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I should have made my point clearer that I believe low literacy rates hurt your ability to articulate yourself and to understand others and even engage in basic reasoning well outside the written word, and that this is (often) detrimental to your ability to navigate the world. I certainly enjoy engaging in memes and jargon and slang too—in fact it's a great joy in life to find new words and manners of expression and to look beyond what worked yesterday—and much of this is just as expressive as formal or classically-analytical english, if not more so given the baggage words tend to acquire over time. But that's not what I was referring to at all.



I should have made my point/question clearer too; I agree that literacy is valuable for all the reasons you outline.

Tests are only as useful as what they measure. The qualitative changes to communication could have impacted the quantitative changes we're seeing (i.e. lower literacy rates). How much, in what ways, I have no idea; I was hoping to learn more by sparking discussion.

Unfortunately (and ironically) my poor choice of words has instead led to my apparent taking of an anti-literacy stance. Oh well.




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