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“Human intelligence,” cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is one of nature’s most fragile things. It doesn’t take much to confuse it, suppress it, or even destroy it.”
The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the supremacy of images over words in American media, culture, and politics. Television “conditions our minds to perceive the world through fragmentary images and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argues in an essay in his book. Conscientious objection. “A culture doesn’t have to force scholars to flee to be impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to ensure they will not be read. . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”
What may have seemed like 1988 reads more like a prophecy from a 2024 perspective. This month, the OECD published result A massive exercise: personal assessment of literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16–65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared to the last set of assessments a decade ago, trends in literacy skills were striking. Efficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 2014 and declined significantly in 2011, with the largest declines in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.
In third-level adults education (eg university graduates), literacy skills declined in 13 countries and increased only in Finland, while almost all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy skills among adults with below upper secondary education. Singapore and the United States had the highest disparities in both literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty percent of Americans read at a level you’d expect from a 10-year-old,” Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education and skills, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the United States who score. Literacy level 1 or below. “It’s really hard to imagine – every third person you meet on the street has difficulty reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the decline is partly explained by growing populations and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone are not entirely responsible for the trend. His own assumption wouldn’t surprise Postman: That technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from longer, more complex texts like books and newspaper articles. social media Posts and video clips.
At the same time, social media has made it more likely that you’ll “read things that confirm your opinion rather than engaging with different points of view, and that’s all you’ve got.” [the top levels] on [OECD literacy] Evaluation, where you have to separate fact from opinion, navigate ambiguity, manage complexity,” Schleicher explained.
The impact of politics and the quality of public debate is already evident. This, too, was foreseen. In 2007, author Caleb Crane wrote one Article The New Yorker magazine called it a “twilight of the chest” about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In an oral culture, he writes, clichés and stereotypes are valuable, contradictions and name-calling are valuable because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in a literate culture to account for past inconsistencies.” Does that sound familiar?
These trends are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Finland demonstrates the potential for high-quality education and strong social norms to sustain a highly-educated population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that better schooling can make: there, the literacy skills of 16-24-year-olds are significantly better than a decade ago.
The question of whether AI can reduce or exacerbate the problem is more complex. Systems like ChatGPT can do well in many reading and writing tasks: they can parse reams of information and reduce it to the gist.
Several studies suggest that, when deployed in the workplace, these tools can significantly increase the performance of low-skilled workers. in a researchResearchers tracked the impact of an AI tool on customer service agents who provide technical support via written chat boxes. AI tools trained on the conversational patterns of top performers provide real-time text advice to agents on how to respond to customers. The study found that low-skilled workers became more productive and their communication patterns resembled those of high-skilled workers.
MIT economics professor David Otto has even argued that AI tools could enable workers to perform more Highly skilled roles and help restore “the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market.”
But, as Otto says, to make good use of a tool to “level up” your skills, you need a decent base to start with. Absent this, Schleicher worries that people with poor literacy skills will become “naïve consumers of prefabricated materials”.
In other words, without strong skills of your own, it is only a few short steps from being supported by the machine, to finding yourself dependent on it or subject to it.
