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For decades, people have been worrying about declines in literacy rates, and even steeper declines in  how many people read how many books, especially among students. For a striking recent example, see Niall Ferguson, "Without Books We Will Be Barbarians”, The Free Press 10/10/2025 — that article's sub-head is  "It is not the road to serfdom that awaits—but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt".

Although I mostly agree with the article's content, I find the reference to ancient Egypt ironic, given how Socrates frames his argument against reading and writing in education. From Phraedrus:

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

There's more, for example

SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.

I've cited those passages before, in the context of concerns about the effect of LLMs in education.

Another, somewhat different, example of ancient negative attitudes toward writing is cited in Fritz Staal's 1989 paper "The independence of rationality from literacy:"

From a social-historical perspective, the first writing activities in India were indeed restricted; but the restriction was to merchants and rulers. Writing was used by merchants to keep accounts (similar, perhaps, to the business ledger of Ansumana Sonie: page 196) and by kings to issue edicts, most notably those of Asoka, the oldest dated inscriptions found in India (third century b.c.). Manuscripts came into existence much later and are known only from the period corresponding to the Western middle ages. Even then, they were almost exclusively confined to secular matters, excluding everything that Westerners associate with religion and especially the Vedas. Within as well as outside the Vedic realm, writing was frowned upon if not prohibited, and there are countless injunctions (discussed, for example, in Ghurye 1950) that make stipulations such as: a pupil should not recite the Veda 'if he has eaten flesh, or seen blood, or a dead body, or done what is unlawful, or had intercourse, or written'.

October 10, 2025 @ 2:57 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Literacy

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