“Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking” – Nietzsche
It’s rather funny to read the writings of the enlightenment and, along with those of the communists, specially the Soviet Union on education. The general belief was that anyone could be picked up from a young age and educated properly and they’ll reach a high intellectual achievement, and society as a whole would achieve a golden age with the educated population. The Soviets were literally attempting to make in their own words “Every man an equal to Aristotle.”
Now, you see the curriculum of the upper class in either Europe and Asia from the past and you realize education has been seriously dumbed down. It’s so damn bad that give someone a book from the past and despite being adjusted for modern English, they can’t read it. The reading comprehension is below the capacity to grasp it. They had to dumb the curriculum down so the average and even below average could pass.
You can also see this in the history and science category for bestsellers: As a general rule the bestsellers as a whole have a very small vocabulary and they’re oversimplistic to the point it hurts. But if you look at the bestsellers in niche categories, the books are very rich and complex. Also read books from the early 20th century and compare it to todays books and you’ll notice the vocabulary used is much larger and the topics more complex.
Now, just look at top sellers from the past for fiction: Dostoevsky, Goethe, Schiller, Byron, etc and compare it to todays bestsellers. The books today are painfully oversimplistic but being parades as enlightened and masterpieces. These idiots are literally incapable of reading the classics and find as insightful the nonsense they are able to consume.
Now the Flynn effect seems to have existed, but it always tried to measure society as a whole within modernity, and not society against the aristocratic ideals, education and achievement of the past.
Also, top performers seem to have improved (depends on how you’re measuring it) at the same time, but in the past the cultural ideals were those of the top performers, while today the cultural ideals are of the mediocre. Music, movies, books and media for the most part try to get the broadest audience, which has the biggest effect now. This also affects education, while the emphasis is to match the course to the capacity of the average student, which now scales to nearly the whole population which means the top performers aren’t being pushed to their full capacities many times.
This isn’t to say everything in modernity is awful, but anything of quality is by default going to be a niche while those education and entertainment that become a standard of the period are by default limited to the intellectual capacity of the mediocre to consume it. The bloody premise that educating all would give a golden age was wrong, civilization has scaled back to the point that the achievements of the past are being discarded since they idiots can’t understand it.
“One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.” ― Oswald Spengler