College Students No Longer Know How To Read Books

The Ivy Leagues are not giving us our best

It’s easier to brainwash illiterate people than it is to well-educated ones. When a freshly minted high-school graduate is admitted to an elite Ivy League school but doesn’t know how to read an entire book, it can come off as a killing joke, the kind that signals the death of America.

Rose Horowitch, an assistant editor at the Atlantic interviewed teachers from Columbia, Georgetown, and Stanford who told her that many students are now being overwhelmed by the idea of reading a book.

Nicholas Dames, for example, a Columbia University humanities professor, said that he felt  “bewildered” when a new student told him she had never been assigned to read an entire book in high school. “My jaw dropped,” Dames said.

Other professors said there are still students equipped to read books, but they are “now more exceptions” than the rule. That could only mean that most incoming freshmen are  “shutting down” when confronted with challenging texts.

“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet,” Horowitch wrote. A Shakespearian sonnet has 14 lines.  

But why are these elite professors so surprised that students have been dumbed down? The universities that employ them are responsible for lowering academic standards in public schools across America. The Dodo birds have come home to roost.

Marxist Schools Of Education Make Marxist Teachers

Why are so many public school teachers hell-bent on brainwashing kids into Woke Marxists? It’s what they were taught to do in college.

Jay Schalin’s report, “The Politicization of University Schools of Education,” makes an irrefutable case that future teachers are transformed into leftist ideologues in college. We all knew this, but it’s nice to make it official.

“Education schools are fundamental to all education,” Schalin writes. “Teacher education has become one of the most politicized corners of academia, an institution that is already out of step with the rest of the country politically.”

The report makes it clear that university schools of education are integral to the left’s plan to undermine America by transmogrifying it into a socialist nightmare of broken dreams and unrealized potential.

“Education schools are leading the charge to ‘transform’ the nation,” Schalin explains, “and that transformation is not leading us to a better, freer, more prosperous, more humane society.”

It’s leading us down the highway to hell. We’ve been heading in that direction for a long time—pray it’s not too late to turn back.

“It started over 100 years ago in the Progressive era,” Schalin continues, “when the education schools first emerged as a body of experts who focused on ‘teaching’ as a science; many of those experts were socialists who were open about their intentions to change the nation.”

“And while not every education professor is politicized,” Schalin concludes, “almost no professor of education objects to the wildest schemes of his or her radical colleagues.”

It’s a familiar brew, drink enough of it and you’ll no longer be able to distinguish good from evil. But this isn’t a return to Eden; it’s a one-way ticket to madness.

And Then Came Paulo Freire

Marxist educator Paulo Freire published The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970.

According to Greg Ashman, who holds a Ph.D. in Instructional Design, Freire is The Man—even Woke feminists like him—in schools of education across our great land.

“Recently, I have been reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire,” Ashman observed back in 2015. “It is a hugely influential book. For instance, it is one of the most frequently assigned texts in philosophy of education courses in the US. Over one million copies have been sold, probably as a result of such assignments— an extraordinary number for a book about education.”

If you want to know why your kids rarely bring home novels or other books to read when they come home from school, it’s probably because their teachers—whether they know it or not—are fans of Freire and are passing their enthusiasm on to your kids. 

Freire’s big-feely education theory focuses on feelings and relationships rather than knowledge, reality, and truth. Coddling kids doesn't make them smart; it makes them spoiled and entitled. Instead of equipping them with critical thinking skills and traditional values like hard work, excellence, and morality, students are taught to be narcissists who are vexed by the thought of reading a book.

The Marxist professor responsible for the blog Wright’s Writing knows why The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is so popular among the in-crowd in education: 

The obsessive emphasis on the participation of students, on the need for dialogue, on the necessity to break down the hierarchy, or “contradiction,” between teacher and student, on the importance of taking into account students’ interests and backgrounds in designing (or collaboratively designing, with them) a course, on the constant imperative to facilitate students’ creativity and critical thinking—all of this in the service of furthering the subversive, liberating thoughts and practices that can bring about a social revolution—helpfully focuses an educator’s energies.

“I'm a Marxist,” Wright admits, “but the fact is that any far-reaching social transformation is going to be much more gradual than Marxists have traditionally thought.”

Wright’s comments were posted in 2015. Almost ten years later, we see that the Marxists have made a lot of progress. Everyone’s oppressed in the West, even Westerners because they can no longer read books.

The anti-Jewish protests at Columbia and other elite universities must smell a lot like a victory to professors like Wright.

The Columbia anti-Jewish protests had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with oppression. Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, raping, pillaging, taking hostages, and killing over 1200 innocents. And yet, for these protestors, Hamas isn't to blame, Israel is.

Why? Because the Jews are oppressors for living in the same homeland they inhabited since biblical times. Palestine, on the other hand, isn’t even a country.  

If that doesn't make sense, odds are you’ve read more than one book in your life. Stripped of critical thinking skills and historical context—this is where reading a book or two might help—the protestors are fueled by blind fury, not reason. They congregate at college campuses to release the pent-up stupidity they learned in school.

Now What?

Freire has highly influenced the people who teach your children. An army of teachers inebriated on Marxism—many who may not even know it—should scare the hell out of you.

Neo-Marxist malcontents are teaching future teachers to teach kids to hate the West. It’s that simple. A lot of kids don’t fall for it, but a lot of them do. It’s a real problem with no quick fix.

At the moment, it’s trench warfare in the classroom. Conservatives, libertarians, and independent teachers are badly outnumbered because they lack the ground support and supply lines they need to advance. It doesn’t look good.

But it’s not over. Remember the Battle of Thermopylae? Though the Spartans warriors—hopelessly outnumbered—-all died defending their way of life, in the end, the Greeks won the day. 

Keep fighting. Vote, attend school board meetings, and write letters to the editor demanding a return to sanity—like learning how to read in school. Do what you can. Just keep fighting.

Everything depends on it.