So far as I know, they taught about the same things as the white schools.
If not, how did so many of them learn to read by going to school?
They didn't learn to read, they learned to ``read''. The ones who got no phonics instruction, black or white, had memorized the appearance of a few hundred or a few thousand words. If they saw a word they knew, but hadn't learned to recognize, they were lost. They couldn't teach their children to read, because they really couldn't do it themselves. Still, they would truthfully be able to say that they could ``read'', and thus would be counted as literate.
Both the white and the black literacy rates stayed above the school enrolment rates, because some of them learned outside of school. Not all schools taught exclusively Look-say, and not all blacks were illiterate, but the blacks were far more vulnerable to bad schools than were the whites, because they were less likely to have a family tradition of passing on literacy than were the whites.
As for Kennedy's little slip (I bet the NEA said nasty things to him about that one), good statistics on literacy start some years after the beginning of the public school movement in the U.S., so it's hard to run regressions, since there are no time series that go back far enough. All we really have for the pre-Civil War period are indicators of literacy, like de Tocqueville's reports in ``Democracy in America'', sales of books like Cooper's ``Last of the Mohicans'', and statements by respectable people of the times, like John Adams. All these indicators point to the fact that literacy was universal among free citizens in the Northern U.S. in the pre-public school days. It was quite common (though not universal) in the Southern U.S. So, Kennedy's sound bite is fun to talk about, because it probably offended his core constituency, but it would have to be based on the same guesswork that I was quoting above. Thus, I haven't traced down the accuracy of the quote.
Some of the vocabulary of the KJV has dropped out of use between Adams' time and now. Remember that we are only about twice as far away from the KJV as Adams was, so that should have been a problem in his day, too, though a lesser one.
The real problem that modern readers have with the KJV seems to be sentence structure. The grammar and systax of the KJV are (aside from some quibbles about forms of pronouns) essentially what we use today. If you clean out the archaic words, you're left with well-written modern English (it's called the New King James Version), and it's still hard going for the ``educated'' modern reader. My grandfather (born in 1888, never finished highschool) had no trouble comprehending the KJV, but most modern college graduates do. He had learned to parse convoluted sentences, unlike the ``educated'' of today.
I'm still searching for the provenance for this quote, but in the 1960's, Senator Kennedy is supposed to have issued a press release saying that literacy rates in Massachusetts had fallen with the introduction of public schooling.
That's not surprising news, since the public schools quickly picked up the insane ``Look-say'' method, which teaches that words are ideograms, rather than that words are collections of sounds. This left children who didn't get phonics instruction at home out in the cold, and may have kept some children from learning to read who would have learned to read if left to themselves. Furthermore, the children were entirely dependent on their teachers, since Look-say provides no tools for learning on your own.
The official statistics show that white school enrolment had essentially no affect on white literacy, while black literacy tracked black school enrolment fairly closely. That is, whites learned to read whether they went to school or not, while blacks learned to read at school, only.
That may be because white parents were able to provide their children with phonics instruction at home, while black parents more often couldn't.
White literacy was high, well above 80%, in 1870. That was after some years of immigration of illiterates from Europe, and the government schooling which was developed in response to the wave of Catholic immegration (yes, public schooling has some racist roots). Black literacy in 1870 was about 20%. That's about 5 years after the Civil War. It is probable that the pre-Civil War black literacy rate was quite close to that. In many of the slave states, it was illegal to teach blacks to read, so that suggests that even in the South, literacy was very widespread, and bright people could ``just catch it'', like a cold, with little aid.
Given that functional literacy might have required a slightly lower level of reading ability than is needed today, those figures are simply astounding. In a time when an illiterate man could make a decent living, more than 80% of the whites (probably more than 90% of the native born whites; remember those illiterate Catholic immigrants) could read. In other words, most people probably had a higher level of literacy than they needed to function. Today, many people would function better if they could read better, with more understanding.
A century before that, in the 1790s, John Adams wrote that illiterate men were scarce. He was speaking of Protestant New England, of course, where everyone was expected to learn to read, so that he could read the King James Bible. Many people who are considered ``literate'' today find the KJV impenetrable, so perhaps the standards of literacy were higher back then, rather than lower?
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, Cooper's ``Last of the Mohicans'' sold about as many copies per capita as the Harry Potter series has. But contrast Cooper's writing style with Rowling's! I suspect that most of the people who are willing to wade through a Harry Potter story would find one of Cooper's books mighty tough going. Also, the price was over a day's wages for most workers. How many Harry Potter books do you think would sell if they cost a day's wages each? Again, I think it shows that real literacy was wide spread in the 18th and 19th centuries, and perhaps at a higher level than today.
>>... the lower level of intelligence of adults in our society. As people get dumber the more difficult books sell fewer copies.
> We need to bring back all of those books that are no fun to read and serve mostly to browbeat you into the authors way of thinking!
If you were trying to prove the point you were replying to, I think you succeded nicely. The whole point of literature is that it is a conversation about things that matter, carried on through the ages. If you find great literature pointless, you are probably too immature and uneducated to understand the ideas that the most brilliant minds in history (think Newton, Pascal, Descartes, et cetera) have obsessed over. Don't take that as an insult, please. Lack of education and lack of intellectual maturity are common problems with folks who attended a public school.
You can learn to benefit from good books. I'd suggest that you begin with How to Read a Book. I'd also suggest learning an inflected language, such as Latin, Russian or even German. The grammar that forces into you will help you immensely with your ability to parse English.
Back in the mid-80s, I worked for a little value added retailer which sold medical billing systems. They sold Xenix/Altos and Pick/General Automation systems with several users on several terminals, and competed with IBM, which sold mini computers which cost far more than the tens of thousands our systems cost.
When IBM PC compatibles became a major force in the market, we were able to undercut our old systems dramatically. We weren't selling MS systems, but every PC system we sold had MS-DOS on it. We were able to undercut ourselves, and cut our own throats.
Microsoft gets a bit of the credit for this, because they provided the standard and open[1] (but proprietary) base that companies like Peachtree, Kaypro and Compaq could build on. Suddenly, there was no need to support a group of engineers and programmers in your home town who could integrate hardware and write software to get the job done. Peachtree and the clones did it from the Bay Area, cheaper and better, as long as better meant cheaper.
MS was always cheaper than what it replaced, jsut as the platform it ran on was cheaper than the minis. MS was making it big on volume. Today, they've got more volume than ever before, but the new competition is able to cut prices all the way to zero, forever, and that's just the opening salvo in the price war. MS aren't stupid. They may figure it out eventually, but they may stumble badly on the way.
[1] The PC BIOS sourcecode was listed in the manual. Command.com was simple enough that you could figure it out using debug.exe.
(In other words, you think I'm so stupid or powerless that you don't need to even try hiding the bias.)
Bias in the open fools no-one. It's sort of like no bias at all. It's obvious, and easily discounted. You can tell where the facts stop and the opinions begin. With subtle bias, you can't easily tell. Overt bias might be obnoxious, but it's honest.
CNN is biased on many issues. They will typically show that by allowing their side's best spokesman enough time to present his case. They then show their ``balance'' by allowing the other side's loony fringe time for a couple of soundbites confirming that they are indeed loony fringe.
How well does CNN's subtle bias work? If you're getting ready to tell me that's all a bunch of crap, it's obviously worked very well indeed.
Flagrant bias isn't about calling you a fool, it shows respect by letting you know the reporter's opinion, so you can evaluate what he says for yourself.
I'd rather read subtle propoganda than flagrant propoganda.
Subtle propaganda --> you're trying to fool me.
Flagrant propaganda --> whatever you're trying, I'll see through it.
The only way flagrant propaganda might irritate me is if it's used to obsure subtle propaganda.
Having said all that, the difference between subtle propaganda and flagrant propaganda is often only that the former matches your predjudices better than the latter.
Oops. Well, good thing I didn't explicitly say it was an error, then. I can claim that I was confirming their take on shipping and exchange rates. Yeah, that's the story.
Picture of flatenna on a review page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
It looks to me as if 15 minutes with graph paper, scissors and glue (together with a bit of card stock and foil) would give you the same thing, without waiting on the snailmail, and without the $25 U.S.
By the way, the site I link to says 9.99 pounds, which should be a bit less than $25.
Windows and Office are free to them, so it only saves on the cost of anti-virus + downtime/patch maintenance, so that's probably only $50 per user or so.
But, don't forget about the user support costs, the system maintenance costs, and the downtime which results from running Windows, Outlook, et cetera, and the resulting infections.
All that dwarfs the price tag of the software, and most of it could be reduced if they used a mix of Linux and OpenBSD.
What's probably more important, by using the GNU development tools, they could easily port their software to dozens of architectures. Right now, MS can't maintain the Intel architecture for one OS and one office suite, while Debian can manage to keep three OSs and more than 8,000 programs built and installable on a dozen architectures. Think what MS could manage if they had up-to-date tools like the ones Debian uses!
Yes, my daughters love pill bottles. Love to try and open them and eat anything that pops out.
But according to half the people here I should let them at it.
Mod parent up. Please.
It's about time someone told these young whippersnappers what their parents had to do for them, and what they'll have to do for their children someday. If they can ever find a girl willing to have them.
Ah, ze CPU run fast, but ze Boches run faster wiz ze French armee after zem, n'est pas?
Shouldn't that be:
Ah, ze French armee run fast, but ze Boches run after zem even faster, n'est pas?
Just thinking of WWII, the last time we saw one of them chasing the other.
The Germans weren't chasing the French for long, though: the Vichey government soon allied their country to the Germans, and supported their war effort by rounding up Jews and what-not. I don't think that government was particularly representative of the will of the French people at the time, but they were the legitimate government by the usual standards.
>>the Windows developers,... added special code that checked if SimCity was running,... ran the memory allocator in a special mode...
>And people say the evil giant doesn't try to fix it's software. They fixed SimCity...
SimCity isn't the Evil Giant's software. Whatever they may do to other people's programs (break DR DOS, fix SimCity...), this doesn't suggest that they fix their own software!
NEVER tell me to modify the xyz file in the abc directory!
Not a problem. Just open regedit.exe, search for k?.@adj$%^rhtg@%^(eruhti, set its value to @#$DFBRT^$%&^^&*....
Oh, winders is so much nicer than that nasty unix!
Yes, I do know about wizards. But if the thing you need isn't in the gui, you're stuck with regedit. Dealing with registry rot definitely isn't in the gui. It would be a great thing if we had GUIs to deal with all the unix config files. It's also a great thing that, until that day, the config files are plain ascii, and generally self-documented (in addition to the fine man page).
Just to get this clearly back on topic, we could say that the moral is: ``Sometimes what newbies want isn't what newbies need.''
The two words have very different definitions, so it's not surprising to me that the FCC distinguishes between them. In fact (adding some words here to beat the lameness filter), I'd be surprised if they didn't.
The FCC seems to concentrate on definitions 1 and 2 for obscene, and definition 1 for profane. I'm not sure that Janet Jackson's breast is obscene by definition 2 (``Inciting lustful feelings; lewd.''), so they must be relying on definition 1 there. Offensive I can believe.
1. Offensive to accepted standards of decency or modesty.
2. Inciting lustful feelings; lewd.
3. Repulsive; disgusting: "The way he writes about the disease that killed her is simply obscene" (Michael Korda).
4. So large in amount as to be objectionable or outrageous: "local merchants in nearby stores get hammered by stratospheric rents and obscene taxes" (Joe Queenan).
profane ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-fn, pr-)
adj.
1. Marked by contempt or irreverence for what is sacred.
2. Nonreligious in subject matter, form, or use; secular: sacred and profane music.
3. Not admitted into a body of secret knowledge or ritual; uninitiated.
4. Vulgar; coarse.
... you cannot correspond with Dell via anything but phone systems, and if you're lucky, e-mail.
Even then, you're dealing with India, so they're not exactly accessible.
Nonsense! From a recent SEC filing:
One Dell Way
Round Rock, Texas 78682
(Address of principal executive offices)
(512) 338-4400
That's not in India, and it's not phone or email only.
I'm sure that a letter addressed to Micheal Dell, CEO or James Schneider, Senior VP at that address would be read by someone with the authority to ask why their website was turning away customers. Just the question, coming from on high, would be seen as a serious problem by the big bosses of whoever ignored the original complaint.
You're making the same mistake that I was talking about: you're trying to convince the peons that they should care about you and your money. If you're talking to them, they know they can ignore you: you can't fire them.
When their boss's boss is asking why the president of the company is on his tail about customers being turned away by the company website, they are going to have to do something to fix the problem. The big cheeses can and will fire them if they don't jump, and ask how high on the way up.
Slashdot Mirror
So far as I know, they taught about the same things as the white schools.
If not, how did so many of them learn to read by going to school?
They didn't learn to read, they learned to ``read''. The ones who got no phonics instruction, black or white, had memorized the appearance of a few hundred or a few thousand words. If they saw a word they knew, but hadn't learned to recognize, they were lost. They couldn't teach their children to read, because they really couldn't do it themselves. Still, they would truthfully be able to say that they could ``read'', and thus would be counted as literate.
Both the white and the black literacy rates stayed above the school enrolment rates, because some of them learned outside of school. Not all schools taught exclusively Look-say, and not all blacks were illiterate, but the blacks were far more vulnerable to bad schools than were the whites, because they were less likely to have a family tradition of passing on literacy than were the whites.
As for Kennedy's little slip (I bet the NEA said nasty things to him about that one), good statistics on literacy start some years after the beginning of the public school movement in the U.S., so it's hard to run regressions, since there are no time series that go back far enough. All we really have for the pre-Civil War period are indicators of literacy, like de Tocqueville's reports in ``Democracy in America'', sales of books like Cooper's ``Last of the Mohicans'', and statements by respectable people of the times, like John Adams. All these indicators point to the fact that literacy was universal among free citizens in the Northern U.S. in the pre-public school days. It was quite common (though not universal) in the Southern U.S. So, Kennedy's sound bite is fun to talk about, because it probably offended his core constituency, but it would have to be based on the same guesswork that I was quoting above. Thus, I haven't traced down the accuracy of the quote.
The real problem that modern readers have with the KJV seems to be sentence structure. The grammar and systax of the KJV are (aside from some quibbles about forms of pronouns) essentially what we use today. If you clean out the archaic words, you're left with well-written modern English (it's called the New King James Version), and it's still hard going for the ``educated'' modern reader. My grandfather (born in 1888, never finished highschool) had no trouble comprehending the KJV, but most modern college graduates do. He had learned to parse convoluted sentences, unlike the ``educated'' of today.
That's not surprising news, since the public schools quickly picked up the insane ``Look-say'' method, which teaches that words are ideograms, rather than that words are collections of sounds. This left children who didn't get phonics instruction at home out in the cold, and may have kept some children from learning to read who would have learned to read if left to themselves. Furthermore, the children were entirely dependent on their teachers, since Look-say provides no tools for learning on your own.
You can find some practical information on phonics and Look-say on my web site.
The official statistics show that white school enrolment had essentially no affect on white literacy, while black literacy tracked black school enrolment fairly closely. That is, whites learned to read whether they went to school or not, while blacks learned to read at school, only. That may be because white parents were able to provide their children with phonics instruction at home, while black parents more often couldn't.
If you want a good history of the public school movement, I'd suggest starting with Gatto's book Undergound History of American Education and Richard Mitchel's Graves of Academe. Market Education: the Unknown History is another excellent resource, but unfortunately isn't available online.
Look here for the sources of what follows.
White literacy was high, well above 80%, in 1870. That was after some years of immigration of illiterates from Europe, and the government schooling which was developed in response to the wave of Catholic immegration (yes, public schooling has some racist roots). Black literacy in 1870 was about 20%. That's about 5 years after the Civil War. It is probable that the pre-Civil War black literacy rate was quite close to that. In many of the slave states, it was illegal to teach blacks to read, so that suggests that even in the South, literacy was very widespread, and bright people could ``just catch it'', like a cold, with little aid.
Given that functional literacy might have required a slightly lower level of reading ability than is needed today, those figures are simply astounding. In a time when an illiterate man could make a decent living, more than 80% of the whites (probably more than 90% of the native born whites; remember those illiterate Catholic immigrants) could read. In other words, most people probably had a higher level of literacy than they needed to function. Today, many people would function better if they could read better, with more understanding.
A century before that, in the 1790s, John Adams wrote that illiterate men were scarce. He was speaking of Protestant New England, of course, where everyone was expected to learn to read, so that he could read the King James Bible. Many people who are considered ``literate'' today find the KJV impenetrable, so perhaps the standards of literacy were higher back then, rather than lower?
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, Cooper's ``Last of the Mohicans'' sold about as many copies per capita as the Harry Potter series has. But contrast Cooper's writing style with Rowling's! I suspect that most of the people who are willing to wade through a Harry Potter story would find one of Cooper's books mighty tough going. Also, the price was over a day's wages for most workers. How many Harry Potter books do you think would sell if they cost a day's wages each? Again, I think it shows that real literacy was wide spread in the 18th and 19th centuries, and perhaps at a higher level than today.
> We need to bring back all of those books that are no fun to read and serve mostly to browbeat you into the authors way of thinking!
If you were trying to prove the point you were replying to, I think you succeded nicely. The whole point of literature is that it is a conversation about things that matter, carried on through the ages. If you find great literature pointless, you are probably too immature and uneducated to understand the ideas that the most brilliant minds in history (think Newton, Pascal, Descartes, et cetera) have obsessed over. Don't take that as an insult, please. Lack of education and lack of intellectual maturity are common problems with folks who attended a public school.
You can learn to benefit from good books. I'd suggest that you begin with How to Read a Book. I'd also suggest learning an inflected language, such as Latin, Russian or even German. The grammar that forces into you will help you immensely with your ability to parse English.
iBash, youBash, we all Bash for iBash... ...
IBM, you BM, we all BM for IBM
No, it simply isn't as catchy as the original. We'll have to go with BashX.
Yes, once upon a time, they were.
Back in the mid-80s, I worked for a little value added retailer which sold medical billing systems. They sold Xenix/Altos and Pick/General Automation systems with several users on several terminals, and competed with IBM, which sold mini computers which cost far more than the tens of thousands our systems cost.
When IBM PC compatibles became a major force in the market, we were able to undercut our old systems dramatically. We weren't selling MS systems, but every PC system we sold had MS-DOS on it. We were able to undercut ourselves, and cut our own throats.
Microsoft gets a bit of the credit for this, because they provided the standard and open[1] (but proprietary) base that companies like Peachtree, Kaypro and Compaq could build on. Suddenly, there was no need to support a group of engineers and programmers in your home town who could integrate hardware and write software to get the job done. Peachtree and the clones did it from the Bay Area, cheaper and better, as long as better meant cheaper.
MS was always cheaper than what it replaced, jsut as the platform it ran on was cheaper than the minis. MS was making it big on volume. Today, they've got more volume than ever before, but the new competition is able to cut prices all the way to zero, forever, and that's just the opening salvo in the price war. MS aren't stupid. They may figure it out eventually, but they may stumble badly on the way.
[1] The PC BIOS sourcecode was listed in the manual. Command.com was simple enough that you could figure it out using debug.exe.
Ta da' It's an airplane, not a missle.
Somehow, that idea sounds as if you cribbed it from Osama.
(In other words, you think I'm so stupid or powerless that you don't need to even try hiding the bias.)
Bias in the open fools no-one. It's sort of like no bias at all. It's obvious, and easily discounted. You can tell where the facts stop and the opinions begin. With subtle bias, you can't easily tell. Overt bias might be obnoxious, but it's honest.
CNN is biased on many issues. They will typically show that by allowing their side's best spokesman enough time to present his case. They then show their ``balance'' by allowing the other side's loony fringe time for a couple of soundbites confirming that they are indeed loony fringe.
How well does CNN's subtle bias work? If you're getting ready to tell me that's all a bunch of crap, it's obviously worked very well indeed.
Flagrant bias isn't about calling you a fool, it shows respect by letting you know the reporter's opinion, so you can evaluate what he says for yourself.
Subtle propaganda --> you're trying to fool me.
Flagrant propaganda --> whatever you're trying, I'll see through it.
The only way flagrant propaganda might irritate me is if it's used to obsure subtle propaganda.
Having said all that, the difference between subtle propaganda and flagrant propaganda is often only that the former matches your predjudices better than the latter.
Oops. Well, good thing I didn't explicitly say it was an error, then. I can claim that I was confirming their take on shipping and exchange rates. Yeah, that's the story.
It looks to me as if 15 minutes with graph paper, scissors and glue (together with a bit of card stock and foil) would give you the same thing, without waiting on the snailmail, and without the $25 U.S.
By the way, the site I link to says 9.99 pounds, which should be a bit less than $25.
But, don't forget about the user support costs, the system maintenance costs, and the downtime which results from running Windows, Outlook, et cetera, and the resulting infections.
All that dwarfs the price tag of the software, and most of it could be reduced if they used a mix of Linux and OpenBSD.
What's probably more important, by using the GNU development tools, they could easily port their software to dozens of architectures. Right now, MS can't maintain the Intel architecture for one OS and one office suite, while Debian can manage to keep three OSs and more than 8,000 programs built and installable on a dozen architectures. Think what MS could manage if they had up-to-date tools like the ones Debian uses!
So, how about a few links on hydergine, and nootropics in general?
But according to half the people here I should let them at it.
Mod parent up. Please.
It's about time someone told these young whippersnappers what their parents had to do for them, and what they'll have to do for their children someday. If they can ever find a girl willing to have them.
We don't have to imagine it: it's here. At less than 500 nodes, the cluster is gridlocked
I always said that the worst sort of perverts were the ones who read the articles instead of looking at the pictures.
From what I've heard of the articles, I was probably right. Since Playboy stopped publishing the works of Kilgore Trout, it's all been downhill.
If you're a programmer with an itch, may I recommend a bath? Follow that up with a visit to a dermatologist, if necessary.
And for goodness sake, don't scratch other folk's itches! You'll spread all kinds of nasty stuff that way.
Shouldn't that be:
Ah, ze French armee run fast, but ze Boches run after zem even faster, n'est pas?
Just thinking of WWII, the last time we saw one of them chasing the other.
The Germans weren't chasing the French for long, though: the Vichey government soon allied their country to the Germans, and supported their war effort by rounding up Jews and what-not. I don't think that government was particularly representative of the will of the French people at the time, but they were the legitimate government by the usual standards.
For a start, they left out the S programming language (started in 1976), for which John Chambers won the ACM Software Systems Award. This, and its Libre dialect R (thanks to Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka at University of Aukland), are in daily use by folks who have to write programs to use data.
>And people say the evil giant doesn't try to fix it's software. They fixed SimCity ...
SimCity isn't the Evil Giant's software. Whatever they may do to other people's programs (break DR DOS, fix SimCity ...), this doesn't suggest that they fix their own software!
Not a problem. Just open regedit.exe, search for k?.@adj$%^rhtg@%^(eruhti, set its value to @#$DFBRT^$%&^^&* ....
Oh, winders is so much nicer than that nasty unix!
Yes, I do know about wizards. But if the thing you need isn't in the gui, you're stuck with regedit. Dealing with registry rot definitely isn't in the gui. It would be a great thing if we had GUIs to deal with all the unix config files. It's also a great thing that, until that day, the config files are plain ascii, and generally self-documented (in addition to the fine man page).
Just to get this clearly back on topic, we could say that the moral is: ``Sometimes what newbies want isn't what newbies need.''
I'd say that as long as the rest of the world is laughing at us, we're doing just fine.
The FCC seems to concentrate on definitions 1 and 2 for obscene, and definition 1 for profane. I'm not sure that Janet Jackson's breast is obscene by definition 2 (``Inciting lustful feelings; lewd.''), so they must be relying on definition 1 there. Offensive I can believe.
Definitions courtesy of Dictionary.reference.com
Even then, you're dealing with India, so they're not exactly accessible.
Nonsense! From a recent SEC filing:
One Dell Way
Round Rock, Texas 78682
(Address of principal executive offices)
(512) 338-4400
That's not in India, and it's not phone or email only.
I'm sure that a letter addressed to Micheal Dell, CEO or James Schneider, Senior VP at that address would be read by someone with the authority to ask why their website was turning away customers. Just the question, coming from on high, would be seen as a serious problem by the big bosses of whoever ignored the original complaint.
You're making the same mistake that I was talking about: you're trying to convince the peons that they should care about you and your money. If you're talking to them, they know they can ignore you: you can't fire them.
When their boss's boss is asking why the president of the company is on his tail about customers being turned away by the company website, they are going to have to do something to fix the problem. The big cheeses can and will fire them if they don't jump, and ask how high on the way up.