Been seeing more and more evidence that mass literacy is both massively diminished compared to the 20th century and accelerating in its decline across the world, especially in relatively highly educated countries. This problem is obviously much more severe amongst the working class than others, as historically tends to be the case.
If we want the masses to get to grips with a communist understanding of the world, which requires a lot of reading and discussion of text, surely this is an issue we need to grapple with. Current political education initiatives usually bring together smaller, highly-literate (typically university educated) groups of people, which tend to remain insular and rarely seem to engage with the broader working class. I am convinced that a significant barrier to mass political education is that so many “literate” people are unable to read a simple paragraph.
How do we rectify this situation? It seems historically unique because in the past, illiterate people had no illusions about the fact that they couldn’t read and were enthusiastic about learning (at least, in general). Nowadays, I can imagine that most people would not view their literacy as something that needs to be improved, and many will even react with hostility to such a suggestion.
What’s the correct approach? Do we need to emphasise the practical rewards that those who engage with theoretical texts benefit from? Take a direct approach and offer reading comprehension sessions? Interested to hear what others think.
Sorry if this is off topic, but its very strange how so called “highly educated countries” have been experiencing drops in mass literacy, why would this be?
Because the capitalist class needs to find ways to make up for their falling rate of profit, and the only tool available to them within the US is to swallow up and/or destroy public services. By wielding bourgeois politics to reduce their tax rates they force important social services to go underfunded. When those underfunded services fail to deliver for the public, the capitalists can then use that as justification for privatizing those services, swallowing up their assets and employees at low cost, squeezing them for a big short-term injection of profits, and then dumping those ruined services. All public goods become first degraded, then privatized, then destroyed - in the end, this only further contributes to the declining rate of profit, because public goods and services (from education to parks to transit and on and on) improve the productivity of the working class. But investing in them directly reduces short term profits and cannot compete with the rapid profits available through the above destructive process.
Add in the racial/colonial aspect of American society and it becomes easier and easier to propagandize that process because you can just blame Black people.
From what I gather, the issue is not so much illiteracy in the absolute, can’t read anything kind of illiteracy. It’s more so the kind of comprehension literacy where people can read things but they lack the skills to get the deeper meanings and understand the unified arguments and implications in longer written pieces.
Part of this might be the emphasis on shorter and shorter media content. However, I think the educational shift to more standardized tests and hyper focusing on STEM is a large part of the problem. Reading and reading comprehension is less emphasized, it gets more segmented to smaller pieces as to fit the test format more neatly, there’s less exploratory reading to naturally grow that skill set.