Donald Trump and Literacy
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here at my Steve's Café and today I want to talk about literacy and I want to talk about Donald Trump and literacy, to some extent.
Before I get into that, today in the England-Russia match at the European Cup there was a great amount of violence, the Russian fans attacked the English fans. Mind you, the English fans had been behaving abominably for the last two-three days. As far as I'm concerned if they turf both teams, Russia and England, out of the European Cup that would probably be a good thing for the European Cup. Canada doesn't have a team there so who am I to say, but it's pretty disgusting to the way those hooligans are behaving. I gather it's also the French ultras and a whole bunch of others. What a miserable culture. We don't get that in hockey, although in Vancouver we had a riot when Vancouver lost in the Stanley Cup. Why do people behave so badly?
Anyway, getting back to Donald Trump, he sort of started me on this thing.
On CNN this morning, first, I watched Hillary Clinton speak to the Planned Parenthood Association and then I saw Donald Trump speak to some Christian group. If we leave aside their politics, the difference in the quality of the presentations is astounding. Hillary speaks well. She uses the language well. She sounds intelligent. She makes sense. She's balanced. She flows logically from one thought to the next. Trump is all over the place. He makes no sense, jumps from one thing to another. He likes to say I have a good brain, that's not evident from his speech. He likes to say I went to one of the best universities and that's also not evident. What do people learn at university?
So then I did a bit of research and it turns out that Trump has 27% more support than Hillary amongst white non-college graduates.
Amongst white college graduates it's even between Clinton and Trump. Now, I also found a website that tells me that people who don't go to college have lower literacy levels than people who graduate from college. That's not surprising. Although a lot of people who go to college don't graduate, but that's another issue. However, amongst college graduates in the United States only 25% have sufficient literacy skills to learn from reading, to really understand what they're reading. That 25% goes up to 31% amongst post-graduate students in the United States.
I should say that in the United States about 50% attend college, which in my mind is far too high, so is it possible that the support for Trump is higher amongst that 75% of college graduates who have poor literacy skills.
In my opinion, if a person has good literacy skills and can read a lot, read quickly and access a lot of information they would know that Donald Trump has historically in his career promised all kinds of stuff and delivered very little, Atlantic City, Trump University, Trump State and so forth. They would have, perhaps, a different perspective on what Trump is saying about making America great, we'll give you jobs, we'll do this, we'll do that. I don't know that for a fact, but we do know that the people who don't go to college are more likely to support Trump.
On the subject of literacy I also found another interesting website where they talk about the importance of oral literacy and sort of comprehensive literacy.
The reason I'm interested in the subject is one of the big issues in the American campaign is the increasing divide between rich and poor. In 1970, more people were bunched up. They had a bit of a bell curve insofar as income distribution was concerned. Most of the people were in the middle. Now we have a much flatter curve with a big spike of people in the top one percent, including Donald Trump of course. Statistics demonstrate that a high level of literacy is one of the best indicators of economic success, academic success and so forth. Therefore, the higher the level of literacy in a society, the better people will do. The more people who have poor literacy skills, the more people will have trouble doing well economically.
So this particular website which talks about the importance of oral and comprehensive literacy and talks about the importance of reading for learning really is something that I fully sympathize with and that's kind of behind LingQ, which as you know is my language-learning website, where every lesson has audio.
You want to listen and read. We have ways for people to focus on words and phrases, save these phrases. Now with text to speech you can hear the phrases you have saved. That relationship between listening, reading, focusing on words, learning words, learning phrases, enriching your vocabulary so that you can then actually access more challenging material, more interesting material, learn more, this is a virtuous cycle. The more you read, the better you can read, the better you read, the more material you access, the more words you know, the more words you can infer and so forth and so on. I'm going to leave links to these articles.
Really, what I want to stress is the importance of literacy, the importance of literacy in order to reduce inequality in any society, the rather low levels of literacy in the United States -- I don't have statistics for Canada or Europe, but there may be a similar situation there – that 75% of college graduates in the Unites States have low levels of literacy, that white non-college attendees are more likely to support Trump, more likely to put up with kind of speech that I heard this morning and I'm guessing a number of the college graduates who support Trump I suspect fall into that 75% of college graduates who have poor literacy skills.
So there you have it.
To me, Trump looks like a guy who doesn't ready very much. One more thing, I'd be quite open to having discussions here with other people. Two or three people could join me and we could exchange views. We could do it in English, French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, whatever language I speak, and we could have an exchange of views live for people to listen to.
So that's that.
Thank you for listening, bye for now.
