[lifeisstillgood]

It's hard to find a suitable analogy (see my advert at end of last post) for almost-literate. I think i would be better saying something like ::

it does not matter if one is born in china or UK or korea - children are given huuuuge amounts of training to become literate. We don't dumb down the writing system, and we don't dumb down the literature written in the system, we spend more on training the kids.

Similarly with programming - we should not look for some uber click and go system that makes it easier - we just have to work harder.

Fridge magnets are just a placeholder for "trying to make reading and writing easier without actually learning to be literate". I mean if someone writes in korean no one suggests they are not literate because it's easier. but if someone can only communicate by drawing, like some ultra-fast pictionary competitor, it's hard to say they are literate.

[dragonwriter]

> it does not matter if one is born in china or UK or korea - children are given huuuuge amounts of training to become literate. We don't dumb down the writing system, and we don't dumb down the literature written in the system, we spend more on training the kids.

We definitely dumb down literature for kids. In fact, we dumb down literature in a gradient to provide a gentle on-ramp.

For the writing system, that's a bit more complex of a question, but at a minimum we judge their use of it more tolerantly (same with spoken language)—this seems somewhat parallel to using a simplified language or environment in programming.