I'm completely in agreement that addiction to phones, addiction to gambling, a reduction in the degree to which the muscles of writing and the muscles of readin

I'm completely in agreement that addiction to phones, addiction to gambling, a reduction in the degree to which the muscles of writing and the muscles of reading are exercised, and a reduced ability to concentrate on difficult intellectual efforts is a growing problem in our society. However, the author might not guess that those same students, the ones who are barely literate, are somehow still powering our society through a rise in economic productivity greater than ever before. Consider the steely-eyed missile men who sent Apollo to the moon, the Greatest Generation that defeated fascism and brought about so many revolutionary technologies through WWII, the inventors behind the first industrial revolutions, the explorers who circled the globe in the Age of Exploration, the literal Renaissance Men of DaVinci and Newton and Kepler and Copernicus: For all their educational and cognitive prowess, their societies were somehow less capable than ours. I would posit that our tools are just that much better in spite of reduced average literacy. Just as we programmers state "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away", so our brains' processing centers are burdened with the malware of ad-tech and addiction, and our storage is clogged with video entertainment. But if you've got to recall 100 obscure factoids, the average 6th grader in 2025 with access to Siri and Google will beat Einstein with a card catalog, and then return to rotting their brain with TikTok. I don't know what this means for the future. But "The average college student is illiterate" follows with the unstated subtext "and this is going to be a disaster when they need that education to do stuff in the future" and I don't think that's accurate.