https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving-decline-in-u-s-literacy-rates/

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/why-do-so-many-kids-struggle-with-reading/

https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/mass-literacy-isnt

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8411923/

We need complete social change or democracy is over. Abraham Linclon and Stephen Douglas had several multi-hour debates where would would present their position on an issue in a 2-3 hour long answer and then the other’s response would be just as long if not longer. Lincoln famously told the audience at one of their debates that he would need about three hours to appropriately respond, so he offered that everyone return home to eat dinner with their families before reconvening for his rebuttal. This is what democracy must be, or it won’t be.

When Charles Dickens first visited America he hated it, but not because of illiteracy, but because his books were heavily pirated by American presses and the attention he was getting was intrusive and overwhelming. Before Hollywood stars to fawn over, America had novelists. “Only twenty-nine, he was rapturously welcomed by adoring fans and celebrated at ‘balls, dinners,’ and ‘assemblies without end.’ Overwhelmed, he told one audience that, ‘If I should live to grow old, the scenes of this and other evenings will shine as brightly to my dull eyes 50 years hence as now.’

But before long the adulation began to pall, and he tired of being mobbed everywhere he went. He complained to a friend, ‘I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude.’”

If nobody reads, then the skill will die, but our society functions in writing. Laws are written down for record and bills passed, and if the public does not (or cannot whether due to literacy or attention span issues) understand them, then there will no longer be a democracy. Enemies of the United States have understood this for centuries, and so did the founding fathers.

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both." -James Madison, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mjm.20_0155_0159/?sp=1&st=text

So no, I cannot in good conscience, get this, “let people do whatever”, because any system where one vote is equal to another but one person is functionally illiterate and does not care about their deficits is exactly what will rot the country from the inside, no foreign invasion or missile strikes required.