I read an article headline about this being the last generation of students that will be literate. It doesn't seem feasible, but with the dumbification of the country in general and the advances in electronics, it just might seem possible. I foresee a future where students get told to read a book and they can get the book read to them through the computer. This already exists on a few different apps. Another choice the student would have would be to watch the movie or stage play of whatever reading, again, everything is recorded nowadays, so it is just a matter of finding it. I was doing this a couple years ago with a free app and there were hundreds of books already available. I listened to about half of Moby Dick, but I couldn't stand the long lists of different whales and it just seemed to go on and on and on. Then I listened to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and those were much easier to get through.
If we then need the children to write reports or anything, they can talk to their computers and they can convert speech to text and put down whatever on paper. If this works, we will be in a new world in the classroom. Why spend the first few years teaching penmanship and the art of writing legibly, if everything will be done through our electronic devices, some I'm sure haven't even been invented yet.
Like it or not, Wife is working in a school where barely half the seniors read above a high school level. If this is happening everywhere, then it must be true that we are reaching a point where most of the population doesn't read or write. I don't think more than 20% of the adult population reads regularly or even focuses on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. If the only time people are reading is in school when they have to, then how literate is the average citizen?
This kind of scares and worries me. This makes the human more animal than man, as one of the hallmarks of what made the human race the alpha animal was learning how to write down our thoughts and ideas and pass them along to the next generation. This is shown really great in Spaceship Earth, the big globe as you walk into EPCOT. It follows from the beginning writing on papyrus leaves, then scrolls and eventually newspaper and going to computers. It did not show a tangent where the human starts learning less, but maybe it should.
I could think selfishly and say fuck it, my boys will be fine, one is almost done with his degree and the other will surely follow in the footsteps, but as a society, aren't we only as strong as our weakest link? I thought this was the reason we helped those on the lower spectrum, to help lift them up? If we are just carrying them indefinitely as Trump supporters would say, then let's cut the umbilical cords off from these leeches and let them starve. There's still plenty of street corners they can occupy.
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