"i'm winging it, but that's my guess. and if i'm even close to right, that's not a failure of public education per se. it's a failure in what we ask public educators to do."
I agree. The domain of "literacy" is not just school, but the whole society. The people I knew in my grandfather's generation (in Romania) were certainly not more literate or better educated than people are now, but 1) they placed a great value on education 2) they had many more and many more varied social interactions in which verbal communication was key 3) as the media was restricted to radio, people depended much more on each other for entertainment, analysis, interpretations of the world. From what I remember, many people of that generation were very good storytellers (something rare nowadays) and had a fairly rich/complex understanding of life.
Some of this stuff can be solved in the schools, but some is really an extension of the social reality we live. Overwork, social fragmentation into different consumer markets, and identity politics do not help at all.
Joanna