By Mary Katherine Ham
Thursday, January 22, 2026
In a video I stumbled on recently, a man in a hoodie
reads to the camera, somewhat haltingly telling the story of Aslan and the
Pevensie children. He’s been working his way, one chapter a day, through The
Chronicles of Narnia. The text over the video reads, “37 years old,
fifth-grade reading level, no one taught me but I’m not giving up.”
Oliver James had behavioral and learning-disability
problems in school. He said adults just tried to keep him under control,
sometimes literally restrained, and never worried whether he learned. In his
early 30s, unable to hold a job, he could barely read a restaurant menu. He
started thinking about his future.
“What would I bring to the table for a kid,” he wondered,
as he told NPR, if he was unable to read. He started reading to an audience
every day, starting with picture books, slowly improving, learning to spell and
read new words through talk-to-text, eventually falling in love with Charlotte’s
Web. He read 100 books in 2023 and this year is publishing his own book, Unread,
about his story.
Around the same time that James realized how behind he
was, America started waking up to the same thing. School closures and other
policies of the pandemic crystallized all the bad tendencies of public
education: powerful teachers’ unions dedicated to their own rather than
students’ interests, school boards succumbing to safetyism and groupthink
rather than creative problem-solving. Online instruction was a failure,
creating massive learning loss and increasing screen dependence, attention
problems, and isolation. Many parents got a view into what their children were
learning, and when it wasn’t overt activism, it was almost nothing at all. The
already worrisome trend of grade inflation was amped up to hide educators’
failures.
The truth is that a lot of Americans, for more than a
generation, haven’t been learning very much. They don’t learn because they
don’t read. They don’t read because they’re not asked to, and if they are, it’s
in small excerpts. If they were asked to read, many couldn’t because trendy
pedagogy took precedence over phonics and didn’t begin to lose its hold until
2022, when journalist Emily Hanford revealed that there is a science to reading
that research shows works but that schools ignored.
***
The Founders knew that microdosing literature and
philosophy wasn’t a recipe for keeping a republic. When you put the power to
govern in the hands of the citizenry, you want the citizenry informed. James
Madison said, “A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves
with the power which knowledge gives.” George Washington called it an “object
of primary importance” to encourage knowledge: “As the structure of a
government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion
should be enlightened.”
Basic literacy is thankfully far more widespread today
than it was at the time of the Founding, when a very small fraction of the
populace contributed to self-governance. But there’s a good chance the above
sentiments would be lost on an incoming college freshman, as Washington’s
Farewell Address, along with many other documents of the Founding, are written
at what is now considered a postgraduate reading level. Only 35 percent of
graduating seniors can read at a twelfth-grade level or are considered ready for
college-level texts, according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational
Progress (known as the Nation’s Report Card).
That puts the Gettysburg Address in their range, thanks
to brevity, but The Federalist Papers are largely out of reach.
Even an elite college like Columbia University, with its
great-books curriculum, is cutting the number of required books because
students are “overwhelmed by the reading,” a situation recounted by professors
to The Atlantic. The share of nine-year-olds who read for fun every day
is at the lowest level since the Nation’s Report Card began studying the trend
in 1984. And the percentage of adults who read for pleasure daily dropped from
28 percent to 16 percent over 20 years. A cycle that began with bad curricula
many years ago started a downward spiral as adults then read less with their
children, a habit that might have countered unreliable school instruction.
A national survey of educators in 2023 found that 53
percent reported that reading attention spans and stamina greatly decreased
over four years, and the same survey revealed part of the reason — only 17
percent report using full texts to teach reading.
Karen Vaites, a literacy expert who founded the
Curriculum Insight Project, reports that books are gone from much of school
instruction as a matter of policy. She notes that there are actually
skeptics of the idea that reading whole books helps people learn. The most
popular and rubber-stamped reading curricula in the country have young kids
reading, at most, seven- to twelve-page excerpts of books. Last year, Alice
Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C., put a viral exclamation point on that
finding by announcing that it would remove full novels entirely from its
eighth-grade English curriculum.
Over several months this past year, I read Pride and
Prejudice aloud to my ten- and twelve-year-old daughters. It was a bit
beyond them in some ways, but we took it slow, I answered their questions, and
they learned a lot about Regency-era Britain: manners and social hierarchy, the
roles of men and women, the military’s place. They delighted in the characters,
particularly the grating silliness of Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet, and the
suspense of a will-they-won’t-they romance. It’s a family joke now, when
objecting to some sibling incursion, to say, “Are the shades of Pemberley to be
thus polluted” in a haughty British accent. Would they have gotten all that
from a ten-page excerpt?
***
American public schools, unlike those in other
democracies, are dominated by teachers with degrees in education rather than in
specific subjects. Indeed, education degrees are often legally required to
teach. Such requirements create a teacher-focused and jargon-heavy discussion
of “high-quality instruction materials,” “common core,” “balanced literacy,”
and “whole language.” It all obscures the long-known fact that teaching phonics
works, and for kids who can read, reading books makes them better at it.
Hanford’s serial, investigative podcast Sold a Story
revealed the extent to which American education had lost its way. Despite the
research showing that newer methods of teaching reading didn’t work, the
education establishment wouldn’t let go of debunked practices. Yet some states,
like Mississippi, had figured things out. When the Magnolia State launched a
new approach to literacy in 2013, it started on a trajectory that took it from
49th to ninth in the Nation’s Report Card rankings. The poorest state in the
country, with large numbers of low-income and minority students, began
outperforming everyone, showing gains across all income and achievement levels
for half what California spends per student.
The state’s approach was to screen young kids several
times per year for literacy, attempting to close the kind of cracks that Oliver
James had fallen through 30 years ago. Mississippi added a policy to hold back
third-graders who were not proficient. This caused controversy, as many assumed
that large numbers of students would be held back. What actually happened is
that accountability and a new approach got adults in gear to help students
succeed by third grade. Setting higher expectations, not hiding failure with
lower ones, worked. The state invested in training to get teachers bought in on
new curricula and used tried-and-true phonics instruction in line with the
science of reading.
This success has already been replicated in Alabama,
Tennessee, and Louisiana, which all rose substantially in NAEP rankings in 2024
as other states continued to fight pandemic losses. Tennessee and Louisiana
have bolstered their success by spurning popular passage-based curricula and
adding whole books. The Southern surge, as it has been dubbed, has met with
some tribal resistance. As Frederick Hess wrote in NR (October 2025), this is
in part because of “contempt for red states and the Deep South. . . . The
notion that Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama are the states where
policymakers are fighting for poor kids or taking the science of learning
seriously just doesn’t compute for cosmopolitan progressives or the education
professoriate.”
Robert Pondiscio, an education-policy scholar, echoes
that, telling me that his liberal counterparts have sometimes laughed out loud
at the idea that Mississippi could be leading the way on literacy. Many experts
“are used to talking about these Southern states as America’s backwaters in
terms of educational achievement. To call it counterintuitive is putting it
mildly.”
A desire “to dunk on any red-state claimed reform,” says
Vaites, is the same prejudice that prevented much of the liberal education
establishment from admitting that reopening schools — as was done in Georgia,
Florida, and the Sun Belt in 2020 and 2021 — was better for students than
extended closures — which is what most blue localities opted for.
If a science-based approach — more phonics, more
accountability, more books — were to rationally make its way into public
schools in most states, red and blue, it would be a salve to our national
divisions. It would remind us, as the Southern surge already has, that we are a
problem-solving people and we can fix things through self-government. It would
create better citizens capable of pulling out of a polarization dive driven by
the dopamine cycle of an attention economy.
The Founders didn’t envision mere literacy. They assumed
functional and civic literacy, and though basic literacy has expanded over the
centuries, deep reading and critical thinking have declined. The NAEP shows
only 22 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in civics, while numerous
surveys on American civic knowledge commissioned for America’s 250th suggest
huge gaps in the understanding of the country’s functions and founding ideas.
In one survey, 70 percent of adults failed a basic civics quiz. Somehow the
entire purpose of public education, as envisioned by its father, Horace Mann,
became a bump in the road on the way to end-of-grade testing and equity.
For too many citizens, their insufficient literacy means
that their “capacity to evaluate evidence is outsourced entirely to others,”
Pondiscio writes, because they can’t comprehend and compare multiple sources
and think through trade-offs.
***
At the risk of simplifying complex problems, the answer
is books. They’re not just practical, but as the “Mississippi miracle” moniker
suggests, downright astounding in their delivery of public good. In the 2019
book The Enchanted Hour, which inspired me to start regular read-alouds
with my children, author Meghan Cox Gurdon calls it a “dazzlingly
transformative and even countercultural act” in an age of increased technology
and decreased connection. “Reading out loud is probably the least expensive and
most effective intervention we can make for the good of our families, and for
the wider culture.”
It does sound like a bargain, especially in a time when
“many of us choose to live in a form of pseudo-reality governed by
algorithmically enabled individual experiences,” as Christine Rosen puts it in The
Extinction of Experience. Although a public-policy revolution in literacy
overtaking 46 more states would be inspiring, the great thing about reading is
that no one needs to wait for the wheels of representative government to turn
before they can do it.
There is evidence in the burgeoning popularity of
classical education, undertaken by hundreds of thousands of families across
traditional and home-school settings since before the pandemic, that parents
and students are choosing something that pushes students to think deeply and
learn serious ideas, as our Founders themselves did in their studies.
As I clicked through Oliver James’s journey, watching him
progress from simple prose to C. S. Lewis, my algorithmically enabled
experience served me more of this traditional act as it becomes a trend of its
own, which is maybe the best way to reach a new generation. The social media
account of Chris Fizer (Chris Kinda Reads) features a young man, already a
reader, exploring the classics for the first time. He recommends Steinbeck and
Tolstoy in the language of an influencer — “Anna Karenina is so good,
btw” — while publishing houses, eager for exposure, happily ship him a full
library. Streamer and YouTuber Kai Cenat is reading to his audience of
millions, using his phone to look up new words and pronunciations, calling
reading “the cherry on top” of the new, happier path he’s on.
These enthusiastic readers seem to sometimes surprise
themselves with how much they enjoy it. But it’s not without doubts and
frustration. James talks about the humility it requires to work with his
ten-year-old stepson, who he says is a more advanced reader than he is.
Developing reading skills takes time. But when you watch
James or a student in Mississippi or your own children learn to read, when you
see them grasp the thing that unlocks doors and builds dreams, you realize how
necessary it is to the American idea itself, whether you’re a 33-year-old
patriot on a deadline in 1776 or a YouTuber in 2025. And to witness it feels a
little bit miraculous every time.
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