"The divide is not between smart and stupid people, but between people who can inspect the systems around them and people who are forced to accept those systems on the basis of trust."

I mean... a smart person can not understand the system, true. But a sufficiently stupid person cannot understand the system. So, it is a divide between smart people who understand the system on the one hand and smart people who don't along with dumb people who can't on the other.

"Back in the day, and I mean way back in the day, barely anyone could read or write. Nowadays, you can't find a single person who believes reading and writing is a useless skill."

One-fifth of US adults can’t read well enough to compare and contrast information, paraphrase, or make low-level inferences based on written text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States