Literacy standards have been falling, and the current generation of university students is the first in the post-war era to have declining IQs. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that TV shows and movies have become more literal with characters stating exactly what they are doing. Even people who are “into books” have trouble having deeper interactions with a text.
The latest study I’ve seen, College English majors can’t read, shows this all rather empirically. These are English majors and they struggle with reading a few pages of dense prose, answering indirect questions, and are flat out are unable to understand non-literal text.
Not mentioned in the study is how younger people are unable...
Literacy standards have been falling, and the current generation of university students is the first in the post-war era to have declining IQs. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that TV shows and movies have become more literal with characters stating exactly what they are doing. Even people who are “into books” have trouble having deeper interactions with a text.
The latest study I’ve seen, College English majors can’t read, shows this all rather empirically. These are English majors and they struggle with reading a few pages of dense prose, answering indirect questions, and are flat out are unable to understand non-literal text.
Not mentioned in the study is how younger people are unable to meaningfully interact with mythology. My own religious tradition of Theravāda Buddhism is rich in mythical, but still very meaningful text. I’d say the same is true of Christianity, from which, presumably, many of the respondents in this study hailed. Hence, I leave this as a question: how you have meaningful spiritual traditions and wider cultural exchange when you’re losing symbolic communication?