Perhaps most people were away the day their teacher handed out comprehension.

Although I'd be surprised if comprehension is more closely related to writing than it is to reading.

An issue on my mind too. I believe it is because too many people lack critical thinking and contextualising skills. I suspect that with education focusing obsessively on 'vocational skills' and 'employment skills' and 'job skills', as education is geared to narrowly training people for the needs of capitalism, the skills of critical thinking and contextualising information are undeveloped or non existent, and these skills are critical to evaluating what we read, see and hear. I'm not sure to what extent the digital age has produced this. I suspect this trend goes back to the 1970s, before the explosion in technology. I remember back then working in adult education and the endless banter about making schools, colleges and universities produce the output for the job market, and nothing mattered but job skills, job skills, job skills. Now the internet has produced a huge mass of data, but too many people have absolutely no ability to critically assess what they read, to contextualise it, or to validate information they access. When I read stories of supposedly well-educated people believing in cults and wacko theories, and the rest, I think this is what happens when you have high paid unthinking monkeys. It would be easy to dump on Millennials but I think unfairly because they are plenty of intellectually critically inadequate boomers, X and Y gens as well. As someone who has worked in education all my life, who thinks critical thinking is paramount, the modern age is very depressing to me.