Seems hard to square your claim that “today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy” with the PISA [1] research.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
It's not been limited to the US but in the developed world broadly cognitive performance has been crashing for about a decade, i.e. the 'learning recession'. Talk to anyone who teaches these days and you usually get a fairly depressing story about kids being unable to decode basic information
[1]https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors...
The only 'non modern' bits are 'Michaelmas' (which I know is a Christianity related date), and 'undistinguishable' where I'd use 'indistinguishable'. So the note about the student being quizzed to translate to 'modern English' seems moot as it is modern English.
However, I'm English, so a number of the terms are immediately obvious.
I obvious know who the Lord Chancellor is (as the role still exists); as do the Inns of Court, being where Barristers receive their initial training. So I would suggest it is more a case of needing specific cultural knowledge, than needing enhanced language skills.
Bleak House: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm
As to the rest of the initial 7 paragraphs.
In P2, I had to look up "aits" (islands); otherwise they are all of no issue other than the length of the sentences, occasionally requiring me to reread a few phrases.
Basically Dickens is modern English, with a few archaic words being used.
> … As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
A completely functional high earning English-speaking software developer might easily find the above sentence hard to parse.
I find old school sitcoms hard to enjoy, probably because I am missing a lot of subtle cultural context. It doesn’t imply my comprehension skills are poor.
But that's kind of the point. Even a person who knows zero old timey nautical terminology or anything about New Bedford and its history will have to pick up what's going on by inferring it from the context.
Reading skills aren't 1:1 connected to comprehension skills, and of course not to intelligence. And most people will never need the higher levels of reading skills, since they mostly are useful for reading text which isn't well written.
I have enjoyed reading Canterbury Tales but have little to no ability to parse Beowulf.
I don’t know where that line is, but pre-Shakespeare is at the least diminishing returns.
> > … As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
1. 'as if the waters had but newly retired' - this is clearly an allusion to the Christian biblical story of the Flood, Noah's ark, etc. The book was written in an era and for a target audience where the educated readers were almost all certainly regular dedicated Sunday church-goers.
2. It helps to understand the relatively recent 'discovery' of dinosaur fossils at the time the book was written, the beginnings of scientific understanding of them, and the history of Paleontology from approx. 1800 to 1900 to understand the reference to the Megalosaurus. It's my understanding that the book was written at a specific moment in history when the discovery of dinosaur fossils was a hot new scientific fad and would be reported on in the popular press.
Now if you're a person who is highly literate in English but you haven't specifically studied the history of how weird English people started going off to the far corners of the earth and digging up dinosaur bones and scientifically categorizing them (see section for 19th century here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paleontology ), and you don't get the part about 'the waters' meaning a reference to an entire planet wide flood in a religious myth, the whole sentence is not going to mean the same thing.
It's not that a highly literate English reader from, let's say, Bangladesh won't understand the words in the sentence, but a great deal of the underlying meaning will be lost. Much as you or I might not understand the metaphors, allusions and allegories in poetry or literature written 150 years ago in a foreign language.
There were some words I didn't know either because of the cultural context (Michaelmas, lord chancellor, Lincoln's Inn Hall) or because of my limited English (the word mire for example). But in all cases I could infer enough meaning that I was able to read the paragraph without losing too much (except for Lincoln's Inn where I thought it was a literal inn but it's not very important for the understanding in the paragraph).
I would say I'm surprised that it was so hard for college students majoring in English but I also noticed that the young generation in my country has a big problem understanding figurative speech, worse than just a general lack of knowledge (it didn't help that it has been politically useful to pretend not to understand figure of speech for the last 15-20 years).
That being said, I found the study to be one of those trying to find the conclusion they want. The students were asked to explain details of the book as they read it for the first time and translate as they go. I can totally see myself failing this test and I used to read a lot. The way they conducted the study is just not the way I read.
It came across as the students were blamed for thinking out loud after they were asked to explain details as they go. I would be unfamiliar with terms like "whiskers" too. I would not know "Michaelmas term" meaning either.
And frankly, the whole paragraph is an atmospheric paragraph that carry no literal importance. You are supposed to take the feelings out of it, the exact composition of the mud layers is not the plot point nor of the books philosophy.
If not referring to the beard as a whole, how else would you reference the facial hair - whiskers is less of a mouthful than any other term.
is tomorrow!
I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
US is still near the top globally, though, and other countries like Germany had a bigger drop in reading performance that started earlier, so your point still stands.
In Germany in the schools I know of, its stressed a lot how it does NOT affect anything at all, so its not actually a test on ability, but also on ability to motivate oneself to perform well in a meaningless test.