The Glade 4.0

I'm not sure if mathematics skills are a legitimate measurement of literacy, but I'd say that if you can't perform the four basic operations on 3 digit numbers with 99%+ accuracy (we all have bonehead moments) under adverse conditions, you've got serious problems with your level of education.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

Used to be, back in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1970s, that the functionally illiterate could fill out a job application, read a map, follow road signs, etc. Hence, they were actually functional in most societal and vocational roles. They could read bus schedules or train schedules, navigate highways and interstates, and order from a menu with little difficulty. What the functionally illiterate could not do, despite knowing all the words and recognizing them in a newspaper article (for instance), was inference or deduction based on written material presented to them.

But, you know, we keep lowering our standards.

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That sounds to me more like a measure of reasoning than literacy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Diamondeye:

Literacy is a measure of trained reasoning, particularly inference and deduction. There are sentences I could write that while perfectly intelligible, you would not understand. I'm absolutely certain that the reverse is true as well. Literacy is not the ability to recognize words as they appear in written format. It is goes far beyond that.

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Interesting.

I would point out though, that any sentence I could write that you wouldn't understand would involve terms which have highly specialized technical meanings within my areas of expertise, and the reverse would be true for sentences you would write that I couldn't make heads or tails of.

Since not everyone is trained in every area of expertise, however intelligent they may be, I don't think you're trying to say that the inability to understand sentences describing highly specialized matters is a good measure of literacy for the average person.

So it seems you are saying that there is a certain lower limit of reasoning power which is necessary to achieve functional literacy and another, higher, lower limit to achieve full literacy (leaving out literacy in specialized areas). That seems quite reasonable to me. However I would also ask if a person of average intelligence can be expected to meet either standard, and if they cannot, why is the standard so high?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Everyone, go!

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Heh, Finnegan's Wake.

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Does anyone understand Joyce?

Timmit:

Finnegan's Wake is widely regarded as indecipherable. Some of the passages are certainly unintelligible without serious effort. The opening? Not so much.

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An example of person who should be banned from writing.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

An example of epic ignorance on your par, Elmo. James Joyce is generally regarded as the author of the single most important piece of Western literature written in the Twentieth Centure: Ulysses. Of course, Finnegan's Wake is an entirely different beast on its own. Very few of the words in that passage are completely contrived; it is a mish-mash of Gaelic, English, Middle English, and Old English, with a little French, and a whole lot of phonetic play.

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It was a joke.

And it wouldn't matter because Ulysses was published before Finnegan's Wake so the ban would have come afterward anyway.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Just to be clear, I personally don't expect comprehension of Finnegan's Wake to be seriously considered as a requirement for literacy. However, as a benchmark for advanced literacy, I think it has its place.

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Comprehension of Finnegan's Wake is a benchmark for dissertations. That said, I'd set the standard for literacy at or around the level of an Arthur Conan Doyle short-story.

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That's CAPTAIN Jack... er...

SIR Arthur Conan Doyle

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In time, this too shall pass.

Granting the assumptions behind this statement as correct for the sake of discussion, the answer is: it depends.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine