4.6 Literacy - ReadySetGooo/Sustainable-Development-Goals GitHub Wiki

United States

CURRENT KNOWLEDGE

Resources

Lay-Person Tasks

Illiteracy has a lot of stigma. Be kind and inclusive to people who can’t read, and don’t make disparaging comments.

Combat anti-intellectualism:

Be supportive of scientific evidence and learning new things.
Be kind and inclusive to people who enjoy discussing academic topics, have a big vocabulary, or have gifted intelligence.
Listen to people with deep knowledge and gifted intelligence and value their input. They metaphorically have “binoculars” that allow them to see more in the world than the average person, and trusting people with binoculars on issues that can only be seen with binoculars is very important. Understand that knowledge and intelligence is different from experience, and be wary of information that can only be gained by experience being discussed by someone who doesn’t have experience.

Action Tasks

Build a little library for your neighborhood- little libraries are sheltered boxes with books people donate and borrow

Stocks

Right now, many students in K-12 education are illiterate and don’t have numeracy. This is for a few reasons:

Students are unmotivated, don’t care, and aren’t interested in education due to the state of the world and feeling hopeless about the future of the world as well as their own future. Lack of motivation is also from living in an anti-intellectualism society.
Students are severely traumatized from the pandemic and current economic and political collapse, and can’t focus on school because they have bigger things to worry about. Some of this inability to focus or comprehend is literal brain dysregulation and damage from trauma.
Students have brain damage from the neurological impacts of catching covid, which they are more likely to catch at school due to schools not following covid precautions.
Students don’t realize they are behind since everyone in their grade is equally behind, they can’t compare themselves to success or have a concept of how far they should be. Many students couldn’t learn in a remote school setting, and students in rural areas or who were low-income may have not been able to attend remote school at all.
Conservative political groups intentionally created these conditions, because they know that lack of education makes people easy to manipulate and abuse, have a higher interest in religion, and are more likely to commit violence.

Rules

“No Child Left Behind” policy has led to illiterate students never getting the support they need.

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

Paradigms

Make tangible progress on the sustainable development goals to give students a sense of hope. See other goals.

Information Flows

Create a short curriculum for the bare minimum students need to know to achieve the purpose of education:

Holocaust (Project 2025 is an attempt to recreate the Holocaust, so students need to be educated as to not support it)
media literacy (to address the spread of propaganda)
women's rights (to address the increase in gender-based violence that boys are committing)
cultural anthropology (this helps students understand transcending paradigms which is the highest level of intervention in systems)
mental health skills (this is to address the rise in mental health problems. CBT should not be used, as it's not helpful for trauma.)

Fedback Loops