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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

    • If your professional goals are becoming an English professor (which is what most English professors assume an English major should want), then this is definitely a barrier.

      Otherwise, eh. I think colleges have become too vocationally focused and everyone's trying to put a dollar value on being able to understand and interpret the human condition in way that goes beyond Fascism's bland and flattened take on the concrete and coming up empty, and then trying to figure out how to dress up what they're doing as important to The Machinery so they can keep getting their grant money.

      • There’s a cognitive dissonance where academia can’t decide if it’s for white collar vocational training or for intellectual pursuit to further society and individuals. So we end up with this sort of half baked of one, not quite there of the other situation.

    • With your last point, I think there is a massive disconnect between how the university views its purpose, and what the society the students graduate into actually is. Of course the major publishers don't care if you can deconstruct Dickens, they pay millions of dollars for trite ghost written crap because it sells.

      Arguably if you are an English major, you should leave with the ability to read dense texts, including archaic ones, but I don't really blame the students for seeing that it doesn't really matter because society at large does not care and they will graduate whether they can parse Dickens or not.

      This all just results in a less literate society though, and I think that's a net negative overall.

      • I mean, yeah it would be a more literate society if most English majors could parse Dickens. But I don’t know if it’s less literate than back when most people didn’t even touch a college-level English course.

    • I get why the one kid assumed Michaelmas was a name

      Just to force Hexbears to learn what it is, Michaelmas is the festival of Saint Michael on September 29th, and thus Michaelmas Term refers to a (university) fall semester.

  • Other than the first sentence of the first passage ("Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.") these were not particularly difficult to understand. A bit verbose, but generally quite clear.

    I'm not surprised that university students struggle with this though because the difficulty level and expectations for reading have fallen through the floor. Most students don't read anymore, and I assume many just use chatgpt to summarize at this point. Reading is a lot like working out a muscle and if you don't keep it up it atrophies.

    I feel like it's easy to blame social media, and I know it's melted my own brain, but I don't think students are challenged to read enough at any level of education anymore and aren't helped enough to learn how to parse difficult texts. Class sizes continuously growing and funding being cut definitely doesn't help. It's hard to imagine a different outcome under the logic of neoliberalism.

    • I feel like it's easy to blame social media....I don't think students are challenged to read enough at any level of education

      Yeah like I said earlier in the thread, I don't think this is anything new. I remember being in middle school over 20 years ago and tons of kids didn't read. People were blaming video games and MTV. A lot of it had to do with kids being made to read books they weren't interested in, so they couldn't read denser material, either.

      Neoliberalism is focused on churning out a workforce using as few resources as possible. It's not interested in making educated human beings.

  • I’m sorry but this article really rubs me the wrong way. The example used (the intro to Bleak House by Charles Dickens) doesn’t seem like it would have a whole lot of cultural relevance to the sample of students tested who were from public colleges in Kansas. If you’re the kind of person who already reads Dickens and/or watches British period dramas like Downton Abbey, you’ll probably perform much better in this exercise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are functionally illiterate or lack reading comprehension skills in a general sense. If the reading sample in question was something like Trainspotting, would it mean that Scottish readers have a unique talent for reading that others don’t have? Of course not. It just means they aren’t Scottish.

    A better example imo would have been something more universally difficult, like… A Clockwork Orange or Finnegan’s Wake, but in reality it’s hard to remove cultural bias completely. Or… You know what? Fuck it. Everyone should just be forced to read Hegel and be considered illiterate unless they can completely understand each and every sentence. How does that sound?

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