[lbo-talk] U.S. working class: buncha morons

Celi Ben cpthron at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 2 13:01:06 PST 2005



>· 50% of the U.S. population aged 16-65 is functionally illiterate.

Yes, that is very unbelievable. While I was surprised sometimes during high school when a teacher had us just read the history book chapter aloud as a group and a few couldn't and didn't want to be called on, my main project is sending books to prisoners, and I'm frequently surprised at their requests. Only a few are asking for Stephen King, and quite a few have really specific requests showing that they know quite a bit about a subject, like requests for specific poets, Francis Bacon and other philosophers, calculus, psychology, lots of paganism, foreign languages and specific areas of history. About 1/3 of requests are for ethnic studies, and I know that this is partly caused by the climate in prison, and all the Nietsche and Machiavelli requests are for cynical european ethnicity bonding. They also ask for '48 laws of power' which I've never seen but an article said Courtney Love was seen walking out of a courtroom with that. They also tend to write their letters very formally with 'mister' and 'Mrs.' and the date in the right place, and nice cursive script like you learn in school. It is high ranking people that write quick emails without checking spelling.

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