Can you imagine this scene today? The older man (who in context is probably in his 50s) would be staring blankly into space, while the young woman looked at TikTok videos.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate. 54% of American adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level.
And we wonder how Trump got elected?
The illiterate are ignorant, and blisteringly ignorant people vote for stupid stuff.
I had a very strange experience the other day, which I need to be indistinct about.
It had to do with homeschooling.
Twice in recent weeks I've run across a topic that's in the legislature, that being the legal requirement, which the Wyoming 2025 Legislative assembly is about to wipe out, that home schooling parents submit their educational plans to their local school districts. The requirement is there to prevent parents from basically not educating their children.
Not educating children is what homeschooling is all about.
This wasn't always the case, but it's become the case.
Some background.
My father was the first male in his family to graduate from high school. He might have been the third member of the family, as I don't know that much about my paternal grandmother's early life in that fashion. She probably graduated high school in Denver however, likely from a Catholic high school. His older sister graduated from a high school in Scottsbluff.
My father went on to a doctorate.
My paternal grandfather, who left school to work at age 13, had such an advance knowledge of mathematics that he helped his children with their high school calculus homework, which is revealing for two reasons, one that is amazing on his part, and secondly all of my father's siblings took calculus in high school.
I didn't take calculus in high school
My father could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin. My paternal grandfather also could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.
My mother did not graduate from high school She was not given the opportunity to. She earned an Associates as a an adult. Her mother was university educated, as was her father. They all spoke two languages, English and French, and had a command of Latin.
Growing up in my family household was like getting a post doctorate in some things, history and science in particular. I read so early that I was on to adult books before I left grade school and had the odd experience of a junior high librarian not wishing to check a history book as she feared it was too advance. I read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire before I left junior high.
I was in fact educated on a lot of stuff at home. . . but I was sent to school.
There's an interesting pattern here. Some of my friends of my age had college educated parents, but not all of them did. But all of my friends attended college or university. Not all graduated, but they did receive some post high school education. One of my closest friends had a father who did not graduate from high school. He joined the Army in his senior year to fight in World War Two, following in the footsteps of a father who had fought in World War One. My friend has two bachelors degrees.
And there's another thing here. Even those people I knew from my generation, and the prior one, who had parents that didn't graduate high school, had quite literate parents. If I ever went into a house that didn't have a lot of books somewhere, it was shocking. I can only really recall one. The home of my friend noted above was like a library. My parents house and that of all of my aunts and uncles were packed with books. In my parents house you could find a few books that were in German or French. A friend of mine who did not graduate from high school, but none the less went off to university, recalled his grandparents house being packed with books in . . . Gaelic.
My paternal grandmother absolutely insisted that my father go on to get an advanced degree, something he briefly though about not doing. His unmarried sister near in age to him was sent to university as well. I was given no real choice but to go on to higher education myself.
And this was common for people my generation, and the preceding one. Farm and ranch family in particular often had a manic dedication to higher education.
Home schooling has been around since time immemorial, I suppose, but when I was a kid, what it probably meant, where I live, is that the kid in question was living on a really remote ranch. Even then, most ranching parents made a dedicated effort to avoid that. More than a few had a teacher who lived at the ranch, paid for by the school district. The county I live in had four rural remote public schools, of which only one is still in operation. The neighboring one had some so remote that if you run across them on really rural roads its a shock. The teachers at these institutions were admired in a way that's hard to describe. Anything going on in the area always included them.
I didn't know a single homeschooled kid growing up.
Next to home schooling, of course, is private schooling. When I was young the only private school I ever heard of was the Catholic school. It was a big downtown school. It's moved from downtown, but it still exists. Catholic education had long been a thing in the US and apparently Catholics are supposed to send their kids to Catholic schools if they can, but I didn't go to it (it was full), nor did our kids.
When in high school I learned that there was a Lutheran grade school, to my enormous surprise, as I walked by it every day. After high school I learned that there was a "Christian" school, by which I mean a school attached to one of the sort of due it yourself evangelical Protestant groups. It started in 1978, so I would have been in high school when it commenced operating. The ministers for that church, at the time, were drawn from the congregation, and I later met one who was ironically adverse with its tenants as he was a geologist who accepted the truth of evolution, which the church did not.
A church that thinks evolution is a fib, probably doesn't have it taught in its schools.
Which is the point, really. The goal of a large amount of modern homeschooling is to keep students as ignorant as possible, which is conceived of as limiting tehir "exposure" to corrupting elements.
I've been exposed to a few homeschooled kids over the years and frankly a lot of them were rather weird and very socially awkward. Having said that, I've met one kid, and know of another, from a homeschooling family who were not that way, and one of which went on to a really high dollar career.
Now, with that comment, let me note that education isn't about getting rich, or shouldn't be. It's about the Allegory of the Cave. The problem here is that those exposed to the sunlight are seeking to drag the ir offspring back into it, deeper in the cave, and into chains.
The simple fact of the matter is that Americans were much more literate prior to the 1990s than they are now. They read. They read even if they hadn't graduated high school.
And they read a lot, and a lot of it is much more advanced than what people claim to read now. Even people who mostly read novels often read things much more advanced than people do now. I recall one parent of a family friend being a fanatic fan of C. S. Forester, whose novels were just that, but noen the less dealt often with the Napoleonic Wars, something a lot of current Americans probably don't know occured. One fellow I knew in the National Guard loved Louis Lamour, so much so that he read The Walking Drum, which is set in the Middle Ages, about which he was able to speak intelligently. Another fellow, who had been a career Marine, was reading War and Peace.
Everyone read the newspaper. You'd frequently see periodicals in people's houses, including unfortunately Playboy on occasion, but the latter had sufficiently good interviews that my high school newspaper teacher used those as examples and adopted them for the pattern of a series in that high school journal. Less unfortunately, you'd see Time, Newsweek and Life in people's houses routinely. And everyone read the local newspaper, by which I mean everyone.
The National Geographic seemed to be in the home of every household that had children, including ours. Our collection went back into the 1940s, from my father's parents home.
Cartoons didn't make much of an appearance in our house, and I"ve never developed a taste for most of the cartoon journal type of cartoons, like Superman, but what I do recall is when they showed up, it was often Mad Magazine, which actually is really adult oriented, and not in the juvenile way "adult" is often used.
The point is, when people claim people were "more educated" in the past, including populists who are not today, they tended to be, but in ways that people now just don't really quite grasp. They often had lower levels of educational achievement, but because they lived in a literate world, they were societally educated.
You can go into a lot of homes today and find that the occupants read. . . nothing.
Instead, people consume only what suits them.
In almost all of the 20th Century, it wasn't really possible to hear only the news you wanted to. Even if you limited yourself to radio, prior to the introduction of television, you were going to get a wide range of news. Newspapers were, as noted, almost a requirement for most households. When television came in, at first, it was highly local but the news was national and there was no avoiding it. You weren't going to get right or left wing propaganda from anyone.
That's all passed.
Americans aren't reading. What media they consume is self reaffirming, like Protestant sermons from the 1600s. People are listening only to like minds, and the nation is becoming more and more ignorant.
Which is why we have Donald Trump in office. No literate nation would elect him to anything.\
Note that this doesn't mean the population is dumb. Ignorant and dumb are not the same thing. But we suffer from the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect in a major way. We're listening, basically, to ourselves, and making excuses for our failures, and justifying our appetites.
And it puts the entire globe in danger.
