Posted on 08/07/2026 12:04:42 PM PDT by Retain Mike
Nearly one-quarter of U.S. adults—21%—are illiterate, and 130 million people can’t read a simple story to their children or sound out more than a few basic words. The problem isn’t confined to high school dropouts, those with disabilities, and non-¬English speakers. It affects university students, working professionals, and those who grew up speaking English at home. It goes beyond the inability to enjoy books, skim websites, and write emails. Medication instructions, ingredient labels, and posted warnings can conceal deadly risks from nonreaders.
The problem starts in elementary school, where a battle over how to teach reading continues to rage and fewer parents reinforce reading at home. By the time students reach high school, those who can’t read start to fall behind in other subjects. The ripple effects of insufficient learning extend into college, where many students who struggle with literacy don’t understand that they have a problem. They can read basic sentences but miss complex concepts. Once they reach adulthood, people who can’t read are dependent on an informal network of literacy classes to help them catch up.
On the school side, Rein says some teachers aren’t willing to have the hard conversations that come with holding kids back. The earlier, she says, the better. The younger the student is, the less severe the social consequences of repeating a grade. Even so, data on the effectiveness of such interventions is limited. One study found that children held back in elementary grades are 60% less likely to graduate high school than similarly achieving peers who were not held back. On the family side, Rein says she sees fewer and fewer parents encouraging literacy by reading to their kids at home.
(Excerpt) Read more at wng.org ...
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The excerpt is not a good summery. You need to read the whole article.
I started screaming about this subject 35 years ago which my oldest went to Kindergarten and I witnessed this “child centered learning” for the first time. Outrageous.
I immediately pulled her out of the school, started home-schooling, wrote a proper reading/spelling program (based on phonetics), opened a small tutoring business and have taught hundred of children to read (some in high school!).
This was intentionally done - whole language was the greatest program to harm children and dumb down the masses. Brought to America compliments of John Dewey and the progressives.
I remember similar numbers from about 30-40 years ago.
I am simply amazed that with all the money we spend on
“education,” those numbers have remained stead.
/s did I really need to add this.
I think quite a few, if not most teachers would be willing to have that hard conversation about having a child repeat a grade level, if these teachers thought their own employer would back them up and support such decisions vs cave to the loudest parents.
If ‘too many’ of a teacher’s students fail, there are some School Districts that will decide it must be the teacher’s fault, and go about replacing that ‘troublesome’ teacher.
This is happening in some parochial and charter schools in addition to the public schools.
I learned to read in the early 1950s, and so did all my classmates. We never even heard about a ‘system,’ we just learned to ‘sound it out.’ One or two who were ‘slow’ had trouble and probably never got good at it, but then we’re talking 2 out of 32 kids.
Hmmm....no breakdown by race. Could be relevant and helpful to understanding the problem and possible solutions. Unfortunately that’s not something that can be discussed in polite company. Authors are often left with generalizing problems that are not general to make their point without being publicly crucified.
A scene strongly in my memory since I saw it at age 14 in the theater. The Time Machine (1960 version) where the modern man sees that all the struggle for knowledge and advancement for thousands for years has been allowed to crumble to dust in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_ZfZaRCWTI&t=195s
The socialist praising young people are the Eloi leading us down to decline today.
It seems literacy is a problem here at Free Republic also.
My wife’s young nephew was reading each early Harry Potter book as it came out along with many other books.
He said his friends were oddities as nearly everyone else at his school never read ANY books. He also did the video games, got a cell phone and used a desktop to search the internet. But he was a reader, too. Currently works doing software support for companies.
Compare this to the number of people with IQ below 75.
Pretty sure it’s a direct correlation.
“summery”?
Well, let’s hear it for spell check.
My Elementary school had six grades in three classrooms, doing a lot of the school work twice helped me a lot.
At least his grammer was correct.
Bookmark
“Hmmm....no breakdown by race. Could be relevant and helpful to understanding the problem and possible solutions. Unfortunately that’s not something that can be discussed in polite company.”
This topic was openly discussed in academic literature as recently as the 1950s.
Most scholars at that time concluded that education would be doomed in the United States because when you mixed apples and oranges all you got was a lot more dumb kids.
The majority of those scholars were convinced that genetics controlled most learning skills and capability—and environment would only be a minor factor.
They had the studies to prove it—looking carefully at integrated schools in areas where they did exist (and yes there were such areas).
All of those studies are banned these days.
One of the biggest helps for education in the USA would be to stop keeping statistics by race. Statistics should be kept by how much progress each student makes under a teacher each year. Computers can keep track of this. Teachers whose students underperform compared to previous teachers should be counseled and either improve or stop teaching. Keeping statistics by race does not help anything. It is a waste of money and only leads to problems.
Statistics by race should actually only be done for some medical studies where it might have relevance.
If you talk to teachers in urban classrooms such tracking will just show them failing.
Then they get fired.
You can’t turn a Yugo into a Maserati with a good mechanic—and least not often enough to matter much.
Lol.
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