John Dean tweet:

[tblue37]

Link to tweet

Text

Goodluck with our self governing: “According to one analysis of Department of Education data, fewer than half of American adults are proficient at reading. And according to [another] a third of adults have difficulty interpreting simple health info.…”

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. Who is surprised by this?

[BlueJac]

2. 33% of US population

[calimary]

3. There definitely is that.

Any wonder why republi-CONS always seem to want to defund public education? If you’re sufficiently dumbed down, they can more easily convince you of just about anything.

If there’s little available except pricey private schools, then that’s certainly one way to keep a lot of people from more informed voting.

[lagomorph777]

4. Yup - it's impossible to be informed, intelligent, and Reptilian.

[calimary]

8. Small brains will do that.

[lastlib]

18. Thomas Jefferson:

"An insightful and educated citizenry is the arch-enemy of tyranny."
Last thing a fascist party like the GQP wants is an educated citizenry to interfere with their brand of tyranny.

[calimary]

31. OOOOOOOH! Quote of the week!

I’m using that in our Indivisible group’s next Call to Action email.

Glad I spotted it! Thanks for posting it!

[triron]

5. We are becoming an idiocracy.

Especially certain states.

[certainot]

41. states dominated by republican talk radio. education is a, but not the problem. even half intelligen

intelligent bozos can vote to help themselves if they're not constantly being bombarded with lies

even 'smart' people believe the republican bullshit merely because its the dominant buzz

[Lovie777]

6. RWers do not want an educated population coupled with facts . ...

history because they are easy to manipulate, example - small crowds awaiting the return of JFK, Jr.

[CrispyQ]

7. This is why the right focused on filling positions on Boards of Education since the 80s.

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." ~Karl Rove

[leftstreet]

9. +1

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

14. Yep, Pat Robertson had a PAC that gave money to local school board candidates...

... so they could afford advertising and therefore name recognition on the ballots. Of course, the campaign money only went to those with his ideology/political leanings. It doesn't take much money to run a, "big", campaign in local school board elections.

[certainot]

40. i wonder if smart democrats will ever figure out to stop ignoring republican radio

[Fiendish Thingy]

10. Just the way the fascists like it. Nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

21. "We love the poorly educatedl" -- tRump, March 2016. . . . nt

[Ocelot II]

11. For many years a lot of Americans have thought being smart was a bad thing.

I think it's much more basic than the idea that an uneducated population is easier to control. It goes way back - I remember reading this book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in college (during the Pleistocene era). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life

Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”

Also, he described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."

Or, as Isaac Asimov once said, in a similar vein:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

[JT45242]

12. This was one of my favorite books in college

Took a lot of intellectual history and this was one of the best books I ever had to read for class. Re-read it a couple of time later.

Another was Marx's Economic and Philosophic mansucsripts of 1844 and how we are alienated by capitalism. Over the last 40 years the alienation of all progress from production could be added as the robber baron class has added more wealth at the expense of the working class than probably at any time.

[halfulglas]

34. And TV and movies with some exceptions the good guys are very rarely the

Well educated and intellectuals. Usually, it's the person who "doesn't have much book learning but knows how things are" who is the one who is the hero. Often the intellectual person in the plot has lots of degrees but doesn't know anything about solving "real problems." Those aren't pictured as warm relatable humans.

[Ocelot II]

35. The exception to that pattern is the disaster movie

where the scientists try to get the politicians to do something about the pending disaster but they are ignored until the disaster happens, and then the scientists are called back in to figure out how to save the world.

[zaj]

13. Authoritarians defund education and invest in propaganda

[Demobrat]

15. fewer than half of American adults are proficient at reading.

Wow. I guess I need to get out more, because I had no idea.

[3catwoman3]

25. That is worse than I thought, as well. Scary worse.

Last edited Tue Nov 2, 2021, 07:10 PM - Edit history (1)

Throughout my career as a pediatric NP, my colleagues and coworkers were, of necessity, educated people. So were most of the parents of the kids we cared for. I know that skewed my perception of the population at large.

[Demobrat]

29. I live in San Francisco

where I’ve spent my career in advertising agencies and corporate marketing departments. Like you, I live and work around educated people.

I know I live in bubble where the highly educated from around the world come to find jobs. The high tech industry is centered here.

But I had NO idea how many Americans are essentially illiterate. I’m shocked.

I wonder how many vote.

[3catwoman3]

30. "I wonder how many vote."

Way too many.

[SouthBayDem]

32. I'm from San Jose. Similarly in a "bubble", haha.

But keep in mind that even educated people buy into crap ideas. Who do you think run the think tanks that have pushed right wing agitprop for 40+ years?

Being able to read doesn't mean being able to see through specious reasoning. There's a reason the Texas Republican Party famously opposed schools teaching "higher order thinking".

[Demobrat]

33. Trust me I know.

People think SF is a liberal oasis, but we have them here too. All of the city’s problems are the Democrats’ fault.

[RVN VET71]

36. You're born ignorant, not stupid, but In Texas

In Texas they want to make ignorance a permanent gift to their children. What’s the word for “rule by the stupid”? Is it T
Texocracy?

[Glaisne]

16. I've been noticing the country growing

dumber and crazier over time. There has always been an anti-intellectual element in this country and it's been growing especially since Reagan. The authoritarians and fascists like it that way because it makes it easy to manipulate the masses. Remember the very first ones they go after are the intellectuals, academics, and the journalists. Because they're the ones that can easily refute the lies and BS the fascists try to foist on the people as they try to gain power. It's happening now.

[Hortensis]

17. I've read that adults who don't read except what they have to

after leaving school lose up to 5 years of reading level. So someone who'd graduated at a sophomore reading level might tend to read at a fifth-grade level. Adequate to get through life, but an article in The Atlantic or NYT would be hard, unpleasant work.

[Stuart G]

19. ....:sarcasm:.....Who is this fellow "John Dean"?...Has he got a brain? Any experience in politics?

.... Does John Dean know anything about testifying?..............................

.... Is he smart? Is he loyal to the U.S.A.?...Who did he work for?...When was that?

..... Did he like his job?...Did he tell the truth?..How old is he?...Is he smart?

..... If you know nothing about John Dean then look up Nixon & Watergate.. Then you might find
a word or two about John Dean....Good Luck!!!!

[bronxiteforever]

20. Carl Sagan warned us.

[Hekate]

22. Home schooling has played its part. Dominionists will happily sell you "history" & other texts

[Lonestarblue]

23. Many of our schools are an absolute disgrace.

By funding education with property taxes, poor communities get short shift. In Texas, some funds are shifted from the wealthier districts to help support poor districts, but it is never enough. As many schools found during last year, remote learning doesn’t work when families can’t afford access to the Internet or computers for their kids. The children of poor families begin school with a disadvantage because they typically have two working parents who are poorly educated themselves and often cannot help their children. That’s why early childhood education is so important—and why Republicans fight it because they want advantages for their kids rather than helping to level the playing field for poor kids.

US performance on international tests has been declining for decades. Betsy DeVos took Michigan from one of the better-performing states to one of the lowest-performing states in a matter of a few years. That is what for-profit charters do. Selling choice as a way to better education hasn’t lived up to the hype. Many kids in public education are still being short changed, and I see nothing being done to change that.

[sop]

24. Corporate conservatives want the public school system to be a tool of economic forces, to

prepare other people's kids for lives of unquestioning servitude while their own children are groomed for positions of leadership and authority.

[3catwoman3]

26. When we moved into our neighborhood back in...

...1994 and were getting to know our neighbors, I remember one of them expressing incredulity once when I said I was going to the library. "How do you know what you want to get?" He went on to say that he had not been in a library since finishing high school, and wouldn't even know where to start.

I was rather dumbstruck, and don't even remember what I said.

During one of our moves, we had 50 boxes of books. I'm going to hazard a guess that there may have been no books in my neighbor's house.

[markie]

39. I have

worked on the "National Assessment of Educational Progress" study for many years... the one thing that has always stood out for me... one of the question asked of kids is "How many books are in your house?" many, many, many kids replied to that with "less than one shelf" wow

that goodness for people such as Dolly Parton and the (not enough) programs that put books in the hands of kids!!

[czarjak]

27. Birchers dream come true? Who needs all that fancy learnin'!

[Poiuyt]

28. I used to be the director at a dyslexia clinic. As many as 1 in 5 people have it.

There are other reasons for poor reading besides dyslexia of course, but there should be more screening for it in 1st and 2nd grade. Many problems could be remedied at that early age.

[2Gingersnaps]

44. My grandson is dyslexic, he was told by his school that he is marginally retarded.

In my son's time, his best friend who was dyslexic was treated the same way, his parents had to sue the school to get them to educate their son. Both young men survived the local schoo system, thankfully. Oh we absolutely do need to look at school boards, the conservatives went after them first since Reagan. Our local schools did not want to spend the money on that type of screening and effort.

My husband and I were avid readers. We lived in rural Ohio. I am not one bit surprised by what Mr. Dean posted. It is damn frightening out here. The husband and I both learned to keep our mouths shut and our heads down. I was actually raised (in foster care with that good ole time religion) that educated people were "educated fools" "who didn't want to have to work for a living." There was no excuse or reason for men to go to college, let alone women. I am 65, so we are talking the 70's here. Women were to get married, have children, stay home. No one bothered to explain what became of women or children without a man to bring home that one paycheck. Until high school, our family was the only broken home, and it had been broken by death, I knew of one other kid who had a single parent home, and her Dad was the one who lived.

I went to college when my kids were leaving home to go to college. I expected people to be a little more educated and a little more sophisticated with schooling, now ask me how surprised I am that nurses are refusing to get vaccinated.

I have to say, Ohio was not this backward back in the 70's.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

37. I've seen notes written by managers...

... at factories which were impossible to decipher.

If they simply wrote as they talked, like dictation, it would be understandable. But for whatever reason, they repeatedly struggled to do it.

I can't remember the details of their notes and memos anymore, but I'll make up an example to illustrate it. Suppose a manager wanted a machine to be shut down and thoroughly cleaned. Then their written note might be: "Machine 6 clean shut down."


Yet they had no problem expressing the instructions VERBALLY, in a completely understandable manner. So why not just write the same way?! Even if they misspelled every other word while trying to write a sentence like they talked, it would at least be much more understandable that way.

[GoCubsGo]

38. So, I guess we're officially an Idiocracy...

[cbabe]

42. The danger of teaching slaves to read.

[2Gingersnaps]

45. And there you have it.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

43. And even those who read often read very little and narrowly.

Novels bring you into imagining the lives of others. Non fiction gives you more information about things.

The typical America who reads might read one book a month. In researching that, I found things which claimed the average CEO reads 60 books a year, which I find highly suspect. That's more than a book a week, which is well above what most people read.

[pandr32]

46. "... a third of adults have difficulty interpreting simple health info...."

Why I hate all those pharma ads on TV.