Could we please start funding the humanities again? It's not just that we're losing the ability to read, we're losing the understanding of what reading even is
True enough, but I do wonder if "the understanding of what reading is" is even a thing, outside of a perennially narrow community of practice. Reading is a most curious, historically recent, and definitely non-natural innovation. The STEM people could say that math notation is a form of writing.
"Mathematics is a shorthand language in which each symbol has a precise and agreed-upon meaning, Once the language is learned, we find that it is only a form of English after all."
-- Isaac Asimov, "Understanding Physics" (1966) v.1 p.17