Found a youtube video that is the perfect material for this thread
I decided to click it out of curiosity, expecting a historical video, but it ended up being a leftist diatribe about how great USSR was and how cringe USA is.
What threw me massively off guard was the claim at around 3:19-4:07 that USA currently has literacy rate of 79%, while USSR in the 60s had achieved nearly full literacy. I decided to immediately check the sources. The
American source in the description does indeed claim that 21% of people are illiterate, but it doesn't link to any sources or research backing up that claim. So I decided to try and find data on American literacy that contain the same percentages and
I found one that details the statistics, however, in that data analysis 21% of people are referred to as possessing
low-level literacy (level 1 literacy and bellow), not outright illiteracy
. Checked the
OECD citation within the analysis, which is where the data was gathered from, which led me to a beefy PDF file (attached down bellow), where level 1 literacy at page 69 (nice) is described as follows:
At Level 1, adults can read relatively short digital or print continuous, non-continuous, or mixed texts to locate a single piece of information, which is identical to or synonymous with the information given in the question or directive. These texts contain little competing information. Adults performing at this level can complete simple forms, understand basic vocabulary, determine the meaning of sentences, and read continuous texts with a degree of fluency.
To break it further down, that 21% number is made up of 12,9% people who possess level 1 literacy, 4,1% bellow that and the other 4% could not participate due to physical or cognitive impairment or lingual barriers (only spoke Spanish).
So my only assumption is that the source she used simply equated low-level literacy with functional illiteracy, which is a blatant misuse of the data, particularly since it didn't even link any sources to it.
I decided to check out other links concerning Russian literacy and I kid you not, one of them is an archive link that leads you
to this page.
SHE DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO PROPERLY ARCHIVE LINKS, IT JUST LEADS YOU TO A RUSSIAN REGISTRATION PAGE. I had to search up on google to find the
original link where I was able to find the statistics mentioned in the video... although once again, none of them are cited, so their validity can't be verified, but I'm not gonna bother fixing somebody else's poorly done homework in citation. What's notable about the text, is how it details and describes 2 opposing viewpoints as for how effective USSR's literacy campaign was, with one viewpoint glazing Soviet achievements and another, by Kerry Foley from Georgetown University, says that soviet literacy achievements were a byproduct of tsarist educational legacy. In that
same article she cites for her video, Kerry says this:
Another problem with conceiving of Soviet educational achievements as exceptional is that the statistics used to prove their success simply cannot be trusted at face value. The Soviets were so intent on proving that theirs was a modern, progressive state that they had every incentive to inflate the statistics on education, just as they did with statistics on public health and industrial output.
Kerry goes much further detailing his skepticism in soviet achievement in education, but you get the point... The exact source she uses to make a point in her video simultaneously disproves it.
Another link about literacy under USSR leads you to an article written by International Socialist Review. It mentions that more than 60% of the population is illiterate and that the communist party government underwent great lengths in fostering literacy, even in the face of war and famine. Once I got to the section mentioning statistics of literacy after these soviet programs, I was left further disappointed:
While the adult literacy campaign’s accomplishments were thus limited, and much of the data is hotly contested as a result of Stalinist distortions, it had important successes.
Yet despite full acknowledgement of some of the data being a Stalinist distortion, the article goes on to conclude...
The complete transformation of education and literacy during the Russian Revolution exposes the lies at the heart of American education—that competition drives innovation, that punishments and rewards are the only motivations for learning, and that schools are the great levelers that provide every child with an equal opportunity to succeed.
Absolutely nothing is cited about the American education or any detailed description of how it developed in contrast to Soviet education or even why it is inferior, besides "muh competitiveness". You're just supposed to take the article's word for it, that the American education system sucks.
There's just so much wrong in the few first minutes alone, before she even gets into actually describing the darn cartoons. I didn't even get into the section starting at 7:01-8:46 where she discusses how stealing public property is good, if it's done in the name of public good
(although to be fair, that's not exactly beyond Bolshevik ideology). Watching that section I was left utterly flabbergasted that people like her, who screech online about media literacy or how all cops are bastards, uncritically fall for pro-cop propaganda meant for fucking toddlers, just because the officer is wearing a red uniform, instead of blue. No really, she doesn't even cite any sources or mention any concrete historical example of how the Soviet police functioned in real life whatsoever. Maybe because if she did, she'd have to contend with the fact that
as late as the 1970s the soviet police would crush political dissent by having dissidents jailed in psychiatric hospitals and pumped with mind altering drugs and engaging in large scale arrests of human rights activists like Helsinki watch group. Not to say that American police was all nice and dandy, particularly when it came to hippies and black rights activists, but depicting the force of communist party autocracy as a substantially more human alternative is the equivalent of trading in being cuffed outdoors by heaped rope in exchange of being locked up in a cellar by steel chains.
I'm gonna leave the rest of the video for you guys to decimate, because it's filled to the brim with just about EVERYTHING wrong with western leftists and has loads of material to make fun of.