March 28, 2022
Visual Literacy Is the New Reading Level, and Most Adults Are Behind
Reading got centuries of institutional scaffolding: schools, libraries, tests built to teach people to question a sentence before trusting it. Images never got the equivalent, mostly because a camera used to be reliable enough that nobody thought they’d need it. That assumption is now out of date. That reaction points at something worth naming directly. Reading, as a skill, got centuries of institutional investment: schools, libraries, standardized tests, an entire cultural infrastructure built around teaching people to interrogate a written sentence before trusting it. Images never got the equivalent infrastructure, mostly because a camera used to be a reasonably reliable
