“Human intelligence,” cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, repress it, or even annihilate it.”
The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was concerned about the dominance of images over words in American media, culture, and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented images and forces other media to move in that direction,” he argued in an essay in his book. Conscientious objections. “A culture does not have to force academics to flee to render them powerless. A culture does not have to burn books to ensure that they will not be read. . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”
What might have seemed curmudgeonly in 1988 looks more like a prophecy from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released the report results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults ages 16 to 65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared to the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and decreased significantly in 11, with the greatest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand, and Poland.
Among adults with tertiary level education (such as university graduates), literacy fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while almost all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy among adults with less than upper secondary education. Singapore and the United States had the greatest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy.
“Thirty percent of Americans read at the level that would be expected of a 10-year-old,” Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the OECD, told me, referring to the proportion of people in the United States who achieved Level 1 scores. or lower in literacy. “Actually, it’s hard to imagine that one in three people you meet on the street has difficulty reading even simple things.”
In some countries, the decline is partly explained by aging populations and rising levels of immigration, but Schleicher says these factors alone do not fully explain the trend. His own hypothesis wouldn’t surprise Postman: that technology has changed the way many of us consume information, moving us away from longer, more complex writing, like books and newspaper articles, toward shorter writing. social networks publications and video clips.
At the same time, social media has made it more likely that you “read things that confirm your views, rather than engaging with diverse perspectives, and that’s what you need to get to (the higher levels) in assessment ( OECD Literacy Report). where it is necessary to distinguish facts from opinions, navigate ambiguity and manage complexity,” Schleicher explained.
The implications for policy and the quality of public debate are already evident. These were also planned. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote a article entitled “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture could look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, clichés and stereotypes are valued, conflicts and insults are valued because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “only in a literate culture should inconsistencies be taken into account.” from the past.” ”. 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 literate population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that better schooling can make: there, the literacy level of 16- to 24-year-olds was significantly better than a decade ago.
The question of whether AI could alleviate or exacerbate the problem is more complicated. Systems like ChatGPT can work well for many reading and writing tasks: they can analyze large amounts of information and reduce it to summaries.
Several studies suggest that, when implemented in the workplace, these tools can significantly increase the performance of less-skilled workers. In a studyResearchers tracked the impact of an artificial intelligence tool on customer service agents who provided technical support through typed chat boxes. The AI tool, trained on the conversation patterns of top performers, provided real-time text suggestions to agents on how to respond to customers. The study found that lower-skilled workers became more productive and their communication patterns became more similar to those of higher-skilled workers.
David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, has even argued that artificial intelligence tools could allow more workers to perform more qualified roles and help restore “the middle-class, middle-skilled heart of the American labor market.”
But, as the author says, to make good use of a tool to “level up” your skills, you need a decent foundation to begin with. Without that, Schleicher worries that people with poor literacy skills will become “naïve consumers of ready-made content.”
In other words, without strong self-skills, it is only a few steps from being supported by the machine to finding yourself dependent on or subject to it.
