The gift of literacy

Have we squandered one of our greatest treasures?

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Thinking Minnesota magazine.

Charles Dickens’ novel “Bleak House” was published as a serial between 1852 and 1853. Designed for a popular audience, the text became widely read. The opening words of the novel are below:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

If you struggled to comprehend this excerpt, you aren’t alone. In 2015, a study of English majors at Kansas universities asked the students to read and explain the first seven paragraphs of “Bleak House”; a majority couldn’t make sense of it. The novel had evolved from a schoolchild’s afternoon reading to a graduate-level text.

The ability to comprehend English at all isn’t a given among Americans. In 2023, the National Center for Education Statistics found that 28 percent of America’s population were considered to have Level One or below English literacy, meaning that they have difficulty completing tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences. Forty-nine percent of foreign-born respondents fell into this category, and so did 22 percent of native-born respondents. Almost three in 10 of America’s residents cannot do much more with written English than successfully order a pizza.

More damning is the irresponsible functional illiteracy that allows individuals to order pizzas easily but leaves them completely unable to engage with the questions that shape their world. It is a blindness to all complex cultural inheritances and a closing of the mind. In 2003, 26 percent of American adults read for pleasure. In 2023, only 16 percent did.

Literacy isn’t an intuitive skill like tapping out a drumbeat. There is no “literary center” in the brain, meaning that setting aside books will certainly result in diminished literary ability. Reading complex texts (sometimes called “deep reading”) requires effort, attention, and the ability to track logical progression. Losing literacy dulls those abilities.

Presumably, most Americans attended a publicly-funded school system that taught them to read. So why aren’t they using their gift of literacy? One answer is that the way they were taught to read left them unable to penetrate complex texts.

During the 1980s, a literary theory known as “whole language,” based on the idea of three-cueing, entered American classrooms. When a child encounters an unknown word, the teacher prompts the student to guess a word that makes contextual sense, then uses three question cues to determine whether it is the correct fit. Does the word look right? Sound right? Make sense in the sentence? Within this theory, early readers don’t necessarily need to sound out words or process all the letters, since they learn to guess well and memorize common sentence structures.

This is how very poor readers have always passed their reading exams: by guessing wildly, hoping that context clues will allow them to respond correctly. But those poor readers (and all students taught to read like poor readers) can struggle mightily when they reach higher grades, when pictures disappear, vocabulary expands, and structure becomes complex. Those students never truly learned how to read well, but got by the best they could.

By contrast, phonics and careful decoding have been well-accepted pedagogical practices since national reports changed the conversation in the early 2000s. Phonics works through “orthographic mapping,” asking the child to sound out the word, connecting spelling to pronunciation. In this way, it’s easier for the child to memorize a word, spell it properly, and recall the definition based on only a few exposures to the word. As she reaches higher grades, her brain easily adds words to her memory bank.

For years, the education system balked at the wholesale use of phonics in the classroom. Teaching programs were loath to throw out the technique, and career teachers have rarely received high-quality, subject-focused continuing education that could update their knowledge. Districts haven’t always purchased updated curricula or insisted upon precise teaching methods. In many classrooms, whole language theory was simply combined with phonics and labeled “balanced literacy.” Unfortunately, any practice that invokes the three-cueing system to prompt guesswork can undo the more difficult learning associated with phonics.

Many states, Minnesota included, have recently mandated phonics instruction. The results of those reforms are yet to be seen, but “southern surge” states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi currently report increasing reading ability. There is hope for our newest readers.

Another contributing factor to poor reading comprehension in adults is the ubiquitous presence of the digital interface. Besides the mind-numbing power of the devices themselves, teacher training programs have grown enamored with the idea that access to a digital device means students should primarily learn how to learn, spending little to no instructional time memorizing facts and dates. After all, what’s the purpose of memorizing the Preamble when it’s a short click away?

E.D. Hirsch, Jr., in his lauded 2000 essay “You Can Always Look It Up… Or Can You?” argued that such a view contradicts scientific consensus about how children learn. Put simply, knowledge of facts provides children with a scaffold to build on as they learn more. The child who knows quite a bit about chess will quickly grasp what a “queen’s gambit” is, while the child who has never heard of the game might never make it past the definition of a “queen.” Hirsch writes, “The Internet has placed a wealth of information at our fingertips. But to be able to use that information — to absorb it, to add to our knowledge — we must already possess a storehouse of knowledge. That is the paradox disclosed by cognitive research.”

It should come as no surprise that former students who never quite learned who Napoleon was, or when the Great Depression ended, or how to identify a common prefix, will struggle to read literature intended for adults.

One might question why America has weathered countless pedagogical controversies, spent billions, and constructed complex academic architectures in pursuit of the nebulous goal of universal literacy. It’s simple. It is one of the greatest American traditions.

American education

Put in utilitarian terms, a nation that assumes self-responsibility and universal enfranchisement requires a high cognitive ability of its citizens. However, the American approach has never been purely utilitarian; we hold the odd distinction of tracing our roots back to an ideology rather than something sensible like a sword in a stone or two babes suckled by wolves. Informed by the classical and ecclesiastical tradition, the American desire for public education has been motivated by a conviction that most of the worthwhile things in this world can only be understood with a mind trained for reason.

Less than 30 years after the Mayflower landing, Puritans built the first public school system in America. Affectionately nicknamed the “Old Deluder Satan Act,” the Massachusetts Law of 1647 attempted to ensure that children could read the Bible and thus avoid the machinations of malevolent spiritual forces. The act required communities with 50 or more households to hire a schoolteacher to teach students to read and write. Even amidst harsh homesteading conditions, they made personal literacy a public priority.

Over a century later, Thomas Jefferson attempted to nationalize this instinct with “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” which aimed to provide three years of publicly funded education to free girls and boys. In Jefferson’s utilitarian view, public education created leaders who could thoughtfully guide the burgeoning American society. Poverty and a subsequent lack of education confined leadership to the wealthy classes, who might be “weak or wicked” by accident of birth.

Early American society, though it lacked large public library systems and graduate schools, brimmed with a love for meaningful cultural inheritances. A 1787 letter from Jefferson to St. John de Crèvecoeur boasted that “ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.”

A craving for knowledge continued to shape American society. After the Civil War, there was a groundswell of teachers who opened schools for freed slaves and their descendants, despite pushback from Southerners. Following the tradition of Frederick Douglass, whose literacy enabled him to fight for emancipation, these teachers believed that education was the key tool for fostering moral, physical, and intellectual development.

It was a lively effort. W.E.B. Du Bois argued that former slaves should be taught Greek and Latin so that they could understand the life-giving classical tradition; Booker T. Washington maintained that English proficiency and technical education were temporarily adequate for the poverty-stricken community. The very discussion of a Greek education is indicative of the time’s high pedagogical expectations.

Within this movement, there was a fervent belief that education was essential for everyone, regardless of age, gender, or occupation. Even a farmhand ought to be educated; his mind, soul, and spirit mattered too. Former slave, classical educator, and author Dr. Anna Julia Cooper wrote in her 1930 essay “On Education” that:

Enlightened industrialism does not mean that the body who plows cotton must study nothing but cotton and that he who would drive a mule successfully should have contact only with mules. Indeed it has been well said “if I knew my son would drive a mule all his days, I should still give him the groundwork of a general education in his youth that would place the greatest possible distance between him and the mule.”

It was a long road to common literacy. At the time, illiteracy was measured by a very fundamental level of reading and writing, like being able to write one’s name. In 1870, 20 percent of all Americans (and 79.9 percent of black Americans) were illiterate; in 1910, 7.7 percent, in 1950, 3.2 percent, and in 1970, 0.6 percent of all Americans were illiterate. Landmark cases like 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and public literacy efforts in the late ’90s and early 2000s illustrate how the fight for universal literacy is continued by each American generation.

Since the dawn of human history, it has appeared impossible that a country half the size of a continent could educate the masses, if they wanted to take on the project in the first place. We have done so.

For the Puritans, the purpose of reading was to free the soul through personal scriptural devotion. For Jefferson, the purpose was to expose the mind to exceptional exemplars. For Cooper, it was to elevate the spirit of a downtrodden people by showcasing freedom through the classical tradition. All are similar means to the same end: literacy lifts up the individual from the shadows and allows them to climb out from the cave of ignorance.

Tradition requires effort

Of course, literacy can bring personal and civic danger. It’s a real political liability when the masses read. Scholar Lawrence Stone pointed out that the great European revolutions of France and Russia occurred in social settings in which the proportion of men who were in some sense literate was between one- and two-thirds. The revolutions, whipped into a frenzy by circulated pamphlets, culminated in bloodshed and chaos.

Not so in England. Written activism by men like William Wilberforce led England to outlaw transatlantic slavery in a fit of moral conviction in 1807. The English then spent the better part of the next century passing stricter laws about slavery and commissioning a squadron of ships to hunt down slave traders.

Literacy is a dangerous game, but one our country has elected to play. America’s telos — a society constructed of thoughtful, responsible individuals — requires common literacy and common intellectual responsibility. Success is incumbent on communities that create environments that value learning, history, and virtue ethics. Only some need a classical library, but everyone should have the ability to research and make prudent decisions.

Regardless, mass social benefits aren’t the most compelling aspect of mass education. The second greatest inheritance of the literary world, the classical tradition, primarily emphasizes the adjective granted to the literary, liberal individual: freed. Freed from cultural lies, freed from personal ignorance, and freed from the lie that a meaningful life is unattainable.

The students in Cooper’s schools didn’t stop reading at nursery rhymes — they perfected their reading ability over a lifetime. That lifelong search is the pathway to true freedom. Yet the ability to read at a basic level has now become so commonplace that the curiosity and hunger for knowledge previously connected with American literacy have faded. Perhaps what scholar Wendy Griswold terms the “reading class” is very slowly forming. This is the new oligarchy: a group of people who read regularly, whose cognitive abilities easily outclass those whose book spines gather dust.

If a reading class is to exist, they’ll certainly be a countercultural bunch. The average adult spends over five hours a day on their phone, and the average teenager almost seven. These vapid, short-term stimuli are a tantalizing lure away from a worthwhile engagement with a text.

The limited moments of our time are often misprioritized. Dickens’ “Bleak House” may not be a cornerstone of the Western tradition, but there are many texts that display truth and freedom. When we lose the ability to understand the words of Dostoevsky, St. Paul, Douglass, Alcott, or Cooper, we fragment our rich cultural inheritance through our own foolishness. In the absence of a wise, literate community, even the theoretical reading class might become disconnected and malformed.

America has enabled millions to seek the priceless treasure of intellectual freedom. It’s a task that began anew with our generation.