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One of the things that undoubtedly went down was the level of literacy. Plenty of secular Roman citizens were literate and there were many schools for young Rom

One of the things that undoubtedly went down was the level of literacy. Plenty of secular Roman citizens were literate and there were many schools for young Romans who wished to find lucrative employment. Once Rome fell, the educational system outside the Church disappeared entirely for almost a millennium and the Church remained the only institution that carried on the tradition of reading and writing in the West. This must have had some impact on the tempo of overall technological progress. Just like the fact that the successor states, unable to concentrate resources as much, couldn't start big public works (channels, aqueducts) which used to require a lot of highly qualified people.

wwtrv 5y ago
That's true, the decline in literacy was significant, but this is to large degree an outcome of the collapse of urban populations, even during Roman times there were relatively few literate people in the countryside. And "almost a millennium" is probably stretching it a bit, for example in Tuscany (and presumably other regions of Northern/Central Italy) most small towns or even villagers seemed to already have teachers by the 12th century and in richer cities like Florence at least the majority of boys attended a primary at least for some time (by the 14th century it's estimated that up to 30-35% of the people living in Florence could read, of course being one the richest and most developed cities in Western Europe this was probably an outlier, but then again even during the Roman times literacy probably varied significantly between Italy, the Greek cities in the east and places like Gaul or Britain).