Often in the news from day to day, we read and hear about the dismal state of affairs in the American public school system. Although the extent of the disrepair varies from one state to another, and even between neighboring districts, the overall decline in students’ reading ability is reflected in both the newest standardized test scores and in firsthand accounts from teachers.
A brief online dive into the numbers is discomfiting. Here is a handful of un-fun facts:
- A report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in June of 2023 showed that students’ scores in reading had dropped four points since the previous year. This could not be entirely attributed to “lost learning” during the pandemic, as scores declined by seven points from 2012 to 2023. In fact, the reading ability of the average American 13-year-old today has not been in such poor shape since the early 1970s.
- The literacy rate for 2022 was 79%. Two out of every ten Americans cannot read or write at a functional level. Perhaps worse, for 54% of Americans, their reading ability is stalled at the sixth-grade level or below. This means that, in general, they cannot understand texts that require abstract and critical thinking.
- Results for the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) test, which measures students’ skills in reading, math, and science) placed the United States at number eighteen worldwide in 2022, behind countries such as Singapore, Estonia, and Poland, to name just three.
In my view, these are some troubling numbers, but the narrative (a ubiquitous and often politically-charged term these days, so just think ‘story’) offered by many public-school teachers supports them. Now, someone might say, “Well, if the teachers can observe and articulate their own students’ struggles, then why don’t they just fix them?” Alas, we all wish it were that simple. For many reasons, the problem, at its root, has become nearly ‘unfixable.’ For one thing, in far too many schools, a teacher who tries to do his or her job well - that is to say, who maintains high standards, expects students to work hard, and flatly refuses to tolerate bad behaviors and disrespect - will inevitably one day find himself under tremendous pressure of one sort or another, e.g., complaints from parents, critical review by administrators, disrepute among students for being “too hard,” and so on. Over time, the teacher grows weary and either compromises his/her standards or finds a new line of work.
In addition, the political tensions within many school districts - between board members, parents, and other factions in the community - have led to the derailment of any real movement in our efforts to raise critical thinkers, readers, and effective writers. For example, in the school system where I worked in Maine for the last seven years of my career, a summer reading list for an Advanced Placement English course was removed because it included “controversial” writers (such as the ever-dangerous James Baldwin, who wrote the acclaimed Go Tell It on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son). The charge from certain activists in the town? These books are peddling Critical Race Theory! Some of my educational colleagues in Florida report that in at least one district there, libraries have been closed so that all books can be vetted for decency, and English teachers are no longer allowed to have their own collections of books on their classroom shelves. The shoving matches over gender identity issues among students, and by association, any books that may address this topic, have erupted across the country - perhaps fodder for a good civics lesson, but certainly not conducive to any sense of unity and mission. It is little wonder that so many kids have difficulty remembering why they are actually in school to begin with.
So, the gash in the side of the ship widens, and the water pours in. In the U.S., for all of our country’s innovation and its history of daring-do, we sometimes have trouble predicting consequences, and often we do not even consider them. Nonetheless, here is something to chew on: what will happen to us if literacy rates continue to decline? What happens when a society ceases to nourish a culture of reading? After all, history has given us several examples, and all of them have gone by the wayside because they were ruled by the brute strength of tyrants, and thus they destroyed themselves. But how might it look in America?
Let’s begin to try and answer this question by looking at another set of relevant data. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, 70% of all incarcerated adults read below the third-grade level, and 85% of kids who end up in the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate. A clear connection exists between illiteracy and the likelihood of imprisonment. Without some sort of progressive reforms to our judicial and prison systems (and there seems to be none on the horizon), as reading skills decline, prison populations will rise even more, and our economy will suffer as the rest of us bear the cost. Statistics also show that the inability to read is inter-generational: a child with illiterate or low-literate parents is three times more likely to grow up illiterate than one whose parents can read. The National Institute for Literacy reports that parents in 6 out of 10 American households will not buy ONE SINGLE BOOK this year. By contrast, 91% of them will give cell phones to their children by the time they reach age 14. The cost of functional illiteracy to American taxpayers this year will be around $20 billion.
Like the families in Ray Bradbury’s extremely prescient work called Farenheit 451, we have accepted the idea that books are no longer a part of our daily lives. We smile serenely as screens small and large give us what we want, what we crave. In the world Bradbury imagined, the fire department confiscates and burns books whenever they are found, but here in the land of the free, we would never let things go that far, would we? After all, the Nazis burned books, for goodness sake. I cannot answer the question, but you might pose it to Greg Locke, a Tennessee pastor/conspiracy-theorist who in 2022 led his followers in building a bonfire on which they burned copies of Harry Potter and Twilight books, among others. Regretfully, whenever I hear about book burnings in any context, I think of the well-known line by the 19th-century Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people, too.”
Historically, literate societies, those that have allowed their citizens to learn to read and write and then to read and write whatever they chose, have prospered, while those in which those rights were suppressed have failed. Incredibly enough, however, as a society, it appears that we are choosing illiteracy - unless, of course, you are inclined to think that all trends in America (social, popular, and otherwise) are actually manipulations by the greediest among us, but… Oh, wait a minute, let us consider that possibility and ask who might stand to benefit financially from the suppression of literacy. It seems to me that those who possess power and want more of it - magnates in the entertainment and technology and real estate industries, for instance - might seek the simplest way to limit people’s access to information and variety, and thereby their tastes, as well as their ability to discern quality; that leaves fewer places for the dollars to flow. We have seen it happen in technology: speaking for myself, I can barely do a damned thing on my computer or phone without first passing through Google or Apple’s gauntlet of username and password requests. That is bothersome, but for a government to limit the availability of books to its own citizenry so that some politician can please his constituency - and that is what is happening now in some places - is downright dangerous.
Parenting is difficult, as I know from experience, but I would also go so far as to say that parents who do not encourage their children to read are likely setting them up for a load of trouble, albeit unwittingly. The research shows that kindergarten and first-grade students with little previous exposure to books certainly can learn to read well (I did), but those who come to school with “reading readiness” are predisposed to advancement, so what happens when the majority of kids arrive unready, with no prior exposure to written texts, from homes where books are scarce or nonexistent? How will they ever catch up to what we now call ‘grade level’?
Frankly, I cannot understand how we have so easily and casually forgotten the importance of reading and writing in our own country’s beginnings. Early Americans valued the written word, understood its power, and some historians now believe that literacy rates were actually quite high - possibly 90% - during colonial times. Where would we be now had it not been for the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, or the mighty pen of Thomas Jefferson, or Ben Franklin’s avid interest in printing? The first public school was opened in Boston in 1635, and by 1918, school was compulsory for youngsters in all states. America’s public education system was a model for free societies around the world, and it epitomized the ideals of democracy. But what will public schooling look like as we move unsteadily into a future in which most kids cannot or will not read? As in the examples mentioned in the previous paragraph, education will become the domain of elitists. Could an early sign of this be the apparent gentrification of universities, where tuition costs have continued to rise astronomically over the last thirty years? Perhaps even a public university diploma will become another status symbol, like belonging to a fancy country club or owning a BMW. After all, it was the now-dissipated middle class that had always been the enemy of the wealthy - the lower class is too desperate and dependent, generally speaking - and one thing that public education undoubtedly helped to accomplish in this country was the creation of a middle class, a benchmark of American life and achievement in the 20th century that allowed young married couples to buy homes and to send their own kids to college.
If the once-hallowed American school system fails, and we can no longer turn out competent readers and writers, the implications are harrowing. We will have future generations who cannot:
- read their own tax forms or understand the services for which they are being taxed.
- make well-informed decisions when voting or understand the nuances of political
issues.
- adequately read and fill out job applications.
- read the instructions and warning labels for their prescription medications.
- read bedtime stories to their own children.
Will chaos ensue? Probably, but chaos is already the norm in many schools today, so at least it will be nothing new to young adults as they make their way out into a broken world. Two things are certain, though: for one, someone (one who is no doubt already waiting in the shadows) will be there to exploit these deficits and make sure that the lower class remains ignorant, for as Frederick Douglass stated, “Knowledge unfits a man to be a slave”; and secondly, those people who might be best suited to finding ways to untangle the mess we are in, who possess the patience and dedication to start over again and get things right, who care about young people enough to give them back the great and powerful gift of language - they will turn away from the teaching profession because they cannot suffer the fools who have allowed things to get to this point. It is already happening.
It is a time for pragmatists and realists, but it is also a time for idealists and dreamers. Yes, we must remember our history, but we must also remember our mythology, and by that I mean our stories, written and unwritten. One educational trend I encountered in recent years was an emphasis on reading and analyzing informational texts - a valuable skill for students, certainly, as long as it is not at the exclusion of folktales, epics, novels, and the like. I have never met any author who has said he or she got interested in writing because of a childhood fascination with Newsweek. Stories are an irreplaceable part of our culture upon which none of us can place a monetary value. Our true identity is to be found in our mythology, in the stories we make up about our heroes and villains. If Americans have not or cannot read works by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, or Toni Morrison, for example, then they have not simply missed out on some good books; they have missed hearing important, articulate voices helping to define the American identity. How can we know who we really are if we don’t read our own writers?
A few years ago, I had a clown (not a budding comedian, but a true clown) in my class who, whenever I handed out books or copies of short stories, thought it would amuse the other students to remark, “Oh, no thanks, Mr. Trippe. I can’t read.” Finally, one day, when the quip and my patience had been worn threadbare, I said, “Well, I know that you can read, in fact, but do you know what it would look like if you really couldn’t?” Then I told him the story of my maternal grandfather, who had never attended school because his family were sharecroppers in South Carolina, and he had to go to work in the tobacco fields there. I have vivid memories of him: I once saw him sign for a registered letter by marking an “X,” since he could not write his own name. And when I would go to church with my grandparents some Sundays, and it came time to sing a hymn, I noticed that he would stand up, open his hymnal to a random page, and stare at the words while moving his lips. No sound came out, of course, but he was so ashamed of his illiteracy, he made every effort to conceal it from others.
Real shame, you see, is unbearable, and to feel ashamed for others is almost as bad.