Having taught high school and college for many years (and continuing to tutor students to this day during my retirement), I can say with certainty that I have seen many students struggle with reading comprehension.
This deficiency has been endlessly documented by decades of declining scores on a panoply of standardized tests that highlight—or perhaps lowlight—the stunning inability of many young adults to succeed in either higher education or the workplace when regular reading is required. Although those who focus on the science of reading are enamored with pushing systemic approaches to literacy, which I agree can help with mastering reading basics in elementary school, this does not help much with high school and college students who crash and burn when they encounter complex texts where analysis and synthesis are the main focus.
The crux of the problem with mastering (or even beginning to stumble through) higher order reading skills is simple and troubling: grievous and continuing gaps in basic knowledge that impede understanding. A framework of information about systems of government, science, economics, religion, philosophy, cultures, military history, geography, and a host of other topics allows a reader to both process and—more importantly—evaluate the information they are reading.
Critical thinking about a text, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, is impossible when ignorance is present. An uninformed mind is a captive mind, and I am no longer surprised when I have to explain what used to be foundational knowledge imparted in our public schools to students who are, truth be told, nitwits with solid, but highly misleading, Grade Point Averages. Reading Animal Farm with little understanding of the underlying tenets of Marxism and the history of the Russian revolution or Pride and Prejudice without comprehending both the status of women in early 19th century England and the strict class structure of that society impedes reader understanding and destroys any possibility of making informed judgments about the content.
Competent and caring teachers will, of course, try to fill in the blanks for their students through instruction and discussion, but schools are increasingly resorting to simply parking students in front of their Chromebooks and having them complete online worksheets to demonstrate that they “understood” the reading, which is a long way from the sort of deep and thoughtful immersion in the magic of the written word that might expand a young mind. Pencil-whipping students toward graduation is very different from educating them, but it is easier and cheaper to throw academic standards out the window and give everyone a passing grade, so this is what is typically done today.
The societal costs of sanctioning stupidity, sadly, go far beyond a student not fully understanding or appreciating the skill and artistry of the great works of the Western literary tradition, a canon that today’s educational Marxists actually wish to eliminate in any case. We are today stuck with the problems that result when so many of our quasi-illiterate citizens cannot fully understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of our nation because their brains are untrained, undisciplined, and likely uninterested in any opinion or idea not featured on TikTok or Instagram.
The harsh truth is that empty minds are ones that can readily and easily be manipulated. Propagandists and demagogues who traffic in half-truths and outright lies are the true beneficiaries of the ignorance that now pervades our country. If you have ever wondered why extremism that is expressed through censorship, compelled speech, and sometimes shockingly violent rhetoric seems so commonplace today—even among our supposedly educated elite—you need look no further than the glaring deficiencies in knowledge that make so many Americans easy prey for the loudest, angriest, and most duplicitous among us.
Stupidity is, after all, a contagious disease that puts us all at risk.
Just look at our history of idiocy over the past decade if you still believe that a nation that cannot—or simply will not—read can survive.
We were bamboozled into a national shutdown over a flu epidemic and convinced to surrender our most basic civil liberties and human rights—or else. We were told an obviously senile President was at the top of his game and forced to accept election results that seemed fraudulent—which we now know they were. We handed free cash, free housing, free education, and free medical care to millions of illegal immigrants who were allowed to waltz across our border by government officials who chose to ignore the law—and we were labeled as bigots if we complained about this malfeasance. A wide array of experts assured us that dosing troubled children and adolescents with powerful hormonal treatments and offering them irreversible genital surgeries was a brilliant idea—not felony child abuse. Another set of experts insisted that we could run a modern industrial economy on windmills and solar panels and convinced (or forced) a great many to buy expensive and unreliable electric cars that will soon be a toxic waste disposal nightmare. Finally, we were instructed to avert our eyes while our nation sank deeper and deeper into crushing debt—and a great many did just that.
In these and many other instances, Americans have been shown to be susceptible to the siren songs of extremists because promoting broad-scale ignorance, which is reinforced daily in classrooms where craven conformity instead of critical thinking is taught and free speech regularly and ruthlessly suppressed, is official policy throughout our misguided and mismanaged educational establishment.
It should be no surprise that uninformed and undisciplined minds are so easily convinced that stupidity, lies, insanity, and criminality are A-OK because they are now intellectually handicapped. This “mis-education” is continually reinforced by mass media outlets, social media propagandists, and government officials who are themselves sad products of schools and colleges that indoctrinated and brainwashed them past the point of all reason or intellectual recovery.
Able and active readers are invariably good thinkers; conversely, weak and passive reading skills are typically an indicator of minds that are easily swayed by fallacious arguments, emotional appeals, and circular logic. Unfortunately, few seem to understand or appreciate the dire consequences of allowing this decline of the American mind to continue unabated.
Read a book, sheeple. In fact, read a lot of books that provide a wide variety of information and opinions so that you can begin to escape the trap of ideological constipation that is afflicting so many Americans and wrecking our nation and its institutions. You and everyone else will benefit if you do. Moreover, you might find it is a pleasure to discuss what you have read and make up your own mind—instead of being told what to think.