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Because Americans are some of the stupidest people in the world.
By design. About a century ago, Rockefeller turned the public school system into a mindless factory worker production machine. Republicans have been reducing funding for decades since.
They only want high school graduates to be smart enough to run the machines. College tuition paywalls real education. As AI improves, the bar lowers further. Public schools will be continually defunded or converted to a voucher system in order to exclude even more citizens.
Nothing new. Jim & Jesse even did a song about it years ago.
The company owned the houses And the company owned the grammar school You'll never see an educated cotton mill man They figure you don't need to learn Anything but how to earn
The money that you pay upon demand To the general store they own Or else they'll take away your home And give it to some other homeless Cotton mill man
Can you elaborate on what Rockefeller did? Never heard that before
Rockefeller worked with the General Education Board to reshape education to be vocational. He also pushed for the duration of the school day to be extended to eight hours, for early exposure and adoption of the standard work day.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED349475.pdf
Very interesting. Surely we can trust our current crop of billionaires to do better for society!
Republicans decided back in the late 70s and early 80s that the public was too educated (and too hard to control) so they decided to do something about it. 45y of slashed education funding and standards later here we are.
and like 90% of our media is owned or controlled by republicans.
I hate to hear this myself but there's a global rebuke against incumbents of all shapes and sizes literally everywhere, in response to inflation.
So by definition, everyone is stupid in countries that have rebounded well because they're doing the same.
The media that they choose to consume is the problem. It plays down the accomplishments of "the enemy" and plays up the hardships and failures like "rampant illegals" and constantly rising food prices. I blame "stupid Americans" less than I blame manipulative billionaires that control media consumption.
What, the country with all the resources but still ranks 36th in literacy and 54% of their adults can’t even read above a 6th grade level?
Literacy info.
i need this information to start being treated as the act of oppression it is rather than the “americans dumb lol” framing i see even in leftist spaces.
americans, and disproportionately minority americans, are being intentionally refused education in the same way they are refused medical care—in service of cost cutting and privatization interests rather than public wellbeing and economic wellness.
Lee Atwater full interview told the real reason for the dumbing down of America. Two younger family members went through four years of prestigious private universities, and neither had ever read classic literature, let alone discuss main themes and philosophical implications, which is sad, since Shakespeare still addresses basic and timeless western human conditions, and I daresay the reach may be broader than that.
i think there’s a bit more to the story than that but sure haha
edit: looked him up and he was an adviser to reagan? ew.
Idk if this is the same guy, but iirc someone did an interview tell-all where they basically came clean and admitted to all the fucked up shit they helped their administration do.
So yeah, undoubtedly ew, but I'm guessing that's what they're talking about.
54%?? Yikes.
And we thought the internet would solve or at least help this. Little did we know...
Yep. I remember those days. I remember hearing Douglas Rushkoff [1] on a podcast or something about how he and others around his same age were seeing the dawn of the (privatized) Internet along with the flourishing of the rave scene, and so on and thought it had all this promise and it gave me such a huge amount of nostalgia.
Instead, we have things like Youtube influencers peddling some of the very worst things you'd want kids to watch and algorithms that push it to them.
[1] Jaron Lanier has written pretty well about some of the same aspects.
I feel like it’s simply widened the divide that was already present. There have always been people that care and people that don’t but now the people that care have the resources to do something about it and the people that don’t have easy access to that which reinforces their lack of caring.
Excellent summary of the internet's potential for both help and harm. At this point, I'm not convinced the net result isn't negative.
Hey man, we can post slurs online while taking a shit or look at porn any time. What else would we use the internet for?
That's why emojis are so popular.
As someone who turned off autocorrect fifteen years ago and cares about things like spelling, grammar, and compostion I can pretty confidently say that emojis have many valid uses. Text, especially quick text, is not very good at conveying subtle meaning in a clear way. Emojis though? They do amazingly, especially when it’s a face, because in normal conversations we have body language and even over the phone we can clearly convey a tone of voice. Body language is the emoji library of face-to-face communication.
TL;DR: emojis are popular because they’re highly effective.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
But honestly, I admire the fact that you care about grammar, spelling, and such. This seems not very rare on Lemmy, but is otherwise a rare sight
Fun fact, the average American public school education doesn't include critical thinking skills in the language curriculum. You either get your introduction to this in AP English (if you're a high scoring highschooler) or during your first year of college/university.
It's mind blowing how many people can't pick apart a given piece of media and think about what message it conveys and why it conveys it.
So yeah, Americans are ripe for manipulation.
That's the result of the Republicans fucking over education in this country for the past 50 years.
I think not stressing critical thinking skills is not a bug, but a feature, of schools that were designed to crank out factory workers.
It's sheer lunacy in today's world, but it also happens to be a feature for the qon/Republican agenda.
Redundant statements are redundant.
I'm sorry to have to upvote that.
I’m American and have to agree with it; it might be because I’m stupid though.
'am I actually stupid?'
That's an understatement. Source: Live in America.
Stupid and proud of it.