About literacy (the end of)

From James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, reminding us that the current state of illiteracy may just be a norm to which we are reverting:A world in which everyone can read seems obvious to us now but it is an astonishingly recent phenomenon. Much of the history of reading might be characterised less as a story of social and cultural change and more as the progress of an esoteric secret passed down by elites.It’s an eagerly anticipated book and everyone seems to be talking about it, by which I mean that people who are worried about the decline in reading (as evidenced by the latest PISA statistics) are talking about it by which I mean very few people at all give a toss. And as John Harris has suggested, the fact that it runs to little more than 200 pages might be an acknowledgement that some battles have already been lost. Much of the narrative focuses on the distractions offered by TikTok and doomscrolling, and some governments are actively attempting to encourage their citizens back…