Students in England 'are the most illiterate in the developed world'

[Turborama]

Source: The Mirror (UK)

The study, which looks at literacy and numeracy skills in England, concludes that 7% of 20 to 34-year-old graduates in England have numeracy skills below level two, while 3.4% have literacy skills below this level - meaning that they struggle to estimate how much petrol is left in a tank from looking at the gauge, or have difficulty understanding instructions on an aspirin bottle.

For numeracy, this is worse than in other nations - including Australia, Ireland, Poland, Italy and Spain, the report shows.

Around one in five young university graduates can manage basic tasks, but struggle with more complex problems, it adds.



Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/students-england-are-most-illiterate-7267087

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Exhibit A:

[applegrove]

1. I worked with a guy who grew up in London. He was one of two

people from his neighbourhood who made it into grammar school at 13. The rest went directly to trade school. That was back two generations ago. But still it must have been awful for those kids.

[T_i_B]

14. The UK moved away from the Grammar school system in the 60's

Currently the trend seems to be away from comprehensive schools towards the grey area of academies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_(English_school)

[elleng]

2. Not good at all for ANY of us.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

3. Americans hear that accent and think it sounds intelligent.

[trillion]

4. We've got a lot of tea partiers in this country. I don't think we can't really speak since we have

our own....

[Spitfire of ATJ]

5. Southern accents don't hold the monopoly on dumbfuckery either.....

I just had a Trump supporter here over the holidays.

He has a Boston accent.

[lunasun]

18. UKIP ; they have that too

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/life-in-the-land-of-ukip-britain-election/390369/

[MowCowWhoHow III]

20. UK has lots of accents

"Donald Thump - I gave Mr Trump a tough guy cockney accent. No words were changed."

[Denzil_DC]

22. And England and the UK aren't the same thing, but one wouldn't know that from reading this thread!

Scotland, for instance, has an entirely separate (and quite different in some important respects) education system which isn't covered by this report.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

23. That's about his speed too.

[LeftishBrit]

6. While low basic skills, especially in numeracy, are indeed a problem in the UK...

it should be noted that these international comparisons can be problematic. It is difficult to ensure exact equivalence of tests given in different countries and languages, especially with regard to literacy. Different studies can give widely different results: for instance, English schoolchildren tend to gain a better position in maths in the TIMSS comparisons than in the OECD PISA comparisons, though the two types of comparison are supposedly similar. There can also be problems with sampling, as only a small minority of pupils in any country are likely to be tested, and it's for example known that countries and schools sometimes skew the data by selecting pupils likely to do relatively well.

Sampling is likely to be even more of a problem with adults, given that they are no longer 'captive audiences' in schools, and varying degrees of self-selection for availability may occur.

That being said, there are certainly problems nowadays in the UK with relatively little opportunities for vocational education, and a tendency to assume that it's university or nothing. Many students would benefit more from an apprenticeship or vocational course than the watered-down university degree that some of them get.

And basic skills teaching for adults has always been a Cinderella in the UK, and even more so with the current government cuts.

[TubbersUK]

16. On the theme of sampling:

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills says:

...the UK’s low performance on mean literacy scores could be explained by the fact that there is “a lot of further education that’s called higher education in the UK”.

He doesn't offer definitive answers at this point however.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/the-puzzle-of-uk-graduates-and-their-low-level-literacy/2015689.article

[LeftishBrit]

19. True

Until 1992, there was a distinction made between 'universities' which had the power to award degrees directly, and 'polytechnics' which had to have their degrees awarded by an external body. On average, polytechnics were less academically oriented, more vocational, less research-oriented, and more likely to award sub-degree qualifications to people returning to education but not seeking a full university course, than universities. However, they varied from universities-in-all-but-name to further education colleges that also admitted some students to degree courses. In 1992, they all became known as 'universities', and some then took a more university-like route and some didn't. Thus, some universities are more geared to advanced higher education than others, and some courses within the same university may be more advanced than others.

But there may be another reason for differences in literacy standards:

English is a more irregular, and therefore more difficult language, to learn to read and write perfectly than many other languages!

[TubbersUK]

25. Interesting, thanks :)

[EdwardBernays]

7. The UK

Is riddled with problems based on class. They're obsessed with class.

Sadly that means that a pretty dramatically large percentage of their population is left behind.

I met a girl in a shop who tried to spell the word "everything"... She was about to enter University. A white girl from North London.

It went like this:

e...v...e......r............. t....h...i....... n.............k.

Everthink

Saying that. I met a girl in Boston in the late 90s, who was about the same age, that had never HEARD of Richard Nixon or Watergate.

[DetlefK]

9. An anecdote:

About 5-8 years ago, in Germany, in a train. There was a huge group of Twenty-somethings who were on their way to some huge protest against NATO. I think, it was because big bad warmongering NATO was involved in Afghanistan.

I told them that NATO isn't all bad. They had stopped the yugoslavian civil-war.
They had never heard of that.
I asked them: "Mid-90s? Civil-war in Yugoslavia? Genocide?" (Hoping that the buzzwords would ring a bell.)
Nope, had never heard of that.

[EdwardBernays]

10. Yep

Stupid and ignorant are pretty universal.

Sure, there's so much that the American military are doing around the world NOW Americans don't know about. Like the crap in Yemen.

It's easy to be pretty disheartened though if you only focus on ignorance. :/

[dorkzilla]

13. 1,000,000

Everyone I know in Britain, well, actually everyone I know in England went to public school, and they're all very posh, exactly what most people in the U.S. would consider typical. Everyone I know in Ireland and Denmark went to state schools and they are every bit as educated. So it is the class system, and it's never going to change either - the HMC is too influential and lucrative. Eton costs something around £30,000 per year it's not the most expensive one either.

[Odin2005]

17. I know an elementary school teacher who doesn't know basic US history.

She didn't know that the Civil War happened before WW1...

[crim son]

24. My son came home dumbstruck last year

because his English teacher was discussing the Civil War but referred to it as the Revolutionary War. When she was corrected, she stood her ground! This was a tenth-grade English "teacher."

[Odin2005]

29. On Jr. High I had a substitute geography teacher who confused...

The Bering Straight land bridge during the last ice age with Pangaea, which was between 300-180 million years ago.

[crim son]

30. My very first experience with taking my first child to school occurred

about twenty years ago when I took my daughter to her first day in preschool. We lived in a very small coastal town in Maine at the time; I think there were about 750 residents in the winter and more during tourist season. The teacher had prepared the classroom by labeling various items in capital letters which was a cute idea but some of the labels contained spelling errors! My (then) PHd husband and I were appalled! but as it turned out it was a clear indicator of the school's standards. A few years later when we moved to Bangor my poor daughter was at the bottom of the class. It took her about a year to catch up and surpass her fellow students, enter the Gifted and Talented program and take her place at the very top of every class she attended from that time on. Long story short, she graduated college with two majors: Systems Engineering and Mathematics, with a minor in Naval Architecture. I have often wondered where she'd be if we hadn't left that tiny town. The school was substandard and there was an active effort on the part of the locals to prevent any growth and improvement. One notable episode, which prompted us to move: a local teacher wanted to take her class to a mid-size town (Ellsworth, ME) about thirty minutes away to attend a live performance in their historic local theater. Residents of the town nixed the plan because, they claimed, the children might be negatively influenced by what they saw in the big city. The population of Ellsworth is roughly 8000. True story and yes, MIND BOGGLING. There were other such incidents. The problems with our educational system are many and varied and as much tied to culture as they are to the teachers themselves.

[Odin2005]

31. The crab-bucket effect and fear of being "tainted" by "Big City debauchery" sounds like.

I'm surprised that the later happened in Maine of all places, I usually expect the "we must protect our kids from the Big City" mentality to mainly be a Southern Fundamentalist thing.

[crim son]

32. The northern part of Maine is very much a mixed bag

when it comes to personalities. There is an incredible resistance to change in the smaller communities.

[LeftishBrit]

8. I must also add...

that the British tabloid press is definitely part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Unlike most British tabloids, the Mirror is at least not right-wing, or obsessed with eeevil immigrants. But it still has many other tabloid faults and IMO does not help the country's educational level.

In America, 'Fox News' and the like no doubt have equivalent effects. Our TV broadcasting is better than that of America, but our press is worse.

[EdwardBernays]

11. Well...

You know there is SOME decent British press... But eg when I lived in East London the local cornershop had to order in a single copy of the Guardian for me... No one else was interested.

The prevalence and dominance of the tabloid press is shocking to an outsider.

[mdbl]

12. The questions on this video are bogus

If they would ask her if she could put makeup on two eyes per hour, how long would it take to finish both eyes? I'll bet she would get it right!

[tom_kelly]

15. We can't be far behind n/t

[hunter]

21. They clearly haven't learned to cheat testing and inhibit research as we do in the U.S.A..

Although, being the Mirror, this is probably some kind of push for further privatization and cutbacks in public education. Their business model requires a certain level of ignorance among their readers.

Okay, I did not read the article, but the Mirror's stupid web page won't load on my browser, probably because they want to make me watch flashy bouncy penis advertisements; no not the kind of penis men usually keep in their pants, I mean the walking, talking sorts of cookie- spewing-dickheads-and-their-constant-grifting penises. I don't block most advertising, just the really annoying shit.

[trof]

26. Wow. That is unbelievable.

[valerief]

27. This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago (the 80s) with my mother and her friends.

These were women I liked and joked with and got along very well with. I gave them a puzzle--a kind of lame one--to solve.

A man and his son were in a car accident. The man died right away, but the son was brought to the hospital. In the emergency room, the doctor said, "I can't operate on him. He's my son!" Who was the doctor?

None of the women gave the correct answer, "The boy's mother." They didn't seem to understand the puzzle, no matter how many times I told it. Of course, this was all before same-sex marriage and just a decade after the big feminist protest marches and their consciousness-raising groups and when the term "women's lib" was used frequently.

After a good 20 minutes, I told them the answer. They still didn't understand the point of the puzzle. "His mother? I don't get it."

I was flummoxed even more than they were. How could they not get it? A child could understand it. What had been missing/damaged/turned off in their brains that prevented them from understanding the point of the puzzle?

[trof]

28. Not just the UK. You tube is loaded with these videos. Concept of MPH.

Amazing how many people don't understand the concept of 'miles-per-hour'.

NSFW!

[geek tragedy]

33. Unsurprising to anyone who's vacationed in Spain. nt