Do you read old English?

I grew up in a house with a rotary phone and a meticulously maintained phone book (written in cursive.) If I'm too young to have been able to reliable hone my cursive-parsing skills, what can we expect of younger generations?

The Flynn effect suggests people are generally getting smarter, remembering things better, etc. Something is happening to cause younger generations to be generally better than their ancestors. IQ scores have their problems but it's still a hopeful sign.

Language changes. Teaching an entire script to be able to read translated documents when there are practical skills that could be taught instead is silly.

We don't teach old English anymore, even though there's a huge amount of our cultural history contained in it.
We don't even teach people about the eras when we used to use "f" in place if "s", and that's right in the middle of the constitution.

Can you read the original magna carta? America would not be unique amongst English speaking nations in having issues dealing with language drift.

lol mixing up language with its orthography system. Classic error