The New Feudalism
The kids can't read. As literacy declines and home ownership grows increasingly out of reach, are we moving towards a new kind of feudal society?
It’s grown painfully common: a young, American teacher posts a video on TikTok, lamenting the challenges of the profession. But the focus of these videos is no longer the low pay, the lack of support from administrators, or the explosion of book bans—though these issues undoubtedly prevail. Instead, teachers are turning to social media to warn the public about two major issues: literacy decline and behavioral problems. While the escalating issue of unruly student behavior is acute, and ranges from blatant disrespect of teachers to physical violence, for the purposes of this essay, I’d like to focus on literacy and the wider implications for American society (with an eye to history).
First, it’s easy for some to dismiss learning loss as purely resulting from the pandemic—keeping children out of school for months, sometimes years, and offering little support to educators—even as restaurants, bars, and shops reopened. While this no doubt exacerbated the problem of literacy decline, the roots of the issue go much further back than 2020.
There was No Child Left Behind, a very nice name for a very stupid policy, which was signed into law by the Bush administration in 2002. NCLB mandated standardized testing and tied school funding to test scores. Education companies like Pearson and McGraw Hill made a killing. (It should be noted that the McGraw and Bush families have incredibly cozy, multigenerational connections, and both McGraw Hill and Pearson, amongst others, have spent millions of dollars lobbying the US government to embrace pro-testing policies.) This influx of standardized testing meant that educators were forced to teach to an exam, rather than to individual students’ needs. The Obama administration’s Common Core initiative had similar issues, in that it focused on standardized testing and a top-down regulatory approach.
No Child Left Behind also created incentives for districts to improve graduation rates. In practice, what this meant was that school districts became far more reluctant to hold students back. “Grade retention,” or holding back a struggling student, is a complicated subject, though recent studies suggest that grade retention can improve educational outcomes if interventions take place earlier in a student’s education (i.e., before middle school). But in many public schools today, even students who are failing will often get moved up to the next grade level.
Then there was the removal of phonics-based reading instruction in favor of trendy techniques like “balanced literacy,” which uses a whole language approach. (Check out this excellent breakdown from American Public Media.) Instead of teaching students how to sound out words and building literacy from the bottom-up (how most of us born before 2000 learned to read), balanced literacy relied more on sight-memorization of words, often incorporating pictures and using context-clues within a passage. We’ve all had the experience of memorizing vocabulary words for school, so what’s the big deal? The problem is that without phonics-based instruction, balanced literacy leaves students without the tools to sound out new words, severely hindering one’s ability to read. Coupled with the rise of the iPad kid and social media addiction, you have the makings for literacy decline.
Fortunately, school districts across the country are recognizing the massive mistake they made in experimenting with the literacy of a generation of children. Many are now course-correcting and embracing the science of reading once again.
But where does that leave us?
Currently, the Department of Education’s biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress demonstrates that a whopping two-thirds of American school children cannot read at their grade level, with 40% being functionally illiterate. What surprised me when looking through the statistics was that since the early 90’s, the situation was never great, with reading proficiency hovering between the high 20’s and low 30’s. Nevertheless, rates of reading proficiency are dropping. As of 2022, 21% of American adults were illiterate, with a staggering 54% reading below a sixth-grade level. My fear is that the situation will grow worse.
We are, of course, nowhere near the rates of illiteracy that existed in medieval societies. It’s incredibly difficult to find exact statistics, as literacy wasn’t tracked in the way we do today. Furthermore, definitions of literacy varied. In early medieval Europe (approximately 500-1000 AD), the literati were those who could read and write in Latin, the language used for legal, scholarly, and theological writing. The use of written vernacular languages varied by region and period; for example, texts written in Old English stretched as far back to at least the 600s. While the literati almost exclusively came from the clergy and aristocracy, what’s difficult to assess is what percentage of early medieval Europeans could read but not write, and the percentage of people who could read in their vernacular language but not in Latin.
The growth of vernacular texts throughout the High Middle Ages (roughly 1000-1300 AD) aided the growth of literacy, but access to written materials would explode in 1440, when Johannes Gutenberg introduced the moveable-type printing press to Europeans. (Moveable-type had already been invented centuries before by Chinese engineer Bi Sheng. He created this invention at some point between 1039 and 1048.) The printing press meant a much larger portion of Europeans could access books, pamphlets, and later, magazines and newspapers.
But what was life like prior to this surge in literacy?
Medieval peasants relied on oral storytelling traditions to transmit knowledge. Instead of reading texts directly, many listened to popular stories and legends being recited from memory or read aloud by the few who could read. This reminds me of listening to an audiobook today; one can still engage with a text without directly reading it.
Do I believe that we will fully regress to the levels of illiteracy that existed in medieval Europe? Of course not. But do I see us moving in a dangerous direction?
I try not to be alarmist or cynical. But I cannot ignore the crisis fomenting in our country. It’s not just this generation of kids facing literacy decline; what will happen one day when they have children of their own, and are unable to teach them to read, or at least aid them meaningfully? The rise of AI like ChatGPT only serves to worsen the problem. While I don’t see a future where the majority of Americans can’t read at all, I do see one in which most struggle to write. Reading and writing, while complimentary skills, are not the same. Already, over half of American adults cannot read beyond a sixth-grade level. I am deeply disturbed that we will reach a point in which a significant majority of the population cannot express themselves proficiently through the written word, even while conducting what should be simple tasks, such as writing an email.
The ability to articulate one’s thoughts, analyze texts, and communicate clearly are essential skills for the preservation of a free society. There is a reason that in the Antebellum South, among the many indignities, human rights violations, and acts of unfettered cruelty that enslaved Africans faced on a daily basis, one was that they were barred from learning to read. Literacy is more than an academic skill. It is the means by which one can be truly, mentally free—for an illiterate person is much easier to control.
It also disturbs me to see these issues arising in tandem with the housing crisis. In the introduction to this essay, I asked if we were moving towards a new kind of feudal society. Feudalism was the dominant social structure of medieval Europe, in which nobility held land from a monarch in exchange for military service. Peasants, or serfs, were tied to the land. With limited freedom of movement, they were required to give a portion of their labor (typically in the form of produce or livestock) to the lord of the estate. In other words, their “boss” and their “landlord” were one and the same.
In the US today, large investment firms have invaded the housing market. In June of 2023 alone, investors accounted for 26% of single-family home purchases. While institutional investors owned 3% of single family rentals in 2022, they have dominated in more affordable markets—in Charlotte, NC, they owned 20%. The properties they target to turn into rentals are “starter homes”—modest dwellings that young people rely on to get onto the property ladder. According to The Economist, it is now cheaper for 89% of Americans to rent a two-bedroom apartment than to buy a similar property. Three years ago, that number was just 16%. Often, the same Wall Street investment firms who control the American rental market are the ones who dominate the S&P 500, potentially paving the way for a future in which once again, your landlord is also your boss.
Will the average American, with declining literacy and declining upward mobility, become the modern-day version of a feudal peasant? Funny enough, I’m slightly more optimistic regarding the issue of housing (at least over the long term) than I am about literacy, mostly because there’s a lot more public attention on the causes of the crisis—from removing the tax benefits that aid large investment firms in feasting on the carcass of American neighborhoods, to addressing antiquated zoning laws, to reckoning with the construction industry’s decline in productivity. In the past few weeks, Democrats in both houses of Congress have introduced legislation to ban hedge funds from buying and owning single-family homes, and would require them to sell off the single-family properties they already own within a ten-year period. Considering the enormous power of Wall Street lobbyists, I doubt the law will be easy to pass, but it’s a start.
Unlike housing, which has strong attention from voters, declining literacy and the surge of schoolchildren using AI to write assignments is often met with a shrug. (“It’s inevitable, isn’t it? Who cares if people can’t write?”) There are some practical solutions, at least in regards to writing—teachers could do away with written homework assignments in favor of in-class, handwritten essays. But I still worry that in this Second Gilded Age of rising income inequality, we are moving swiftly toward a new kind of feudalism, one in which only the top third or less will have access to homeownership and can read and write with ease. One in which culture grows segregated once again between the literati and illiterati.
I hope desperately to be proven wrong, but frankly, I’m terrified that for the iPad kids, it’ll be too late. Maybe it’s the Cuban in me, but I’m never one to blindly assume that things will just get better.
What are your thoughts on the issues of literacy decline and the housing shortage? What subject would you like us to cover next? Let us know in the comments below!