Even English majors are getting caught up in illiteracy. When that's your chosen path of study and you're failing it, you're fucked. We're fucked. It's not just the United States anymore, it's the globe. This costs the United States billions of dollars annually as it stands. The global economy can't function if a sizable enough portion of the populace can neither read nor write.
Boomers do this all over the country to sabotage other boomers and young people. I've seen them be perfectly nice and helpful to everyone who isn't clearly trying to get promoted.
We've raised some vicious animals in this system. Full of nothing but people who have learned to pull the ladder up out of the well because they're either too afraid of competition on an equal playing field or just don't want to help others succeed in good faith. Probably both even.
Individual professors in the US will crush potential academic rivals before they have the ability to develop. We have a truly abhorrent group of professors, and it is actually due to the individual character flaws of almost every one of them that these things are happening.
So it's not actually planned, it's just academic sabotage rearing its ugly head? Then what's happening on the primary school levels? Surely that isn't spite as well.
When I was in undergrad, I had a VERY Chinese professor say the following thing of another professor:
"When people who are inferior are allowed to teach, the students become inferior."
I didn't believe this, because I wound up more skilled than a lot of university professors. I didn't realize that I was an extreme anomaly. The situation right now is that our professors are mostly inferior people. They try to create copies of themselves...and as a result, those who are academic successes are inferior copies of an inferior person.
This trickles down into teaching. Our teachers are trash. This isn't their fault. They start out their careers with an education that is worse than useless, and they struggle to overthrow it.
US education is in a positive feedback loop. If you think an inability to read slightly difficult texts like that is upsetting, then you will be shocked in 10 years when the average English major cannot read Harry Potter.