Mexico lifts 8 million people out of poverty since 2022 (youtube.com)
The dawn of post-literate society - with Jared Henderson and James Marriott (youtube.com)
In history, declines in literacy accompany things like civil wars, etc, but this time it's basically just ‘smart phones.’ Gap between reading good students and not good students, since government Pandemic measures.
Does it really matter? Do the herd of uneducated, don't want to be educated, people really matter, so long as there are educated people to make decisions for them and run the machines? College grads no longer read for pleasure.
IQs rose year over year until sometime in the 2010s when they started declining.
In a book, information is dense, arguments are dense, print requires the writer to make a logical case for an argument. If you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up, unlike TikTok or YouTube where you can just assert things. 'Print priveleges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing that is more logical, rational, information dense, and intellectually challenging. In a book you can pause where you were reading, think about things, go do something, and come back to that exact moment and continue.
‘If you can’t write it down, you can't interrogate it in a way that leads to the birth of philosophy.'
We might be re entering an oral culture, since TV and radio, the 60s. But now we might not be moving toward an oral culture (which often has a high imporance for memorization) to a broadcast society (where people are purely receptive).
I don't know. I went to high school decades ago, before smart phones, and most people I knew never read books (except some did school books because they were good students). Most adults I knew read mostly popular novels (romance or spy thrillers). This was a small town, though, and kids from the city were more sophisticated. Today, where I live no one reads books either. But if you go to the city, and go to a used book store, you can find people who read and have things to talk about.
Note, though, that even in times of high literacy (like Periclean), culture remains oral to a high degree, people trained to read or to listen (to plays and poems or oratory) and discuss it.