The article in the August issue of the ATLANTIC by Rose Horowitch entitled THE AGE OF READING IS DEAD is the most informative and the scariest article I have read in years, given how close we are to Full-Blown Fascism.
That article connects with: American students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago. In reading between 2015 and 2025, 83% of the school districts lost ground. (THE NEW YORK TIMES, May 19, 2026)
Starting with our founders, a legion of philosophers have connected education with personal freedom and, as a result, national sovereignty.
Only educated people can be truly free and only a nation with educated, involved citizens can become and sustain a democracy. Jefferson stated that education was the only sure foundation for the preservation of good government, freedom and happiness.
Benjamin Rush, a founder, said: “The only method that can render a democratic form of government durable is the dissemination of the seeds of virtue and knowledge through every part of the nation in the proper places and by the proper modes of education.”
The Founders saw an educated populace as a prerequisite for political stability. It would be a particular priority to attend to “the education of the common people,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, for “on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Kenneth Clark made innumerable statements connecting education with freedom.
Giroux said: Individual freedom and personal capacities must be developed to their maximum, but individual powers must be linked to democracy in the sense that betterment of humanity must be the necessary consequence of individual flourishing. The educated individual and the community thus live safer, more decent and more progressive (Liberal) lives.
Everybody should focus on the primary purpose of education for the individual and the nation because it is so easy to prevent the realization of its objectives when we move away from its primary purposes.
The best definition of the kind of education that is pertinent to democracy comes from Noah Webster:
“It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences (physical and social) — but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”
If properly educated, human beings become the most divine and civilized of all animals; but if they are illeducated, they become the most savage of earthly creatures. (From Plato)
Until I read the article in the Atlantic, I had thought about education principally from the perspective of knowledge and the capacity to use what one knows to make decisions. I had never thought about what reading did to strengthen the brain that seeing and hearing did not do. Reading books is a workout for the brain. An analogy for this ol’ coach would be running and weight training to strengthen the body as compared with leisurely walking.
One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy.
TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels dominate the attention economy. Ten second posts as a way to campaign for office in the postliterate era may be fine for politicians, but as a way to practice informed self-government, as Horowitch states, it portends disaster for democracy.
I once thought people were making injurious political choices – to wit: electing Treasonists — because they were simply bereft of truthful information. However, some respected researchers have concluded that a huge percentage of Americans are intellectually incapable of assessing politicians’ effectiveness. Intellectually Incapable also means the inability to determine whether a politician has operated in consonance with the governments’ Values, Vision and Mission as defined in our founding documents, and as stated in their oaths of office.
The process required to make ethical and effective decisions apparently exceeds the mental bandwidth of too many Americans. It is not that they don’t want to do right, they cannot.
The largest group of Trump voters in 2024, at 64%, were white, non-college graduates.
If people have not arrived at their convictions through a rational, factual, decision-making process, it is not likely that others can easily dissuade them from their positions using logic, reason and facts. The task for democracy’s advocates is awesome. Democracy’s salvation requires expertise in persuasion by leaders who want to thwart the Trumpists from realizing their Fascist objectives. Virtue separated from fact-based reality becomes a principal instrument of evil (Camus).
