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New Literacy Statistics Just Dropped, and it's grim. 50% of Americans read so poorly that they are unable to perform simple tasks such as reading prescription drug labels
(www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com)
Makes sense anecdotally.
Lines up with the big groundswell of opposition I've seen from parents about their kids getting homework because "this homework is ridiculous I can't even answer the questions on my kids third grade homework. Who the hell cares what an adjective is."
Also lines up with the rights understanding of what a pronoun is.
The parentposting is the worst with math.
My favorite flavor is the "THIS 5th GRADE HOMEWORK IS TOO HARD" when the adult clearly has never learned basic concepts like order of operations (PEMDAS) and cardinality of logic (e.g. how you solve sudoku where you order working through the solution always taking the smallest number of unknowns, first solve places where only one numbers missing until there are no first rank order problems, then move on to second rank order problems where two numbers are missing).
But there are definitely parents answering 'she was looking for Romeo when she said "wherefore art thou Romeo?"'.
You can 100% see this degradation with adults in real time if you look at popular reality TV shows that have puzzle/knowledge/trivia components like Survivor and The Challenge and just binge watch the whole back catalog. You'll see things getting harder until the game hits its stride and identity but then at one point just simpler and simpler and simpler.
Survivor is actually pretty bad now because the entire show started cheaping out and reusing things over and over again. So people just started 3d printing the puzzles and memorizing them. Literally No Reality TV Contestant Left Behind style pipeline. The other thing is that they completely devalued the actual survival aspects of the show, and it's a game of attrition where it's who can think straight on the lowest amount of calories. The only reason to know any actual survival skills on that show anymore is just in case of tie breakers where they have to make fire from flint.
Another way that you can watch the degredation of the American brain over time is by looking at the Flesch-Kincaid reading levels of major Presidential speeches over time.