The problem of course is that most Amerikans educated in the last 20-30 years CAN'T read, even the college educated ones. This is not newz to long term Diners, since I have on many occasions written about the failure of Public Schools, going back to my own years teaching almost 30 years ago. Bad as it was back then, based on this article it has clearly got even worse since. I had to publish the link here since it reinforces what I just wrote.
The various reasons for this we have covered before as well, grade inflation, no child left behind, computers and screen time etc. Like the reasons why people aren't having kids, it should be common sense but they are not meaningfully addressed. It's a cultural problem teaching isn't valued, nor is education except for the elite. They have their own private schools, so they really couldn't give a shit. The only reason public education was ever funded at all was to serve as a warehouse for kids until they were old enough to work.
For a while in the post WWII period public schools worked OK, at leastt for smart kids and kids from white middle class neighborhoods where property values and taxes were high enough to pay the teachers a decent wage, though they still were better off going into corporate work. IN the NYC schools where they tracked the smart kids and put them alll together for college prep into a couple of high schools, we got a 1st class education. But that was 1% of all NYC HS students, and at Stuyvesant we were just about all white or chinese, there were only a handful of black kids or hispanics. In fact I really can't remember ANY, I just say a handful because there must have been a couple.
There was the occasional inner city success story paraded out also. Who didn't see "Stand & Deliver", the story of Jaime Escalante teaching Calculus to East LA chicanos?
Inspirational as this is, the number of times something like this was ever pulled off was vanishingly small in 1985, and I doubt you could pull it off today. Hell, if you can teach algebra you're ahead of the curve, colleges now teach PRE-algebra in their math departments.
In NYC, the typical HS had a trade track, where you took shop classes in machine shop and carpentry, etc, and kids who were poor at math just had to learn something like "business math" and add up numbers on a balance sheet. Calculators eliminated the need to know even that, and before long kids were graduating without even knowing elementary school math.
Today, Johnny can't read, can't write and can't add or subtract. You think any of these folks understand how compound interest on a mortgage works? How to balance their bank account and make a budget? Gen Z is leaving HS now dumb as rocks. So dn't count on them to be making very good choices about who their leaders are or fixing what is broken in our society.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html
The Loss of Things I Took for Granted
RE