American Illiteracy: Who Is Responsible?
September 11, 2025
Just a dinobaby sharing observations. No AI involved. My apologies to those who rely on it for their wisdom, knowledge, and insights.
I read an essay I found quite strange. “She Couldn’t Read Her Own Diploma: Why Public Schools Pass Students but Fail Society” is from what seems to be a financial information service. This particular essay is written by Tyler Durden and carries the statement, “Authored by Hannah Frankman Hood via the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).” Okay, two authors. Who wrote what?
The main idea seems to be that a student who graduated from Hartford, Connecticut (a city founded by one of my ancestors) graduate with honors but is unable to read. How did she pull of the “honors” label? Answer: She used “speech to text apps to help her read and write essays.”
Now the high school graduate seems to be in the category of “functional illiteracy.” The write up says:
To many, it may be inconceivable that teachers would continue to teach in a way they know doesn’t work, bowing to political pressure over the needs of students. But to those familiar with the incentive structures of public education, it’s no surprise. Teachers unions and public district officials fiercely oppose accountability and merit-based evaluation for both students and teachers. Teachers’ unions consistently fight against alternatives that would give students in struggling districts more educational options. In attempts to improve ‘equity,’ some districts have ordered teachers to stop giving grades, taking attendance, or even offering instruction altogether.
This may be a shock to some experts, but one of my recollections of my youth was my mother reading to me. I did not know that some people did not have a mother and father, both high school graduates, who read books, magazines, and newspapers. For me, it was books.
I was born in 1944, and I recall heading to kindergarten and knowing the alphabet, how to print my name (no, it was not “loser”), and being able to read words like Topps (a type of bubble gum with pictures of baseball players in the package), Coca Cola, and the “MD” on my family doctor’s sign. (I had no idea how to read “McMorrow,” but I could identify the letters.
The “learning to read” skill seemed to take place because my mother and sometimes my father would read to me. My mother and I would walk to the library about a mile from our small rented house on East Wilcox Avenue. She would check out book for herself and for me. We would walk home and I would “read” one of my books. When I couldn’t figure out a word, I asked her. This process continued until we moved to Washington, DC when I was in the third grade. When we moved to Campinas, Brazil, my father bought a set of World Books and told me to read them. My mother helped me when I encountered words or information I did not understand. Campinas was a small town in the 1950s. I had my Calvert Correspondence course at the set of blue World Book Encyclopedias.
When we returned to the US, I entered the seventh grade. I am not sure I had much formal instruction in reading, phonics, word recognition, or the “normal” razzle dazzle of education. I just started classes and did okay. As I recall, I was in the advanced class, and the others in that group would stay together throughout high school, also in central Illinois.
My view is probably controversial, but I will share it in this essay by two people who seem to be worried about teachers not teaching students how to read. Here goes:
- Young children are curious. When exposed to books and a parent who reads and explains meanings, the child learns. The young child’s mind is remarkable in its baked in ability to associate, discern patterns, learn language, and figure out that Coca Cola is a drink parents don’t often provide.
- A stable family which puts and emphasis on reading even though the parents are not college educated makes reading part of the furniture of life. Mobile phones and smart software cannot replicate the interaction between a parent and child involved in reading, printing letters, and figuring out that MD means weird Dr. McMorrow.
- Once reading becomes a routine function, normal curiosity fuels knowledge acquisition. This may not be true for some people, but in my experience it works. Parents read; child reads.
When the family unit does not place emphasis on reading for whatever reason, the child fails to develop some important mental capabilities. Once that loss takes place, it is very difficult to replace it with each passing year.
Teachers alone cannot do this job. School provides a setting for a certain type of learning. If one cannot read, one cannot learn what schools afford. Years ago, I had responsibility for setting up and managing a program at a major university to help disadvantaged students develop skills necessary to succeed in college. I had experts in reading, writing, and other subjects. We developed our own course materials; for example, we pioneered the use of major magazines and lessons built around topics of interest to large numbers of Americans. Our successes came from instructors who found a way to replicate the close interaction and support of a parent-child reading experience. The failures came from students who did not feel comfortable with that type of one to one interaction. Most came from broken families, and the result of not having a stable, knowledge-oriented family slammed on the learning and reading brakes.
Based on my experience with high school and college age students, I never was and never will be a person who believes that a device or a teacher with a device can replicate the parent – child interaction that normalizes learning and instills value via reading. That means that computers, mobile phones, digital tablets, and smart software won’t and cannot do the job that parents have to do when the child is very young.
When the child enters school, a teacher provides a framework and delivers information tailored to the physical and hopefully mental age of the student. Expecting the teacher to remediate a parenting failure in the child’s first five to six years of life is just plain crazy. I don’t need economic research to explain the obvious.
This financial write up strikes me as odd. The literacy problem is not new. I was involved in trying to create a solution in the late 1960s. Now decades later, financial writers are expressing concern. Speedy, right? My personal view is that a large number of people who cannot read, understand, and think critically will make an orderly social construct very difficult to achieve.
I am now 80 years old. How can an online publication produce an essay with two different authors and confuse me with yip yap about teaching methods. Why not disagree about the efficacy of Grok versus Gemini? Just be happy with illiterates who can talk to Copilot to generate Excel spreadsheets about the hockey stick payoffs from smart software.
I don’t know much. I do know that I am a dinobaby, and I know my ancestor who was part of the group who founded Hartford, Connecticut, would not understand how his vision of the new land jibes with what the write up documents.
Stephen E Arnold, September 11, 2025
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