This discovery shocked even me:
The study also finds that more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges have only the most basic literacy skills, meaning they can’t do basic tasks like summarize the arguments in a newspaper editorial. On both measures, students at two-year colleges perform even worse.
Without literacy, most people will lack adequate vocabularies. An inadequate vocabulary leads to an inability to verbalize experiences or beliefs. This hurts the natural human desire to stand outside of self and ask hard, yes Socratic, questions. “Am I correct?” or better “To what extent am I correct?”
Words make the world wider by allowing humans to categorize experiences. Due to television, movies, gaming and other virtual reality technology, people have more experiences. We have increased visual intelligence, easily seeing the flaws in the most sophisticated special effects films, but we lack the vocabulary to talk about them . . . to reflect on our experience.
When someone tells you that the “new media” or the Internet is changing everything, ask them if arguments that form the basis of scientific, philosophic, and theological advances have changed. They have not. It is not just that we have not yet devised a way to create pictures of these things and get rid of words. . . it is the very ability of words to describe but not be reduced to our experience as easily as an image or icon must. Our failure to give our children the gift of language dooms them to serve those who have it, I fear.
Illiterate people are doomed to be slaves with souls stamped by tyrants to follow the will of those with words.