Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
Maybe. But I see quite a bit of naked disinformation in mass media that can't really be refuted unless you abandon the outlets themselves entirely.
Comprehension only gets you so far on third hand info. At some point, when all your media resources say X, you're going to believe X whether or not its true.
That's not "education" per say. It's access to data.
That’s a good point, but it’s not exactly against what I’m saying. With poor literacy it’s very easy to internalize propaganda because you lack the critical thinking skills and broader knowledge base that enhanced literacy provides you. Those tools are what is necessary to dismantle propaganda, and those are the tools that aren’t being effectively learned in school.
Sure. But even advanced literacy won't save you from an abundance of misinformation. Just ask Thomas Aquinas or Emmanuel Kant.
You can have an extremely well researched and erudite debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I'm not sure how related these are, there are plenty of highly literate people are extremely propagandized, and vice versa
definitely a bad thing on the whole though