I am a professor. I see what the kids are capable of first hand. Our students are literate. They're not well-read, capable of critical thinking, or able to perform analysis. There is a difference.

I suggest you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death about how we are an incredibly informed society but we have very little knowledge about that information. This book was written in the 1980's and he is concered with television, but his arguments certainly hold up in the digital age. He argues that entertainment has become so ingrained in education that there isn't as much learning going on. I see this in the rush to incorporate every new trendy technology into the classroom. Sometimes an iPod is just an iPod and not a teaching tool.

Even when I taught community college the students could read and write. They hated it and as a result they were very poor at it and so they played that off as illiteracy to get out of doing it.