In 2023, 56% of adult Americans scored below a literacy level of 3 in a NCES study, which corresponds to a lack of proficiency in working with information and ideas in text. Most can understand simple sentences and even short paragraphs but struggle to comprehend multi-page works. What happens to literature in an increasingly illiterate future? Is there even a point in preserving it if no one can read it?
>>25319021Most zoomers are retarded, but not all of them. You’re not doing it for the majority this time around, but rather the promising minority.
Some people have a fantasy version of the past in which a high proportion of the population was reading literature. It is certain that the world is more literate today than it has ever been, and likely with broader readership of literature. It is an extremely new thing for 90% of a population to be literate at all.
>>25319021we've had this thread 10 times in the past 24 hours.
>>25319050Your outrageous claim contains no truth
>>25319021I hate to tell you but this is how society has been for most of history. The works of Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas, etc etc. were not widely understood or cared about in their day. Literature is worth preserving for the +2sd IQ crowd of the future.
>>25319044My great great grandfather in rural Appalachia was famous for making fun of people for not having what he deemed a sufficient amount of Shakespeare memorized. When I was 12 I was given the Latin textbook that my great grandfather had used when he was my age. IDK how it was in wherever you're from, and we certainly weren't poor, but we weren't anything close to rich either.
>>25319057My cousins on that side of the family are now: Physical therapist, white rapper, mechanical engineer, factory worker, bartender, dead from drugs, nurse, generic girl email job I haven't cared to learn about. None of them read literature. So at least here there's been an enormous decline in culture.
>>25319044>I can't extrapolate trendsSo this is that humanities education I've heard so much about.
>>25319057That's great for your family, but the other 340,000,000 Americans may have had a different experience and so we must defer to general literacy stats
>>25319066They were representative of the middle class of that time and place.
>>25319057This was typical for the 19th century. Poor farmers read Dickens for fun. No TikTok to eat up the hours.
>>25319065just say "extrapolate", no need for pleonasms
>>25319073>Poor farmers read Dickens for funMore fantasyAt least try to make it remotely plausible with an urban worker like a domestic servant or a tailor
>>25319044All that progress undone by the importation of illiterate third world retards. Is that supposed to make me feel better?
>>25319073>>25319080They were very rural but not poor. My family at least. The very poorest certainly were not reading for fun, or >>25319066at least not much. I believe my grandmother (who was poor: She grew up in a dirt floor shack and picked cotton as a kid) did read Shakespeare and of course the Bible as a girl so idk.
>>25319093Ignore the third quote, my finger slipped
>>25319057>My great great grandfather in rural Appalachia was famous for making fun of people for not having what he deemed a sufficient amount of Shakespeare memorized.That's autism, it doesn't have much to do with him having better education or reading comprehension.These days he would have been the kid who laughed at the casüls who can't memorize Osu beatmaps with jumps to beat them BL.>When I was 12 I was given the Latin textbook that my great grandfather had used when he was my age.How many old people from rural Appalachia do you know that are proficient enough to use it on the fly?
>>25319021Are you certain that a average population level literacy level is a absolute good? Perhaps the main media for cheap entertainment is now short videos, and if not short video then short text. Perhaps the text generated and interpreted by the previous generation isnt worth keeping around anyways.
>>25319044If 50% of a population was literate and say 60% regularly read, it'd be more than if it were say 25% at ~100% literacy rates. I think this is a dumb gay thread, but it's also important to consider periods of relatively high literacy before the invention of audio and visual reproduction/broadcast, when writing was the easiest medium to reproduce and spread widely. Some minimum of literacy in order to take part in society at all also changes the dynamic, and I think the obvious parallel is to the demographics of computer/internet users over time, and how there has probably been a relative decline in levels of computer/internet literacy as computers/the internet became near-necessities rather than hobbies or niche tools.
