The Literacy Myth

I just finished attending a lecture by a prominent Texas historian, James L. Haley. The focus of his talk was on the lessons of history in the context of the American revolution against England and Texas' revolution against Mexico. The theme was that the U.S. founders and Sam Houston in Texas used their knowledge of history to create a form of government that could avoid the errors of the past if the voters were educated. The founders were themselves generally quite literate, reading history in the original Greek and Latin and absorbing the ideas of leading Renaissance philosophers.

Haley went on to point out that today, our government is imperiled because so many Americans are illiterate and thus incapable of correct knowledge about political issues and electing wise leaders. He presented a litany of statistics showing a shocking percentage of Americans who cannot read at all, cannot read at the fourth-grade level, and cannot read above 8th-grade level. The clear implication was that to save our country, we need a more educated pool of voters.

Education Alone Is Not Enough

While I accept that literacy is important, I think it is a myth to attribute our hyper-politically correct "woke" culture to illiteracy. In the Q&A that followed, I raised the following point: "I am not persuaded that education is the solution. The origin of much of our cancel culture originates in the universities." Liberal arts professors seem to be obsessed with race, gender, revisionist history, and Marxist ideology. James heartily agreed with my point, but the paradox was not explored, because time was running out.

How can education be a solution to illiteracy when the source of our current historical and political dystopia largely originates with ostensibly the most educated professors in the universities and more and more youngsters go to college? Could it be there is something wrong with how professors were educated and how they in turn educate citizens these days?

The answer is a resounding yes. Civics is no longer taught in K-12. History, when taught at all, is commonly taught from a revisionist perspective. As a professor with over 58 years of observing university teaching practices and consulting with the middle school teaching community, I conclude that we no longer teach youngsters how to think but focus on what to think. Educators have confused education with indoctrination. We tell students what they must learn and then test them for compliance. Too many teachers and professors were trained, not educated in the classical education sense. The focus of teaching at all levels is on what to think.

Socratic Teaching

The problem is illustrated by how few people know about logic and logical fallacies, which I tried to address in a recent blog post. The problem extends to a general inability to think critically and creatively about what one reads and hears. Where are the Socratic teachers of today who are showing students how to engage reading content, ask penetrating questions, develop reasoned possible answers, distinguish evidence from opinion, test knowledge for accuracy, and how to learn from history instead of erasing it? When it comes to reading literacy, many youngsters have such limited vocabulary and reading skills that they cannot handle the extra cognitive load of critical thinking about what they read.

In his essay on college graduate illiteracy, Dale Ahlquist concludes, "The rise of incomplete thinking has been marked over the last several decades by a near-total loss of true humanities studies at many colleges and universities. It’s a terrible scandal that, without authentic humanities education, universities around the world are manufacturing cohort after cohort of uneducated people." He explains the cause of the scandal this way: "Everyone agrees, or claims to agree, that we want citizens who can think for themselves. But our education system, our commercial culture, and the latent message of our social media are precisely the opposite. We want everyone to get in line."

Literacy alone is not the answer. We already have too many under-educated college graduates, as has been amply documented in numerous surveys.

Though I am known as a "Memory Medic," many of my followers misunderstand my emphasis on improving memory ability. My whole point is that the quality of thinking depends on what you remember. Remembered knowledge is what one uses to think with. The less you recall from past learning, the less knowledge you have to inform rigorous thought.

Improving the way reading skills are taught would surely help. But recall that the pupils of Socrates were not necessarily all that literate in reading Greek. The main value of Socrates' pedagogy was that he showed his pupils the value of avoiding knee-jerk thinking and of questioning and thinking about reasonable answers. His mindset was a habit they could learn, and such practices help to minimize error and foolishness.