I remember taking the level 5 test and phew, it was sixth grade reading level text, at best. This doesn't coincide with anecdotal narratives of earlier times, where it seemed a larger percentage read far more extensive works. There's good reason to believe mass literacy campaigns make things worse.
You might enjoy Lionel Shriver's recently published novel Mania. This is set in an alternate timeline of the last twenty years or so. It becomes unlawful to favour the intelligent over the less so - in fact to even suggest that intelligence is a thing opens one up to being cancelled. Kids who excel at school are bullied into failure, or concealing their smarts. Swathes of words and phrases that suggest cognitive inequality are memory-holed. Joe Biden is eleected on a landslide as he's a man that noone would feel inferior to. To set a text for one's students called The Idiots is to risk being dismissed. The students won't read it, any more than they read anything else, and they certainly wouldn't pass a comprehension test, but testing is elitist and thus abolished. You get the idea.
I remember taking the level 5 test and phew, it was sixth grade reading level text, at best. This doesn't coincide with anecdotal narratives of earlier times, where it seemed a larger percentage read far more extensive works. There's good reason to believe mass literacy campaigns make things worse.
You might enjoy Lionel Shriver's recently published novel Mania. This is set in an alternate timeline of the last twenty years or so. It becomes unlawful to favour the intelligent over the less so - in fact to even suggest that intelligence is a thing opens one up to being cancelled. Kids who excel at school are bullied into failure, or concealing their smarts. Swathes of words and phrases that suggest cognitive inequality are memory-holed. Joe Biden is eleected on a landslide as he's a man that noone would feel inferior to. To set a text for one's students called The Idiots is to risk being dismissed. The students won't read it, any more than they read anything else, and they certainly wouldn't pass a comprehension test, but testing is elitist and thus abolished. You get the idea.
Really excited to go thru some of your essays
Mostly I disagree with this essay but you make a lot of good points throughout
The vapidity you complain about is quite abundant
the three hard R's, Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic.