Are we becoming a more literate society?

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“Human intelligence,” cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to disrupt it, to suppress it, or to end it.”

The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the rise of images over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “makes our minds perceive the world in separate images and forces other media to conform to it,” he argued in an essay in his book. Conscientious Objection. “Tradition does not have to force academics to flee to make them powerless. Culture does not need to burn books to ensure they are unreadable. . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity. “

What would have seemed difficult in 1988 is almost prophetic in the view of 2024. This month, the OECD released results of multiple practice: individual assessments of literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared to the final examinations ten years ago, trends in literacy were remarkable. Skills improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest declines in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland.

Among high-ranking adults education (as university students), literacy has fallen in 13 countries and increased only in Finland, while almost all countries and economies have experienced declines in literacy among adults with less than secondary education. Singapore and the US had huge disparities in literacy and numeracy.

Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the OECD, told me: “Thirty percent of Americans read at the level you would expect a 10-year-old to read.” level 1 or lower in literacy. “It’s actually hard to imagine – that every third person you meet on the street has difficulty reading and simple things.”

In some states, the decline is partly explained by an aging population and increasing levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone do not fully account for the trend. His idea would not be surprising to Postman: that technology has changed the way many of us use information, from a long time, to writing complex pieces, such as books and newspaper articles. social media messages and video clips.

At the same time, social media has made it easier for you to “read things that confirm your point of view, instead of talking about a different point of view, and that’s what you need to get to ( high levels) in the (OECD literacy) test, where you need to distinguish fact from opinion, navigate ambiguity, manage complexity,” Schleicher explained.

The political implications and quality of the public debate are already evident. These too were predictable. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote a letter to the brute called “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker magazine about what a post-literacy culture might look like. He wrote that in oral traditions, clichés and stereotypes are valued, confrontations and name-calling are valued because they are memorable, and speakers tend to be unprepared because “it is only in the culture of the people who can read and write where the inconsistency of the past should be reported”. Does that sound familiar?

These processes are irreversible or irreversible. Finland shows the potential for high-quality education and strong social norms to support a highly literate population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improved schooling can make: there, the literacy of 16-24 year olds was much better than a decade ago.

The question of whether AI can reduce or exacerbate the problem is more difficult. Systems like ChatGPT can perform well in many reading and writing tasks: they can interpret large amounts of information and reduce it to summaries.

Several studies suggest that, when used in the workplace, these tools can significantly increase the performance of low-skilled workers. To one lessonresearchers tracked the impact of an AI tool on customer service agents who provided technical support through text chat boxes. The AI ​​tool, trained on the conversation patterns of top developers, provided real-time suggestions to agents on how to respond to customers. The study found that low-skilled workers were more productive and their communication skills were similar to those of high-skilled workers.

David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, even argued that AI tools could help more workers to work. high-level jobs and help restore “middle-class skills, the middle-class heart of the US labor market”.

But, as Autor says, to use the tool properly to “improve” your skills, you need a good foundation to start with. In his absence, Schleicher worries that people with limited reading and writing skills will become “uninformed users of planned objects”.

In other words, without your solid skills, you are only a few short steps away from being supported by a machine, finding yourself dependent on it, or depending on it.

sarah.oconnor@ft.com