Perpetual assault on American education

(Update: I've chased down some of Layne's sources and I am not convinced that they entirely support her conclusions about what has caused the degradation of Americans' reading skills. The Daily Parker is ever-evolving.)

ProPublica reported this morning that the OAFPOTUS has stocked the Department of Education with Christian nationalists who want to end public schooling and redirect our taxes to private interests. OK, maybe they're not all Christian nationalists; maybe some of them are just grifters hoping to steal some of the $878 billion in annual US education spending.

Author Hilary Layne argues that the idealogues on the far left have done at least as much damage to US education in the past 30 years as the idealogues on the far right. In her most recent (52-minute!) video essay, Layne takes us through the scholarship on one side and the writings of the critical literacy (cf. critical thinking) theorists on the other to explain why a recent study found only 5% of a group of English Literature majors at two prestigious state universities "had a detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House:"

As Layne points out, these kids will go on to teach English to other kids, in a cycle that has already produced a generation of writers who can't write.

I've had my own dealings with children unable to read, including one extremely negative interaction with a 26-year-old holding degrees—including a JD—from two of the most prestigious (and left-leaning) public universities in the US. This person admitted at one point that she doesn't read books, which she clarified to mean she literally doesn't read books. In one particular conversation she could not comprehend that her feelings about a point I was making were exactly the same as mine, even as I was making a rhetorical point that she agreed with. This young lawyer got so flummoxed by the nuance of it that, even when written down, it was incomprehensible to her. She's a lawyer, FFS, with what should be an impressive pedigree, and yet has the level of analytical skills that we Gen-X folks were expected to move beyond in 10th grade.

I singled this example out because I found this combination of facts especially egregious. Sadly, I have met too many under-30s with similar deficiencies that I was really looking for any hypothesis that could tie it all together. Layne's video suggests one hypothesis, which I hope to discuss with a couple of teachers I know (including a contemporary of mine who teaches high school English) to see if Layne's on point or not.

I also recognize that older generations have bemoaned falling standards of education for millennia. It might take 30 seconds of Googling to find a quote from Aristotle that no doubt supports the universality of this phenomenon. I really have come to think that the late 1970s and early 1980s were a high point in American education, though: reading through phonics, math through the metric system, physical fitness through daily gym class. Since the Reagan Administration elevated business and Christian nationalism over classical liberalism, though, things seem to have slipped a bit.

"Yeah! Whatever happened to all those people who graduated from Vassar with a degree in English Lit for the Hermetically Sealed Mind?" Gabby Johnson howls in Authentic Frontier Gibberish(tm)

Actually, I do have a somewhat legitimate quibble with our education system. How is that I reached the age of 55 with 3 Masters degrees but only *today* learned what "the Levant" is? So much excellent formal education and I never even *heard* that word until today. It's astonishing. I find this to be... well... inconceivable.