Like the distant call of a horn announcing the arrival of the cavalry, news broke this week of Trump’s executive order investigating DEI in higher education. It’s a welcome announcement, and I greet it as gladly as any other fair-minded person who has suffered through the malicious drivel of the identity politics found in our classrooms and the woke posters smothering their hallways.
The ultimate goal is for students to read “the best that has been thought and said.”
But the rot in our educational system goes deeper than DEI. And a thorough revitalizing of the system will require not just tearing out the evil but also replacing it with the good.
It’s not just that schools are injecting a poisonous hybrid of neo-Marxist and postmodern ideology into students. They’re also failing to transmit the values of our Western heritage and the intellectual habits necessary for an educated society.
Consider the growing trend of the “un-literate,” to borrow Dwight Longenecker’s term. College professors are now encountering students who are technically literate — they know how to read — but are unwilling or unable to put that skill to use. In some cases, students are entering college without ever having been assigned a full book in high school. The prospect of reading an entire book — let alone several of them in the course of a month or week — simply does not compute. It leaves them paralyzed, reaching uneasily for the stress-relieving sedative of the cell phone.
Reading rates among adults have plummeted, too — more evidence of an educational system that isn’t instilling even one of the most basic habits of learning and self-development. A 2022 Gallup poll uncovered that Americans now read books at the lowest rate Gallup has ever recorded.
As far back as 1985(!) some educators were sounding the alarm on our educational deficit. In spring of that year, Paul Gagnon wrote:
Many of our freshmen arrive at college, after 12 years of school (presumably in the “college track”), knowing nothing of the pre-Plymouth past, including the Bible! All too frequently, they have not heard of Aristotle, Aquinas, Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, or Marx. They often know nothing of the deterioration of Athens and Rome, of Czarist Russia and Weimar Germany, and next to nothing of the history of science, technology, industry, of capitalism and socialism, of fascism and Stalinism, of how we found ourselves in two world wars, or even in Vietnam.
They have been asked to read very little and to reflect hardly at all. At 18 or 19, they are unarmed for public discourse, their great energy and idealism at the mercy of pop politics and the seven o’clock news.
Gagnon’s searing words apply even more today than they did when he wrote them 40 years ago. Does anyone really believe that the caliber of incoming college students has improved since 1985? Considering that today 1 in 3 incoming college students have to take remedial coursework (at significant cost in time and money), I’d say the answer is a resounding “no.”
Grade schools and high schools are faring no better. In fact, the deficiencies professors are noting at the college level are the direct result of failures at lower levels of education. A recent Pew Survey found that 82 percent of teachers believe the state of K-12 education has declined over the past five years, and 47 percent of teachers report that their students are bored and unengaged with the material. The survey also reported high levels of disciplinary and mental health issues amongst students.
In her analysis of the 2019 National Report Card, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos stated, “Every American family needs to open The Nation’s Report Card this year and think about what it means for their child and for our country’s future. The results are, frankly, devastating. This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen…. Two out of three of our nation’s children aren’t proficient readers.”
So yes, Donald Trump should absolutely target DEI and tear it out — like a festering, cavity-riddled tooth — from colleges, high schools, and grade schools. But we also need to address the gaping holes we’re seeing in student’s education. We need to quickly reverse the collapse in reading ability and interest. We must teach students not just how to read, but how to love reading.
Reading is Fundamental
And we need to reintroduce classic texts that transmit the Western heritage and a love of that heritage, the great works of literature and history and philosophy that helped build our civilization.
Good books must be introduced early and not dissected with comprehension questions or an avalanche of footnotes, which take the joy out of reading.
Teachers should offer some gentle guidance, and ultimately aid the students in perceiving the light contained in the books, without getting in the way or turning reading into busywork. The ultimate goal is for students to read “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, from Aristotle to Austen, but with the proper preparation.
That means reading titles from a young age onward such as those found on literature professor and educational theorist John Senior’s “Thousand Good Books.” Such works foster the necessary reading ability and the cultural soil needed for the Great Books to take root in students’ souls — which will reinvigorate our nation’s educational, philosophical, and cultural life from the bottom-up.
READ MORE: