One of my foundational theoretical commitments is that the technology of reading and writing is neither natural nor innocuous. Media theorists McLuhan, Postman, Ong and Flusser all agree on this point: the technology of writing is a necessary condition for the emerge of liberal/democratic/Enlightenment/rationalist culture; mass literacy and the proliferation of cheap books/newspapers is necessary for this culture to spread beyond the elite to the whole of society.
This was an expensive project. Universal high school requires a significant investment, both to pay the teachers/build the schools and in terms of the opportunity cost to young people. Up until the end of the 20th century, the bargain was worth it for all parties invovled. Young people might not have enjoyed learning to read, write 5-paragraph essays or identify the symbolism in Lord of the Flies, but it was broadly obvious that reading and writing were necessary to navigate society and to consume the overwhelming majority of media.
And it’s equally obvious to today’s young people that this is no longer the case, that they will not need to spend all this time and effort learning to read long texts in order to communicate. They are, after all, communicating all the time, online, without essentially zero formal instruction on how to do so. Just as children learn to talk just by being around people talking, they learn to communicate online just by doing so. In this way, digital culture clearly resonates with Ong’s conception of “secondary orality,” as having far more in common with pre-literate “primary oral culture” than with the literary culture rapidly collapsing, faster with each new generation.