A woke educational system politicizes everything, it also produces functional illiterates who only know how to be outraged at the things they’re told to be outraged at. (This is often mislabeled as teaching ‘critical thinking’.)

The consequences of replacing Shakespeare with Amanda Gorman are more than just wokeness, but a student body that even in Ivy League schools can’t read.

Literally. Can’t read a book.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

Why are those students even there would be a question. But the answer is pretty obvious. Quite a few of those students are there for reasons other than merit. But beyond that they’re the products of public school systems that pursue every possible gimmick and fad except actually teaching basic skills.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Why read books when you can go with teacher to a protest rally instead?

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

And they also need their “mental health days”. And their “self-care”. And why should they be expected to do anything anyway?

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen.

If only we paid public school teachers like NBA players…

In the face of this, the educational system is doing what it always does, lowering its standards.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

Indeed.

And with some more adjustments, the curriculum will be reduced to toxic masculinity, studies, the 1619 Project and How to Support Hamas.

The public school system is a radioactive mess that does nothing but eat endless money and fund Democrat organizers while radicalizing and tainting young minds.

College today is mostly worthless.

Policy should follow those realities. We need schools, we do not need a public school system. And at this point widespread use of college should be reserved for specialties, not for a liberal arts that is dying off anyway.