Reading, writing and arithmetic are becoming less relevant to the day to day of the majority of young persons. How much text actually appears on Instagram? How much reading skills are required for it? Outside of school, when does a young person ever require literacy? Even numeracy is less relevant on average, as payments are digital, no longer requiring quick mental sums.

At lest here in Argentina, everyone uses WhatsApp. Some people use voice messages in WhatsApp, but most messages are just text and emojis.

Long sums and multiplications are probably not very useful now, but approximated calculations are, at least as a sanity check. [Yesterday in a shop they tried to charge me x10 by mistake. They realized the error and fixed it before pressing [enter] in the credit card device. I'd not notice a 1% error, but a x10 error should be obvious.]

The problem with approximated calculations is that they are very difficult to teach and learn. In spite what some new fads in educations say, you must do first many exact calculations by hand before you can understand how to approximate.

Anyway, without a good literacy and numeracy, it's difficult to get good medical doctors or engineers or other high paying jobs.

Yes, you are right, and there is a falling off of skills in incoming students. Perhaps not in medicine, that will always scrape off from the top applicants, but nany subjects are either neglected or suffer from cheating. You dont see it because colleges dumb down their requirements so that students can pass. I say this as personal anecdote, knowing college lecturers and students. I think that when current high schoolers enter college the system will have a shock.

I'm a math professor in the first year of the university in Argentina. I've seen a lot of stuff. The students that ended high school by zoom need(ed) a lot of help to plug the holes in their curriculum.

Is your argument that these things don't matter, or is your argument that the experience outside school is failing to lrovide sufficient reinforcement?

It is not necessarily that they don't matter, but rather that something which is difficult must be rewarding otherwise it will just not be done. When reading, writing and arithmetic were absolutely necessary fir a young person to enjoy and fulfill their lives they would invest gladly. Even a paperback Western is too hard to read today, amd there are alternatives. In a few years reading long form will be a rare skill in the younger generations, or will be found mainly in special populations, such as highly religious groups that have large collections of religious texts.