MAP Forum

RoosterDance wrote: Tue Jul 01, 2025 3:17 pm ... my biggest worry is how much authority the government would exert over their lives, much like what Justincredible brought up. This is especially true of how they handle schooling. I am personally have trepidation about putting my hypothetical kids though public school as it is now, (Dare I rather say public indoctrination) but if I refuse to cooperate with that system the government would just throw me in prison, steal away my kids, and force them to do it anyway. Private schools are not any better. I'd lean much more towards homeschooling, but I'm not sure how much control the government exerts over that.

Western governments have way too much power over people's personal lives, and especially the children. It's probably why they're so invested in maintaining the "innocent child" narrative.

hugs wrote: Wed Jul 02, 2025 5:20 am To briefly illustrate this, I offer a not-so-fun fact from the book: literacy rates, at least in America, have decreased since the implementation of the public education system.

PorcelainLark wrote: Wed Jul 02, 2025 6:00 am That sounds unlikely. What source did he provide for that claim?

Intellectual Espionage

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to 1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn't worry anybody.

WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth-grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.

A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on — in other words, the number found illiterate — had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s — much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups — but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.

Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, 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 1826, sold so well that 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, manners, politics, geography, 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 that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth 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. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.

...

1 The discussion here is based on Regna Lee Wood's work as printed in Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch's Network News and Views (and reprinted many other places). Together with other statistical indictments, from the National Adult Literacy Survey, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a host of other credible sources, it provides chilling evidence of the disastrous turn in reading methodology. But in a larger sense the author urges every reader to trust personal judgment over "numerical" evidence, whatever the source. During the writer's 30-year classroom experience, the decline in student ability to comprehend difficult text was marked, while the ability to extract and parrot "information" in the form of "facts" was much less affected. This is a product of deliberate pedagogy, to what end is the burden of my essay.

The discussion here is based on Regna Lee Wood's work as printed in Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch's Network News and Views (and reprinted many other places). Together with other statistical indictments, from the National Adult Literacy Survey, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a host of other credible sources, it provides chilling evidence of the disastrous turn in reading methodology.

hugs wrote: Wed Jul 02, 2025 5:20 am I had a perfectly average childhood, and I absolutely hated it. Until very recently, I loathed the idea of bringing new life into the world, just for them to experience the horrors of childhood that seemingly all of us must endure. But when I considered the possibility of a community, a real community where people meet face-to-face, where people get to know one another deeply and personally, where people support each other like family, I realized that I'd love to be a father. I would love to raise a child of my own in a community where they could be loved and respected as a human being equal to all others. So I'm gonna try my best to build a community just like that. I think we all should.

PorcelainLark wrote: Wed Jul 02, 2025 8:30 am My three objections would be:

1. It isn't always clear when the author is talking about basic versus functional illiteracy. I'll admit people are reading less books, but given how much of the world is mediated through writing, I don't think basic literacy is in decline.

2. I'm skeptical that public education is the primary cause of the decline in functional literacy, considering other potential factors like first television and later the internet creating more distractions .

3. This isn't good citation on the part of the author:

The discussion here is based on Regna Lee Wood's work as printed in Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch's Network News and Views (and reprinted many other places). Together with other statistical indictments, from the National Adult Literacy Survey, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a host of other credible sources, it provides chilling evidence of the disastrous turn in reading methodology.

RoosterDance wrote: Wed Jul 02, 2025 12:09 pm I have also been dreaming of such a community. It helps that I've also partially read that same book.

However, I fear if we tried nowadays it could end up like these guys.

There's also the fact that communities in general have been greatly eroded over the years. I blame things like the media sowing constant fear and division. This has overall decreased our reliance on each other, and replaced it with reliance on the government. Another obstacle to overcome.

hugs wrote: Wed Jul 02, 2025 8:22 pm These are valid objections, and I appreciate your response. After digging into it myself, I've found that it's very unlikely that either basic or functional literacy have decreased. It seems that Gatto is comparing multiple different sources that simply aren't compatible since they aren't standardized. Measuring literacy rates is a lot messier than I had imagined, and it's even harder to compare them over time. It also looks like Gatto is oversimplifying the issue by disregarding any potential confounding variables and ascribing everything to the education system - which, I admit, is a mistake he makes more than once in the book. With that said, there are still numerous pieces of evidence throughout the book that support the conclusion that the education system was designed with the intention of miseducating young people. Most damning are the letters between the builders of that system where they admit such intentions in their own writing.

My apologies for getting this wrong, and again I thank you for pressing me on this. I got to learn something new today.

Scientists have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion.