To sort of echo what was being said, I hate to break it to you, but the teachers are already mostly illiterate. Ironically enough, the most literate teachers I have ever met were almost universally kindergarten/early elementary, special education, and university professors. Basically people who have to go through additional/specialty education to actually teach and not just have a random bachelors. The only other exceptions were a math teacher I had who had a change of consciousness after his second divorce, stopped designing rocket guidance systems (read missiles), and decided to instead teach high school math and coach the baseball team, and a high school history teacher who somehow was teaching high school despite having a Master’s in European History from Harvard, never got the full story there.

I say this having multiple friends and family who are middle school and high school teachers, many of whom I pity their students because despite spending so much time with children they have barely any sense of humor, understanding of childish logic or a general philosophy of teaching. Without these things, it is basically impossible to be truly literate. Genuinely, these people could use a dose of Marx’s maxim, ‘Nothing which is human is alien to me.’ They are so worried about being a figure of authority that they have alienated themselves from their students and therefore can never earn any natural respect as a mentor, and paradoxically, the harder they try enforce it, the more difficult it will become to enforce. And it is difficult enough to be a mentor when you are constantly derided by society as ‘those who can’t do, teach’, when teaching itself, especially in a classroom, is a ‘do’ that most people readily struggle with.

It reminds me of a science teacher I had in middle school who expected sixth graders to keep neat and accurate hand-written science notes (something I have never had to do even in professional academia) for a full experiment, and then, after basically alienating the entire class by not giving out a single ‘A’ in a class that really should have primarily been about learning the scientific method, not her particular journaling style, did one of those ‘read all the instructions, and then just sign your name at the top’ gotcha’s, and then gave a whole thirty minute lecture on the importance of reading directions fully after no one in the class got it. Again, for a bunch of coming into their bodies, angst and hormonal sixth graders. The only thing I really learned from that class is that you shouldn’t inherently trust that the teacher knows what they are talking about, but god forbid you correct them.

That said, even shit teachers still deserve a living wage and union benefits. Shit’s incredibly difficult.

However, yeah people definitely feel more technically bordering on functionally illiterate to the written word than they were in the past, but like, most of the 40-50 year old factory workers I work with are absolutely technically illiterate, but get by fine because society caters to their illiteracy, so idk when things actually ‘stopped getting better’. It feels like the trend towards functional illiteracy predates social media.