Ignorance wouldn't prevent you from concentrating on a 14-line poem, or from understanding the immediate plot details of a book and how they fit into the plot more broadly.
Things like this are foundational for learning. If you can't do them, you can't learn very well. Even if you do learn to do these things in college, you're literally learning as an adult what previous generations learned in elementary-, middle- and highschool. This is delayed development. People like that will never be able to achieve at the same level.
But, ignorance predisposes you to stupidity. In the absence of knowledge, you can either admit you don't know enough about a topic to have an informed opinion on it, or, you can cobble together some bullshit, making up stuff as you go.
Since admitting you know nothing takes humility, most (ignorant) people opt to cobble together bullshit. Or accept plausible-sounding cobbled-up bullshit as true.
Things like this are foundational for learning. If you can't do them, you can't learn very well. Even if you do learn to do these things in college, you're literally learning as an adult what previous generations learned in elementary-, middle- and highschool. This is delayed development. People like that will never be able to achieve at the same level.
Here's the article if you're interested:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
https://archive.is/TJ18n