"I currently don't have the time (or, frankly, the mental energy) to find meaningful data about literacy in the United States. (I'm talking about all kinds of literacy – not just reading and writing, but also basic reasoning skills, science literacy, media literacy, etc.)
But, having dipped my toe (inadvisedly) into the comments sections of local media...it seems like an awful lot of people are functioning at about a sixth-grade level.
This probably shouldn't surprise me. But it always does.
There's that George Carlin bit: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
For whatever reason – privilege, inborn traits, upbringing, good teachers, choices that I've made, whatever – I've turned out to be pretty damn smart.
So I tend to keep company, mostly, with other smart people. (That's y'all!)
So my baseline expectation for the average person's cleverness is perhaps higher than it ought to be. And when I'm confronted with the brain-meltingly ignorant and facile utterances of some of my countrymen, my first reaction is to think "there's no *possible* way that you're actually this dumb; your nonsense must be motivated by something else".
But I'm gradually, grudgingly coming around to the notion that a lot of them *really are that dumb*. Somehow, vast swaths of our society manage to hold down jobs, raise families, own homes, pilot motor vehicles – all with the intellectual maturity of a middle-schooler.
Again – perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Unless you're naturally curious, or receive social pressure from your peers, there's no particular *incentive* for folks to become knowledgeable about things that don't directly affect their own survival and happiness.
Apparently I *did* have time to write a condescending-as-fuck Facebook post about this, so whatever."
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