the passage given another moment or two and understood it? Furthermore, the opening passage isn't even particularly important to the plot, and it seems like the vast majority of people reading understood at the very least that "it was a shitty morning in London" is the point here. Is that functional illiteracy, or simply skimming purple prose that isn't all the relevant to the story?

This example feels only a little removed from laughing at undergrads for not understanding why Homer spent so goddamn long in the Iliad charting random Greek soldiers' entire family trees only to kill them off a breath afterwards, and calling them illiterate for not grasping cultural context from literal antiquity.

Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.

This is the more troubling bit than not recognizing archaic English (I get why the one kid assumed Michaelmas was a name). Not being able to recognize that one has presented a contradictory argument speaks to a severe deficit in reasoning. I’m not sure if that’s a failure of education or a reflection of a society that presents introspection and self-criticism as weakness.

However, I do want to push back a little on this:

In the end, the lesson is clear: if we teachers in the university ignore our students’ actual reading levels, we run the risk of passing out diplomas to students who have not mastered reading complex texts and who, as a result, might find that their literacy skills prevent them from achieving their professional goals and personal dreams.

This begs the question, what are the professional goals that are stymied by not being able to deconstruct Dickensian prose? Is this something that major publishing houses care about when hiring people? If these kids are able to graduate and then go on to have successful careers despite being below what’s considered “standard,” is it possible that the standard is simply irrelevant to “real world” demands? That these kids are simply prioritizing what their “professional goals” demand rather than being incompetent?