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« Skeptics' Circle #26 • The Rants • Carnival of the Godless #32 »
A Little Something We Like to Call "Job Security"
2006.01.22 (Sun) 00:12
Now this is just sad.
More than half of students at four-year colleges and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills no matter their field of study.
The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
These are the complex tasks?! Balancing a checkbook, calculating a tip, interpreting those little tables on exercise equipment, and understanding credit card offers? Another version of this article also mentions comparing the per ounce cost of food. Hell, these aren't complex tasks, they are extraordinarily basic tasks. Each of them requires two things: the ability to parse and comprehend what you are reading, and the ability to do elementary school level math. What the fuck is wrong with these people? This isn't differential calculus, it's simple addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication — skills that were taught in grade school. Fuck!
Now, we're reasonably sure that most of the people who failed these basic tests knew how to do the math involved, so we have to assume that they simply didn't know how to apply what they know to the situation at hand. But frankly, that's pretty staggering as well. To us, this isn't a statement about lack of education, it's a statement about lack of basic intelligence. What the heck can be done about that?
Of course, this is the same apparent stupidity that spurs calls to stop credit card companies from offering credit cards to people under 21. Some people would mandate parental consent, or even parental co-signing for the card, while others would ask for demonstrated income sufficient to pay the expected monthly bills. Others would require classes in credit management, and still others think that if you're under 21, you just shouldn't be able to have a credit card at all.
First of all, it's important to note that not all excessive credit card (or other) debt is due to stupidity. There are many valid reasons that intelligent and responsible people end up in debt with no way out. However, there also seems to be a segment of the US population that has no comprehension of how credit works, and as a result they end up in massive debt for the rest of their lives, with a credit rating in the toilet to boot. It is this latter group that we are talking about here.
The idea of protecting people from their own stupidity is nice, but when it infringes upon the rights of the non-stupid, it becomes harmful. If someone is not a minor, then insisting upon parental consent (or co-signing) before a credit card can be issued is placing an undue burden on an adult. The same goes for mandating a credit management class — this isn't rocket science, and many people are capable of figuring out how credit cards work all by themselves. Finally, demanding demonstrated income sufficient to pay the estimated monthly bills is just plain crap — if the monthly payments are estimated based on the spending habits of the more moronic credit card holders, then few people with full-time jobs would have enough income to pay that assumed bill, let alone college students. Of course, if you are responsible in your credit card use, then you don't need much income at all to pay your monthly bills, now, do you?
But this problem isn't limited to credit cards and restaurant tips — our guess is that this mass stupidity is behind the wild popularity of evolution denial in the United States as well. Yes, we know that religion is a big part of that movement, but without an underlying lack of intelligence or proper education (or, more usually, both), these people would eventually realize that Creationism and Intelligent Design were nothing but unscientific bullshit, and they would move on. For our dime, it's the combination of religious indoctrination and basic stupidity that creates a Creationist — one without the other just doesn't do it. We just have difficulty believing that an intelligent person to whom the theory of evolution has been explained, and the evidence has been presented, could ever deny the simple fact that evolution is real.
Whether the particular statistics detailed in this study are shown to be accurate or not, it's clear that there's a problem in this country, and to us, that problem appears to be one of intelligence; as far as we can tell, no amount of income or remedial math classes can solve it. Sadly, we don't know if anything can.
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[ Filed under: % Business & the Economy ]
Comments (18)
Dikkii, 2006.01.22 (Sun) 09:12 [Link] »
Ford, 2006.01.22 (Sun) 16:27 [Link] »
jay denari, 2006.01.22 (Sun) 18:58 [Link] »
DummyPlug, 2006.01.22 (Sun) 20:07 [Link] »
The Two Percent Company, 2006.01.22 (Sun) 22:20 [Link] »
Jesse, 2006.01.23 (Mon) 14:30 [Link] »
Crosius, 2006.01.23 (Mon) 14:50 [Link] »
The Two Percent Company, 2006.01.23 (Mon) 20:52 [Link] »
DummyPlug, 2006.01.23 (Mon) 21:33 [Link] »
The Two Percent Company, 2006.01.23 (Mon) 22:59 [Link] »
Michael Bains, 2006.01.24 (Tue) 08:07 [Link] »
The Two Percent Company, 2006.01.24 (Tue) 14:32 [Link] »
Michael Bains, 2006.01.24 (Tue) 16:36 [Link] »
Fan-man, 2006.01.24 (Tue) 18:12 [Link] »
The Two Percent Company, 2006.01.24 (Tue) 18:25 [Link] »
PB27, 2006.02.02 (Thu) 16:28 [Link] »
Tom from the Two Percent Company, 2006.02.05 (Sun) 01:09 [Link] »
roman, 2007.01.23 (Tue) 19:54 [Link] »
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