Neoliberal education austerity and AI-driven cognitive fragmentation erode deep reading—who benefits from the decline of critical thought?
Original framing: “Does the decline of book reading mark the end of rational thinking?” — Nature
Indigenous knowledge systems, such as the Navajo *Hózhǫ́* (harmony) or the Māori *mātauranga Māori*, demonstrate that critical thinking is not the monopoly of written argumentation. Oral traditions, embodied practices, and land-based learning have sustained complex reasoning for millennia without relying on linear texts. The erosion of these systems—through colonial education policies that banned Indigenous languages and replaced them with Eurocentric curricula—parallels today’s AI-driven cognitive fragmentation. For example, the Australian *Songlines* encode ecological, historical, and philosophical knowledge through song and journey, a form of 'deep reading' that AI cannot disrupt because it is not text-based. The current crisis mirrors the violence of epistemicide, where dominant systems declare non-Western ways of knowing 'irrational' to justify their erasure.
The 'decline of rational thinking' is not a cultural failing but a designed consequence of neoliberal education policies, algorithmic attention economies, and the erasure of non-Western epistemologies.
The crisis narrative serves to justify the very systems that create it: underfunded public education, corporate ed-tech monopolies, and AI trained on superficial data all benefit from a population that consumes knowledge passively rather than engaging critically. Yet the story is far from over. Indigenous and cross-cultural traditions offer blueprints for cognitive resilience—from the Māori *whakapapa* to the Inuit *Inua*—while historical parallels reveal that every 'crisis of thought' has been met with resistance. The trickster here is the algorithm itself, which profits from fragmentation while elites lament its effects. The solution lies in reclaiming cognitive sovereignty: by decolonizing curricula, regulating attention economies, funding slow knowledge movements, and unionizing against ed-tech monopolies, we can restore depth—not as a relic of the past, but as a dynamic, inclusive, and adaptive practice for the future. The real question is not whether reading is dying, but who gets to define what counts as 'rational thinking'—and who stands to lose if we let corporations and algorithms decide.