There Will Be Benefits to Living in a Post-Literate Society

Are you aware a great many young people now live fully functioning lives with scant need to read or write? While there is panic in some quarters about the perils of living in a post-literate world, I’m rather more sanguine. I suspect instead the move away from the intellectual narrowness of credentialed book learning may mark a return to those eternal principles we’ve recently forgotten: truth, goodness and beauty.

First, let me explain how a post-literate young person successfully navigates life with bare minimum reading or writing. If something needs to be known, Generation Alpha (those born post 2013) and the younger members of Generation Z (1997-2012) will either Ask Alexa within the home or their phones outside. Voice activated software is used, the answer is spoken by Siri, Bixby or plain Google. Young people speak into the bottom of the phone and then place the phone at right angles to their heads to listen to the response. ‘What time’s the last train from London to Guildford? Where’s my driving instructor? Is Nandos still open?’ Voice-notes, photographs and emojis are sent rather than typed-out messages.

Helpfully, voice-activated tech is becoming more widely adopted to support longer forms of work. Essays are dictated into phones and then transcribed onto the required document. In spite of all that time that poor old Gove spent on teaching children fronted adverbials, the truth is spellings and grammar are of absolutely no consequence in daily, and increasingly, school life. I once tried to suggest to a child whose transcribed text was riddled with spelling errors that if he clicked on spell check these could be rectified, and he said passionately, “Honestly, no-one cares. It’s fine.” Even intellectually motivated young women like Rose and Dani, the bright young things who host Foidcast, embody this casual relationship with the written word by using only lowercase. Writing and reading accurately is just not really a thing anymore, even amongst the brainy. It’s all ideas, vibes and scenes. Those of us who do love reading will equally have adopted more auditory based ways of learning, turning to audiobooks and podcasts as pleasant ways of imbibing ideas.

Such is the rapid month-on-month adoption of voice technology that the LSE (in conjunction with Jabra, a wireless tech firm no less) has predicted that when Generation Alpha enters into the workforce, voice AI will be the default way of working. Joy of joys, it trumpets, no-one will ever need to read or write an email again. We speak and listen three or four times faster than we read, thus our auditory and visual-dominated future will transmit complex information far more efficiently than via screeds of text; just look at the popularity of the FT’s graphs shared on X.

 And yet such interesting shifts have caused panic from the great thinkers of our time. Niall Ferguson suggests if we stop reading, Barbarians will reign supreme. The latest PISA scores show the OECD average dropped by 10 points (from 487 to 476), the largest consecutive-cycle decline ever recorded. James Marriot worries we won’t be able to continue as a civilised society with only the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

Using old-fashioned reading, I have learned Britain only reached almost complete literacy after the 1870 education act. Previously 1-15% of the population was able to read between 1000 and 1500 (and yet our glorious cathedrals were built), shifting upwards to 25-25% by 1700, 60-70% by 1850 and then 97-99% by 1900. I’m not suggesting we all aspire to live as empty-mindedly as Keir Starmer, who proudly does not dream nor have a favourite book, but I am optimistic about society’s mass return to functional illiteracy and a return to a visual and oral world, for it presents a future where we are less likely to be tricked by wicked yet intellectually persuasive ideas. Just think what this means for art: no more explanatory notes to explain the vapid ugliness. How much harder will it be in a visual world to convince people wind and solar farms are good for the environment? Zack Polanski’s unfortunate teeth will put more people off him than his ludicrous policies.

The popularity of ‘the ick’ is the most obvious expression of this instinctive revulsion to something obscene. Imagine, Cher-like from Clueless, non-literate people will be presented with a design for yet another modernist hellscape, grimace and say: ‘As if!’ That the Pirelli calendar 2026 once again features beautiful women demonstrates the reviving triumph of instinctive beauty over physically disquieting, but nimbly-argued, trans and body-positive movements.

In terms of education, the results could be transformative for society. Children could learn skills again through doing, through copying, through ritual, rather than through books or soul-destroying EdTech. And the academic elite who can properly grapple with the classics, science, philosophy and all the rest of it, can do so in peace and excellence. Our other senses will re-activate and we will once again elevate visual beauty and moral intuition above wicked but cleverly-argued theory. Let’s see. And listen. And for now, read what Plato famously has Socrates warning us about in Phaedrus:

If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.