Functional Illiteracy - Alternative View

2024 Author: Keith Bush | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 14:01

Scientists are sounding the alarm: only 2% of Russian students demonstrate the ability to understand texts, critically evaluate the information presented, formulate hypotheses and conclusions. The situation in the world is no better, and not only among schoolchildren. Columnist Daria Sokologorskaya explains what functional illiteracy is.

New illiterates: education has nothing to do with it

Functional illiteracy began to be thought about in the West somewhere in the 80s of the last century. The problem was that, in spite of the general literacy, people did not grow smarter, and they were getting worse at coping with their professional duties. Several studies have shown that although people can formally read and write, they do not understand the meaning of a book or instruction they have read, and cannot write a coherent text.

People with functional illiteracy recognize words, but they cannot decode the language, find artistic meaning or technical use in it. Therefore, their readers and viewers are useless - they prefer the most rude and straightforward pop culture. Some researchers believe that functional illiteracy is worse than even ordinary illiteracy, since it indicates deeper disturbances in the mechanisms of thinking, attention and memory. You can take a Nigerian negro, teach him scientific wisdom, and he will become a smart person. Because in his head all cognitive and thought processes proceed adequately.

The emergence of functional illiteracy in developed Western countries coincided with the first tangible steps of these states towards the transition to the information society. Knowledge and talent to quickly navigate in an unfamiliar environment became the criteria for the social growth of an individual. At MIT (as you remember, Gordon Freeman himself studied there), a graph of the employee's market value was created depending on the progress on two scales. The first is the solution of routine, repetitive actions, reproduction, simple perseverance. And the second is the ability to perform complex operations that do not have a ready-made algorithm. If a person is able to find new ways of solving a problem, if he can build a working model on the basis of disparate data, then he is functionally competent. Accordingly, functionally illiterate people are adapted only to the work of cashiers and janitors,and then under supervision. They are not suitable for heuristic activity.

In 1985, an analyst was prepared in the USA, from which it came out that from 23 to 30 million Americans are completely illiterate at all, and from 35 to 54 million are semi-literate - their reading and writing skills are much lower than it is necessary to “cope with responsibility of daily life. In 2003, the proportion of US citizens whose writing and reading skills were below the minimum was 43%, or 121 million.

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In Germany, according to Education Senator Sandra Scheeres, 7.5 million people (14% of the adult population) can be called illiterate. In Berlin alone, there are 320,000 such people.

In 2006, a branch of the UK Department of Education reported that 47% of schoolchildren dropped out of school at 16 before reaching a basic level in mathematics, and 42% were unable to reach a basic level of English. British high schools send 100,000 functionally illiterate graduates to life every year.

Have you laughed at the imperialists? Now let's laugh at ourselves. In 2003, we collected similar statistics on schools (in my opinion, among 15-year-olds). So, only 36% of schoolchildren had sufficient reading skills. Of these, 25% of students are able to complete only tasks of medium complexity, for example, generalize information located in different parts of the text, correlate the text with their life experience, and understand information given implicitly. A high level of reading literacy: the ability to understand complex texts, critically evaluate the information presented, formulate hypotheses and conclusions was demonstrated by only 2% of Russian students.

Signs of functional illiteracy

Functional illiteracy, of course, does not develop only in childhood. It can overtake a completely adult person who has been swallowed up by the routine of monotonous existence. Adults and old people lose their reading and thinking skills if they are not required in their daily life. After all, we also go through a million in school and university. And let's say, I don't remember chemistry at all, mathematics - at the very least, it's a shame to talk about history without Wikipedia at hand. Fortunately, I have not yet forgotten how to organize small simple words into giant pseudo-scientific texts.

However, this is all boring. Let's better deal with the study of functional illiteracy in practice, namely, isolate its main properties and signs.

Functionally illiterate citizens avoid difficult tasks, are sure in advance of failure, have no motivation to take on more difficult tasks, and repeat the same systemic mistakes.
Such people often try to excuse themselves from any intellectual tasks, citing either a runny nose, or busyness, or fatigue.
They honestly admit that they don't like reading.
Asking other people to explain to them the meaning of the text or the algorithm of the problem.
Attempts to read are associated with severe frustration and unwillingness to do so. When reading, psychosomatic problems quickly arise: eyes and head may ache, and immediately there is a desire to be distracted by something more important.
Our functionally illiterate people often articulate with their lips or even voice what they read when reading.
Difficulty following any instructions, from shaping exercises to nuclear reactor repairs.
Inability to build and ask questions on the material read. They cannot fully participate in discussions.
There is a very noticeable difference between understood by ear and understood by reading.
They react to a problem caused by their own misunderstanding either by learned helplessness, or by running into others, since they do not fully understand who is right and who is wrong.

An additional complication is that reading and writing skills are directly related to the ability to produce any kind of informational content. In fact, it is responsible for creativity in the network sense of the term.

Mass degradation

We must admit that we live in a world of functionally illiterate people. I do not want to say that it was created by them, but in many ways it was created for them. I see this literally in everything, everything strives for primordial, childish simplicity and obsession. Advertising, 140-letter Twitter, press level, literature level. Try suggesting a passage from Heidegger, Lacan, or Thomas Mann to someone. Only a few percent are able to read, and even more so to write large, slender analytical articles. I was surprised that this disease has not bypassed the media sphere as well: normally writing journalists are now worth their weight in gold and are quickly becoming editors. Simply because they have almost no competitors.

Degradation primarily affected all spheres of activity, one way or another associated with the word. And if earlier the mass was distinguished only by a bad taste, now even this rubbish must be poked into it on a spoon in the form of chewed jelly without hard lumps.

Too Many Letters

By the way, in the study Literacy in the Adult Client Population - Jones & Bartlett Publishers, recommendations were given on how to write texts for functionally illiterate people, that is, practically for the entire B2C segment. Direct advice on copyright, since most advertising messages are made out according to these laws. I will share with you:

They perceive abstract and impersonal texts much worse than direct appeals in the spirit of "YOU volunteered?" It is necessary to compose an address message, more imperative, more personalized. It is believed that this is the most important and effective rule for working with an illiterate audience. You agree, right?
You should use words from everyday vocabulary, preferably no more than 3-4 syllables. You don't need all those long compound words like the German language. It is necessary to avoid pseudo-scientific words (they still do not understand our discourse), technical and medical terms. It is advisable to avoid words that are ambiguous in terms of both semantics and connotation. You can not use adverbs like "soon", "rarely", "often" - because it is important for such people to know how soon and how rarely.
Give abbreviations in full, "etc." replace with normal "and so on", do not write NB in the margins at all. Introductory words should also be excluded, although, of course, it's a pity.
Break up information into beautiful blocks. More paragraphs, no sheet of text. Such people, as a rule, do not plan to decipher statistics and graphs with numbers in principle.
Sentences should not exceed 20 words. Headings should also be short and succinct.
Would you like to diversify your text with synonyms? Will not work. For such readers, the emergence of new words only confuses. And what you called “cars” at the beginning of the text should not suddenly become “cars”.
The most important information is put into the lead of the article, at the very beginning, since there is a great risk that even if the reader gets to the end, then his health and perception will no longer be the same.
The text should be diluted with generous spaces, pictures, callouts - all so that the reader is not scared off by the dark wall of solid text.
More accurate with pictures. There should not be any decorative elements, illustrations that draw attention to themselves. By the way, in social advertising for such an audience it is recommended not to use, say, photographs of pregnant women smoking or drunken women lying under a bench. You only need to show what you want from the audience.

Better online than live

What are the causes of functional illiteracy? Here scientists disagree, but personally, I am sure that this is due to the increased number of information flows that have hit a person. The phenomenon of functional illiteracy began to form, conventionally, in the 60s and 70s, at a time when television became color and widespread. A couple of years ago I read some good research from France, which stated that children from one to three years old, spending more than a few hours a day in front of the TV, lost some of their cognitive functions.

I asked my acquaintances teachers and pediatricians, they unanimously say that children born after 2000 all suffer from ADHD, they can neither study, nor concentrate, nor read. At the same time, there is an increase in social maladjustment. Children are much more comfortable and more accustomed to texting with each other on the network than to communicate live. In Japan, a culture of gamers and hikki has already formed that does not leave their own room. This awaits us too.

I understand, it sounds somewhat outlandish that children at the same time do not really know how to work with texts and vegetate in social networks, where everything is built on the text. But look better at the level of their messages. On the web, content is generated by several enthusiasts, and a hundred or two of commercial brands - the rest is a continuous repost. At the same time, it does not matter what a person is reposting: cats or a post about Baudrillard, this may equally indicate functional illiteracy. It is not for nothing that the new generation was immediately nicknamed "killing cancer".

Universal literacy has exposed the fact that schooling does not always produce competent people. However, it was only with the proliferation of new communication channels that the problem became impossible to ignore. And if forty years ago scientists were looking for a way to deal with functional illiteracy, now they are looking for ways to interact with it. So the diagnosis has become universal.

I blame television, and then computerization, digital-media. Radio is also a tricky thing. To hear the news or Roosevelt's "Fireside Conversations" you need to strain and concentrate. Television became the first source of information that did not require any effort for perception and analysis. The picture replaces the voice-over, action, the frequent change of frames and scenery does not let you come off, get bored.

In the days when the web was created by geeks, the Internet was inundated with smart texts. As the network became popular, people far from science and skilled labor came to it. Nowadays most users need to know how many words like "porn" or "flashgames" are to get what they want. You can instantly switch from horoscopes to news chronicles, from chronicles to jokes, and then to YouTube or Farm Frenzy. It's almost like clicking channels on TV. Growing up, I had to spend some time and energy to amuse myself. The game more or less spurred cognitive impulses.

Why did Steve Jobs and Bill Gates take away electronic gadgets from their children? Chris Anderson, who password-protected home devices so that they could not work more than a couple of hours a day, said: “My children accuse my wife and me of being fascists who are too preoccupied with technology. They say that none of their friends have similar restrictions in their family. This is because I see the danger of being overly addicted to the internet like no other. I saw what problems I faced myself, and I don't want my children to have the same problems."

But these are people who, in theory, should idolize new technologies in all forms.

Let's be honest, until now society has not developed a specific information culture. On the contrary, things are getting worse from year to year as commercially oriented structures take over the information space. Advertising and SMM marketing departments need consumers. And who else can be a better consumer than a functionally illiterate person? These people may have a low income, but their legion, and because of their low IQ, they are easy to manipulate. For example, the overwhelming majority of credit debtors are people who are not able to read the bank agreement correctly, estimate the payment procedure and calculate their own budget.

Poverty breeds poverty

Poverty breeds poverty. Including in the intellectual sphere. I often see how young parents, in order to get rid of their child for at least half an hour, give him a tablet with games. And this is one and a half to two years. Personally, I started playing and hanging in front of a telecom when I was five or six years old, but by that time I had already formed methods of informational self-defense in my mind. I knew how to filter out advertising junk and be critical of any image on the screen. I could concentrate on reading one book for long hours. And early access to information flows that carry pleasure and relaxation leads to rapid degradation and atrophy of synthetic functions of thinking.

You may have noticed that the inequality between rich and poor is growing in the world. So, soon 10% of people will have not only 90% of wealth, but also 90% of intellectual potential. The gap is widening. Some people are becoming smarter, more and more dexterous in operating with endless streams of information, while others are turning into dumb and indebted cattle. And absolutely of their own free will. There is no one to even complain to. There is no obvious link between poverty and functional illiteracy. The influence and education of parents is much more important. And also the presence of functional literacy among themselves.