Earlier generations were not products of golden educational times and consistently high standards, but growing numbers of voices lament an accelerating decline.
This matters. Constructing coherent arguments and outlining clear explanations depend on a high ability with words and sentences.
Thoughts must be processed and expressed logically. Attention must be sustained to both read in-depth and write with clarity.
This applies not just in humanities — where these skills should be honed — but across almost all areas.
The background and explanations of mathematical problems, for example, involve far more than formulas and symbols.
This month, University of Canterbury lecturer, sociology associate professor Mike Grimshaw despaired at the "crisis" because so many tertiary students were "functionally illiterate".
They had passed through the school system with relative success but often lacked the literacy for university education requirements.
University of Otago English and linguistics associate professor Paul Tankard last week put much of the blame for the worrying decline in the overuse of technology. He warned it could take generations to repair.
He said the education system had become "so flexible and accommodating" to diverse ways of learning there was the possibility of choosing options and pathways that fulfilled some aspects of the technical requirements but did not do other things that teachers had always expected book reading to do.
Students, in the internet era, wanted one-shot solutions for everything and schools had gone along with this as well, he said.
Victoria University education academic Bronwyn Wood also said the drop in literacy across the board was because of increasingly digital lives.
She said the high school pathway to university was too relaxed and was leading to a drop in literacy among those taking up higher education.
She said the New Zealand NCEA university entrance pathway needed to be firmer.
NCEA provided too many easier options, noting the steady fall in pupil numbers taking algebra, another grounding subject that could be important in later university study.
Expectations are important for pupils across all schools and all backgrounds. If sights are set low, achievement will be too. Taking easier ways out should be avoided.
New Zealand’s poor and falling achievement at its bottom end is serious both in reality and compared with the rest of the world.
Figures from 2022 found 19% of 15-year-olds did not meet the lowest benchmark for literacy. Another 21% were only at the most basic level.
New Zealand was once proud of its reading levels. Not any more.
While the very top-end standards remain impressive, the decline across the rest is disturbing. Middle-class children are among those reading less for pleasure and with falling literacy.
Their parents are much more likely to have read to them and provided a richer book environment, but, with eyes on their phones or Netflix, they set a poor example. The many thousands of hours reading books to develop the necessary breadth of skills is just not happening.
The blight of Covid, rightly, takes some blame for the current cohort’s woes. The underlying trend, however, marches on.
AI throws another curveball. Its implications have to be worked through by society and educators.
These issues are causing angst across the Western world.
The switch in primary school reading to phonetics, as long as it is accompanied by flexibility for some learners, could help. The government has also sent messages about the importance of basic literacy and numeracy.
The removal of mobile phones from classrooms might also help a little.
But wider societal attitudes and technology change provide a context where both the desire for and means to focus and concentrate are diminished. All the more effort will be needed through the home and throughout the education system to foster reading, writing and thinking.
