Fencing Bear points out that the extreme decline of literacy should have been obvious, less due to the various technological and demographic changes, but because of the way in which the value of reading has been deprecated by the schools and universities:
Why should we expect our students to be able to read for scriptural allusions and figures of speech, images and cross-references and patterns of meaning, for symbolism and beauty and the resonance of phonemes, when everything in their education is telling them that reading is a skill that they need to make money, and making money means filling in the right forms to get shipments from China or contracts from India? Why should we expect our students to enjoy reading when we have reduced their education to a series of bullet points that they might as well get from SparkNotes or chatGPT? Why should they care about reading when their souls have been rendered statistics in the calculation of our national GDP?
It’s true that reading, and the liberal arts in general, have been massively devalued since the early 1980s, as a part of the quantization that has followed the adoption of a purely materialist philosophy by the education system and society at large.