Our Eroding Literacy: Fodder for Autocracy

 

Our Eroding Literacy: Fodder for Autocracy

I watch as the United States, on average, seems unable to shake its reliance on conspiracy theories, is willing to elect officials with extreme proclivities (beyond their “lips are flapping” memes) to lie and cast anyone with opposing views with exceptionally demeaning labels, and is increasingly searching for shortcuts to exceptionally complex issues with multilayered variables. As I will drill down later, the performance levels of American students are slip-sliding downwards as hallucinating AI is providing information that caters to the bias of the individual asking the platform for answers. Unlike the age of enlightenment (which the preceded the industrial revolution), where curiosity, education and knowledge were elevated societal values, the United States has, for the last decade or two, increasingly has relegated intelligence and education into a vat of elitist tripe, out of touch with reality. We have even challenged medical research, once-cherished medical doctors, and those driven to make life better for all through research.

Facts and the willingness to accept reality are fundamental to making democracy work. If lies, distortions and severely biased propaganda become the basis for election choices, where truth is distrusted, the door is wide-open for autocrats without moral compass, to foment falsehoods, repetitively and with passion, catering to fabricated fears and biases. The underlying underbelly of cherished ignorance makes it all possible. Start out with a few common biases, find people to blame, attach fighting words (“radical,” “extreme,” “unpatriotic,” “low IQ,” “communist,” “Godless,” “brainwashed,” etc.) to those who oppose the aspiring autocrat, and, well, you can explain Hitler’s rise from the post-WWI ashes and forced poverty on Germany, to a murderous villain who was directly responsible for the horrific deaths of millions.

Today, at a lesser level, where complex technology and billionaire access to capital and privileged government granted “indulgences” have marginalized most Americans to second class status, subordinate to the rich… you can see how a charismatic, cult leader, catering to millions of constituents seeking easy answers with a clearly eroding public school education, could cast a misguided spell. Looking at recent events, there are facts that even antecede Donald Trump.

Today, we have an attorney general who, per as earlier blog, has no understanding of the difference between privileges and rights guaranteed by the Constitution, or a former Trump-appointed Homeland Security head who turned habeas corpus, a shield against unwarranted incarceration, into a blanket right for the President to order warrantless arrests and jailing of people he considers “criminals” without proof. Hordes of Americans believe these profound inaccuracies as so many of our elected officials repeat these distortions as if true, I asked myself, what is the evidence of this decline? Or what The Atlantic staff writer and Washington bureau chief for The Economist, Idrees Kahloon addressed in his October 14, 2025 article, “America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy.”

It can start with our falling comparison test scores, domestic and international. In the examination of 80 nations, the US has fared badly in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (looking at 15-year-olds) over recent decades, dropping from first decades ago, into the middle of the developed world pack. “Test scores have been trending down for over a decade. There are some signs of recovery in math, but not many in reading. Learning declines are not a distinctly U.S. phenomenon and are not even limited to schoolchildren. Researchers are only just beginning to wrap their heads around the causes of this…

“Consider one example from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP: In 2013, 74% of American eighth graders scored at the basic or above level in math, the highest figure since the test started in 1990. In the most recent round that number fell to 61%, hitting levels last seen in 1996. Scores have fallen in other grades and subjects, too.” Matt Barnum, writing for January 8th Chalkbeat.org. Reading has fallen out of fashion as students increasingly rely on AI platforms for summaries, eliminating essential elements and nuance.

Attention span is eroding even faster: “While there is a formidable knowledge gap when it comes to measuring attention spans over time, particularly in pre-teens and adolescents, the work of Dr. Gloria Marks offers us some insight. Dr. Marks’ research shows that on average, the length of time people stay on a single computer screen before switching to another has decreased from 2.5 minutes to 47 seconds over the past two decades. In a study that used screen capture technology to analyze mobile device screen time, researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Stanford University found that the median number of times participants engaged with their phone was 228. What’s more, on average each session only lasted 10 seconds.” Columbia University’s CBMS (April 2, 2024). Kahloon focuses more directly on the pervasive failure of American education:

“The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards…

“We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is ‘below basic’—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.

“American schoolchildren have given up almost all of the gains they achieved at the start of the century. These learning losses are not distributed equally. Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse. From 2000 to 2007, the bottom tenth of fourth graders in in reading and math scores not seen since these tests began in 1971 and 1978, respectively.

“A seemingly plausible culprit, and a familiar boogeyman for progressives, is insufficient spending. The problem with this tidy explanation is that it’s not tethered to reality. School spending did not decline from 2012 to 2022. In fact, it increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation, from $14,000 a student to more than $16,000… Low-expectations theory explains other trends that the smartphone thesis, by itself, does not. If the bar for grading and graduating were constant year over year, we would expect both to decline in line with student performance. Instead, we see the opposite. An Act study found that the share of students getting A’s in English rose from 48 percent in 2012 to 56 percent in 2022, even as their demonstrated mastery of the subject declined over that period. (The same is true of other subjects, including math, social studies, and science.) Over the same decade, high-school graduation rates improved from 80 to 87 percent despite objective declines in academic achievement.” No, we seem to be learning less and accepting a lesser standard, or as George W Bush once stated, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” I’ll add to that as the soft bigotry of lower values, normalized at the highest level of our nation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is so easy to blame Donald Trump for the collapse of a viable democracy, but the seeds of this demise were planted long before he arrived; he just turned these variables into his advantage.