Three "Ah!"s

People are no longer being taught to read or write (or add).

The younger generation will be up in arms, tweeting their denials.
The older generation will nod their heads wisely & get back to their spy thriller.

Society is to blame.

I'm moving too fast, so I'll back up a bit ... a long way. Once upon a time, there was a big gap between the educated & the uneducated. Those who learned to read & write (& do maths) were the elite. They had time on their hands. They read the words of those held in honour by their teachers - people who were respected by all educated people. Although they could put quill to paper, they would rarely consider the possibility of writing for a wide audience themselves - that was a task for the few greats.

The spread of education over the years meant that, as people started filling in the gap between the educated & non-educated - the burgeoning middle class of education, if you will - & saw the advantages of being able to read & write, & how it held those with the skill so far above those who couldn't, they encouraged others to be brought up from the uneducated into the semi-educated class. They sometimes had the support & encouragement of the educated.

However, & this is the key - it was never (or very rarely) the educated who took the illiterate to a higher level, it was the semi-educated sharing their knowledge, which had been gleaned from the educated in a diminished (often begrudging) manner. It takes great dedication & perseverance to take an illiterate person to the level of being highly (tertiary) educated. It always has done. This is why the task of doing it was given to the semi-educated, who pushed themselves up the education scale at the same time (making a bigger range in the middle educated). This could never have made them members of the educated elite, of itself. It only made them the most educated of the semi-educated.

Now, Western society "expects" almost everyone to be literate - but only by the standard of the educators, who still belong to that middle band. Those being educated have little or no access to the truly educated elite. However, they are arrogant enough to believe that they can learn everything from the one source & have achieved greatness as the result of an ordinary education. The truth is, they are the new illiterate - the lowest educated in society.

People who are told that they can read & write will believe it. But if you ask them to do so, the result is not particularly enlightening. Someone who "can write" could well still have trouble writing in complete sentences or making a message clear. Similarly, someone who "can read" may not be able to decipher a simple paragraph of text giving instructions for how to operate their smart phone.

Some "educated" people - those whose university degrees border on the vocational - including teachers - don't read books. They read manuals or guides, full of jargon & pictures. They do not read books full of ideas.
Some "educated" people who write blogs (like this one) don't automatically have ideas worth sharing, even if they can indeed communicate in the first place, just because they have a blog.

Yet we find teenagers who think that what they have to say is so amazing that they should receive praise for their ability to tap a few keys (like "photo" & "send"), & that being the first to know who of their circle has done likewise is a substitute for caring.

So, that's the problem - we (society) arrogantly assume that what we have been taught within & by our social system is all that there is to offer. Accepting this, we assume that we are at the pinnacle of the social tree because we can, indeed, read a newspaper headline & spell a hashtag.

I say that's just not good enough.