I'm much more worried about literacy, frankly. Understanding numbers is quite important but this understanding doesn't mean much if you can't interpret their meaning in context.
I live in an extremely poor city and I would estimate about half the adults I interact with cannot read, write, or articulate anywhere near the level you'd expect from the high school I went to twenty years ago. And I believe the problem is getting much, much worse with the rise of youtube and the collapse of diction into a shared set of social-media memes—if you can't express yourself through those memes, you may not be able to communicate well at all.
Some portion of this can be written off to being a very attractive immigration target for those, like most, who don't speak english as their native language. I don't want to entirely write this off to a money/social/government/education problem—it's more complicated than any single narrative can convey. But I am firmly convinced we are looking at decades of literacy continuing to fall. If we can't figure out a way to collectively parent each other and resolve this, I can't imagine this is going to result in the kind of social and economic stability most people generally desire.
I live in an extremely poor city and I would estimate about half the adults I interact with cannot read, write, or articulate anywhere near the level you'd expect from the high school I went to twenty years ago. And I believe the problem is getting much, much worse with the rise of youtube and the collapse of diction into a shared set of social-media memes—if you can't express yourself through those memes, you may not be able to communicate well at all.
Some portion of this can be written off to being a very attractive immigration target for those, like most, who don't speak english as their native language. I don't want to entirely write this off to a money/social/government/education problem—it's more complicated than any single narrative can convey. But I am firmly convinced we are looking at decades of literacy continuing to fall. If we can't figure out a way to collectively parent each other and resolve this, I can't imagine this is going to result in the kind of social and economic stability most people generally desire.