Comment by avidiax

> In fact, none of the [problematic readers] ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.

> these students had full use of dictionaries and even their phones when reading the passages. They were free to look up and search any terms they didn’t recognize. But these resources did not help them understand the text.

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> I found that a majority of [English majors] had a lot of trouble understanding metaphor and allusion in the assigned reading, couldn’t grasp even obvious themes and character motivations, and could not reliably construct grammatically correct sentences in their own writing.

> Almost all of them went on to be awarded BAs in English.

I feel there's multiple factors in all of this, but the central spiral could be summarized as corrupting economic pressure on learning that forces schools to reduce rigor for the sake of increasing the passing rate.

There could be an inclusion bias however. Long ago, only a select few students would go to college. If we looked at the test results of 2024 students that also would likely have gone to college had they been in the class of 1960, would we see such a difference?