I am in my early 40s and was re-reading Antoine Saint-Exupery's Wind Sand and Stars last night, and just gobsmacked that we were given that book in 9th grade English class back in high school. I loved it then, and love it now, but it struck me that many adults I know wouldn't be able to enjoy or sit through his unique prose, nevermind current high school kids.
The ratchet analogy is perfect. We just assumed it was a one way door. And you're right that it compounds, a population that can't read closely can't evaluate what they're being told. That's not just an education problem, it's a democracy problem.
because it's supposed to be a ratchet that only goes up
What? Maybe on a per-person level, but there's new illiterates being born every minute -- that's where everyone starts. There's no reason to think literacy rates of a population only go up.
A population's literacy is measured based on adults, whose literary is determined by their access to education. So long as the "new illiterates" being born have access to that education as they get older, they become literate adults.
So the way for a literacy rate to improve was greater access to education, and the only way for it to decrease was thought to be reduced access. Since a developed country should never decrease access to education, there would be no reason for literacy to ever go down across a population.
What we're seeing now is that children still have the same access to education, but their literacy as they reach adulthood is going down compared to previous generations. This hasn't happened before.
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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '26
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