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There is no way US literacy in the 1950s was anywhere near 90% unless you excluded marginalized and minority populations.
Ok i thought for sure this is bullshit, but apparently not:
Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills
Is the ministry of education in China a reliable source?
Why wouldn’t be a reliable source on education in China?
Really?
Really
I’m going to go with yes. 97% isn’t an unreasonable literacy rate for a country, being similar to those of Greece, the Philippines, Turkey, and Chile. It would also make sense given the emphasis that has been put on education
Forgive me for being sceptical. I’ve worked with a lot of Chinese researchers who have said outright that I should never cite a paper from China unless it’s published in nature or I know the authors personally (because it’s so often falsified).
Fwiw the same stats (or similar ones) are corroborated by other sources
Is the US Census Bureau a reliable source?
I hate to rain on y’all’s parade, but the US measure of literacy is much more stringent than China’s. America is counting literacy as the ability to use print materials like brochures and manuals fluently, the rest of the world just bases literacy on the ability to read a handful of test sentences in a controlled testing context. That’s the reason that America appears to have gone down as well, they switched literacy measures. The 79% measure is people who are “at or below level 1 literacy”, meaning it counts people who met level 1, people who didn’t meet level 1, and people who couldn’t even take the test at all because of a language barrier or disability. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf
I’m all for dunking on America but the apples to apples here would be comparing America’s 96% (just excluding those below level 1) to China’s 97%. Historical materialism requires a true material basis to work.
