Mass “illiteracy” returns to the West’s ruling class

Mass “illiteracy” returns to the West’s ruling class. By Brandon Zicha.

A student today at my elite university admitted to me today that she took a class so she could work on reading for more than 20 minutes at a time. She can’t read. She mainly skims and summarizes, she says and still gets A’s.

This student is, by professional standards, illiterate. Gonna have high GPA when she graduates. …

The student is literate [but] not at professional university level. …

This conversation was had after 6 of 22 students dropped my course because the maximum reading per week in one week was over 100 pages.

What people aren’t grasping is that this is literally *dangerous*. These people are going to be come doctors, engineers, etc. They are — by any metric — vastly less capable than prior generations. These effects are cumulative over a lifetime.

This grade inflation is part of the problem, but not even close to the entirety. And the problem obviously starts in K-12.

Students don’t know history because, you can’t actually become historically literate on the advice of ‘never assign more than 30 pages a week’. You can’t develop any of the skills that came with literacy. This is, quite honestly, a civilizational catastrophe. …

I was feeling crazy about student complaints about 7 years back. Went back to old syllabi from the late 1990s. I was not crazy. They had a fraction of the load.

Elaborates:

I coteach a class with a colleague … for the past 15 years. … We have reduced the difficulty and load every 3 years or so since the beginning, and we probably have to stop. … That is an objective decline in ability.

I routinely hear professors complaining about students who:

  1. Can’t or won’t read at levels we have never seen.
  2. When they do, their ability to connect between texts and evaluate is poor. Indeed, grasping the text is not great. It’s increasingly the norm, and it used to be the opposite.
  3. They struggle to reason, honestly.
  4. Most weirdly, we struggle to talk about ‘reflecting on one’s ideas’. They often struggle to understand *what that means*.
  5. They have declining writing skills.
  6. They have lower interest in ideas
  7. They are less sophisticated in their ability to manipulate ideas
  8. They are much worse on many of the metrics associated with high level reading ability.

At the same time

  1. Study times have declined.
  2. Assigned workloads have declined a great deal
  3. Hiring employer complaints about graduate quality has declined continually.
  4. Grades have remained the same or gone up.

Causes? Phones, DEI (affecting admissions to elite universities), lack of motivation or fear to spur effort, and of course the general IQ decline of ~1 point per decade since 1880 due to smarter women having fewer kids and today’s lack of selection pressure. The ability to reason probably isn’t helped by wokeism, which requires people to arrive at nonsensical conclusions for political reasons.