A new OECD study reveals a concerning decline in literacy skills worldwide, with experts raising alarms about the potential for a 'dumb culture' driven by technology's shift towards fragmented information consumption.
Technology has changed how many of us consume information from complex pieces of writing to short video clips. 'Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,' says Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD . 'Human intelligence,' the cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, 'is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.
' Television 'conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction', he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. 'A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read… There are other ways to achieve stupidity.' The OECD recently released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland. Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper-secondary education. Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy
Literacy OECD Technology Education Globalization
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