I'm sympathetic to the concerns motivating this essay, but the charts related to test scores are ridiculous. The y-axis is so compressed it makes it look like performance has dramatically plummeted over the least 20-25 years, but the actual declines are basically 1-5%.
This. I follow John Burns Murdoch on social media & normally find his work great so I was really surprised that the most egregious "graph crimes" shown in this article were visualisations created by him.
I'm risking engaging in similar hyperbole, so I must stress that they're not too egregious, just mildly misleading in their significance, but it does still put the article into some question.
The x-axes are also over relatively short time periods, presumably to deemphasize massive upward trends in previous decades.
But we don’t really know what the scale is. Like, a 100% reduction would presumably be very serious, completely unfit for skilled labour? so what does a 5% reduction mean?
The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992,
But the point remains the same, we shouldn’t be seeing a decline at all…
The "point" the article is trying to make is that there is a decline in literacy so severe that it means "the end of civilization" -- a strong claim, to say the least, and one that demands rather stronger evidence than a 1-5% decline in various measures of literacy/thinking. (Granted, test scores are not the only evidence he has marshaled.)
It's simply the end of the the symbolic era's low meaning load. The sentence is dead. The metaphor. Whatever low-grade semantics we suffered under is coming to a close and a new form/format of meaning-units are needed.