But the cost of the society in money is in the end more if they can't get jobs and end up in prison. Or end up receiving social benefits. I'm really mind blown by the results of this poll. Really.
Reading is pretty fundamental, period. The root cause(s) isn't just reading. What lead to children falling behind reading by the 3rd grades? That's a more important questions. The answer can be so vary. - Mental ability (born with) - Education mismatch (not everyone learn the same way; e.g. People with Dyslexia can learn to read, just not with the standard methods) - Children with 24/7 working parent (of course I'm exaggerating, but there are parent that work to death for their livelihood and does not have time to support their Children - e.g. reading daily, homework, ...) - Children with parent that don't give a crap - Children with parent that are abusive Which of the above do you think likely lead the child to be more likely to be incarcerated at an older age? All? Some? Does IT EVEN MATTER? If children is first and foremost (hello, can we direct some war funding to our children?), we can help with all of the above situations.
I'm not actually against improving literacy. Doing so would bring a big societal benefit. But, I don't like the way the question was framed. Imo, the correlation with crime is related to being a member of a subclass at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy, and not literacy itself. Widespread improvement in literacy can help empower mobility, but you'll have someone at the bottom still, which will continue to engender crime. To borrow a Bushism, we'll be making the pie higher. But literacy won't change the size of the slices, and I don't think we'd see a secular decline in overall crime as a result. So, yeah, of course we should work on literacy and education generally. We should make the pie higher. But, I don't think we should do it with an eye toward crime rates. We should do it to improve social mobility, to improve quality of life, and to increase our competitiveness in the world economy.
So you are saying education is not a means out of poverty? I am not sure when the correlation is so strong that people would not see literacy as an important element in fighting crime. The most fundamental of skills to be part of society is being able to read. If you can't read, you can't really work and that leaves crime as one of the few alternatives. It seems the connection is just common sense? And while I see your point about not wanting to connect literacy to crime, the fact is that I am trying to understand if people would care more about educating children especially around literacy if they knew the link to crime. I am asking this because I am working with a nonprofit trying to move people to participate more in children's lives who are underprivileged and they are looking to find a more powerful way to shake people out of their apathy. Especially more conservative folks who are against giving handouts crowd. So I am trying to understand what would move people to care about this issue.
But imagine if you couldn't read. You couldn't get a proper job,you couldn't have any prospect in life and you couldn't even acquire new knowledge. Reading is a fundamental skill taht our whole society is built on. If you were in such situation you are limited all your life in poverty. Poverty and hardship leads many people to do crimes like stealing, out of neccesity. What about involving the third age? A lot of old retired people with the modern family feel they lack purpose and often are depressed. Helping young kids learn to read (which most should be able to do just fine) can be mutually beneficial. Just throwing an idea here.
Yeah I guess I would be willing to provide support if I knew how to properly teach reading. I am not a good reader. I don't have a fundamentally sound base in reading. I think I only actually read 2 or 3 books up until college. The only two I remember are the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass and a biography about Bo Jackson. I'm sure there had to be some others I read from cover to cover but I don't remember them. I was able to bs my way through book reports and luckily I had a knack for memorizing words quickly for vocabulary tests. Reading and mathematics are two things that are not fundamentally taught properly in school. I learned math is not taught correctly when I discovered Khan Academy. I learned reading is not taught correctly from research I did about it after I discovered Khan Academy. I can go deeper into it but I'm posting from my phone. So I guess my point is that we are failing in our teaching methods and not recognizing it and that is the cause of many educational problems. We don't need to work harder and throw more money at things like we do with everything in America. We have to work smarter and be more nimble with how we address problems.
I think that puts a whole different spin on it. My reaction on crime and education is essentially academic, and I was reacting in perhaps a little annoyance to the way the question was framed -- would the crime I'm subjected to go down if we were able to educate kids better. I think it won't, but that doesn't mean that education for the individual isn't a benefit or that it won't lead to better outcomes and less crime. Of course it will for the individual. I have a theoretical construct about why crime in general will persist despite education, but it's not really relevant to real non-profits trying to do real things in the real world with real individuals. I'd think conservatives would be addressable through church organizations, framed as a ministry. I don't know if that's an available channel to you, but the structures are already there, as well as the mindset of helping others instead of serving self-interest.
What exactly is your proposal here? Volunteer tutoring? Specifically, what public policy should be enacted to reduce illiteracy?
Unless the money and benefit flows up to the Few they don't give a damn about the overall cost to society it makes for a good narrative to have more money making schemes to push money upwards while keeping the whip cracking over the poor Rocket River
This stuff gets very political quickly. Part of the mission for the organization is to help raise awareness that providing underprivileged children with mentorship is a national security priority. For the kind of scale they are thinking they need a strong message that will resonate with more than those who are already inclined to receive it. That's why I test different ideas.
I failed the 3rd grade. I had to take the 3rd grade over again. The school wouldn't let me go to the 4th grade until I was able to read and do the work. Is that not how it works today?
Not committing crimes is fundamental to not being incarcerated. Should we provide more education to children about what is and isn't breaking the law? Perhaps make this education oral in nature so even the illiterate kids learn just like the literate kids?
I have never seen any rigorous evidence that there is significant causation between literacy and crime rates and not their correlation simply being caused by a third, unseen factor. Well, it doesn't say if the prisoner participation in those reading programs were voluntary or not, so it is not evidence that literacy causes lower re-incarceration, since prisoners who want to better themselves would naturally re-offend less than the ones who don't and it would not be caused by improved literacy. That invalidates everything that you said after that since I still haven't seen any evidence that falling behind in reading skills causes crime, and not that committing crimes causes a drop in reading skills, or (as it most likely is) that there is something else that causes both low reading skills and future crime rates. I see the relationship between literacy and crime as a spurious relationship. The lack of evidence that low reading skills CAUSE crime, meaning that there is a lack of evidence that helping kids learn to read will reduce future crime rates, is the reason why I don't see any point in addressing reading in order to lower crime rates. Other problems: how can you address low reading levels? Take the kids away from their neglectful parents? Who is going to protect them then? There's simply no way to improve reading rates without hurting some other aspect of kids' lives that will commensurately increase their chances of committing crimes later as well.
Well the facts show that public schools are not failing in neighborhoods with good income. In fact they are often world class in such neighborhoods. The outcomes are not so good in low socio-economic neighborhoods.
Causation is always difficult to prove but you put up a standard that's higher than medical science. The only way to prove causation is to do a study of two groups where one group is taught how to read and the other group just watches videos but still signed up for a reading class. It may not be reading you are right, it might be moral support or confidence. But the correlation is strongest with reading versus other academic skills so that does imply a more than casual relationship. The fact that you don't see any point to trying something here says a lot.
What? LOL You can improve reading skills without taking the kid to foster care Like with after school lessons, donating children books, programs in boys and girls clubs where volunteers help, spelling contests with some prizes etc etc Your question quite frankly here was ridiculous. I think it is obvious that this pitch doesn't work. You said you made this thread ot see the reaction. Maybe just linking to poverty will be enough, because a portion of the posters here a) think that poverty isn't a factor to crime b) are too defensive. Of course it depends on your crowd too. Doubt that the people who post in the DnD are indicative of the general population and your volunteering target crowd. Good luck and keep the good work. You are making a real change.
No we shouldn't spend as much on education as we spend on policing. That would represent a gargantuan cut to education spending. In 2010 (the first year I could find numbers for both) the United States spent $261 billion on crime (including policing, the criminal courts, incarceration, legal services, the whole shebang). The same year, the United States spent $919 billion on education (I believe this only accounts for public monies, not private education expenditures). We spend 3.5 times as much on education as we do on crime. There is also not one school in America that is so deficient that none of the children attending are able to learn to read. Children who attend school but can't read likely fall into one of the following camps: (1) too stupid to read, (2) don't care to learn to read (lack of motivation, societal pressure against learning, whatever). Neither group get's fixed by throwing more money at schools. Instead, we should work to identify early on those who are not destined to become college bound and divert them onto a different track to prepare them to do something else, improving both their lot, as well as the lot of those who are no longer dragged down by their presence. That plus an end to social promotion would go a long way toward improving education in this country.
