The Literacy Crisis No One Wants to Talk About
On February 3, 1468, Johannes Gutenberg died. Not only was he the inventor of the printing press using movable metal type, but he could be considered one of the greatest liberators of thought in human history. Prior to the printing press, copying by hand was a slow, laborious process that made books expensive and rare. There was a strong chance, in the copies of copies available for people to read, that copy errors had been made and preserved. Errors were especially common in works containing scientific charts and diagrams displaying, for example, the positions of planets.
The printing press changed everything. Printing became the first mass-production industry, which made books far less expensive. A well-stocked medieval monastic library contained only a few hundred books, but after the printing press, individuals amassed far larger private collections and, as a result, became self-taught in a wide variety of areas. Access to more books was a spur to creativity and contributed to the blossoming of science, literature, and philosophy in Early Modern Europe.
With printing, every copy of a book is exactly the same. Errors can be corrected in future editions. This was extremely important in all fields, but especially in the sciences.
Even more, printing made it essentially impossible to suppress ideas. The revolutionary teaching of medieval religious reformers like John Wycliffe or Jan Hus could, to some degree, be stopped, but not Martin Luther. Luther even commented that “God invented the printing press to reform his church.” Printing also resulted in new forms of literature, from comic books and pulps to essays, short stories, and novels. Most importantly, Gutenberg’s invention enabled the growth of education and led to an explosion of literacy.
It’s impossible to imagine what the world would have become without the printing press. However, there’s plenty of evidence that the world is squandering the riches it left us. A recent Atlantic article, entitled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” tells how an Ivy League professor learned that a student had never read a complete book in her high school career. His colleague reported that his students were unable to remain focused on a single sonnet.
Of course, professors have complained since the beginning of time that students “aren’t what they used to be,” but today, it’s true. According to the Nation’s Report Card, which measures the math and reading levels of fourth and eighth graders, there is a genuine crisis of literacy and learning. As Angela Moribito summarized on X, eighth-grade literacy is the lowest ever recorded, below 50% in many cities. Even worse is proficient reading, which, according to the study, is below 10% in many cities. In other words, the vast majority of students in America cannot ascertain the meaning of the words they read.
A student once said of Colson Center Senior Fellow Glenn Sunshine, during his last year of university teaching that “the problem with Dr. Sunshine is he expects us to understand what we read!”
The typical culprits blamed for failures in education are COVID era policies and digital devices. Studies show that screen use has reduced the average attention span to about 8.25 seconds. Still, these are comorbidities at best.
Upstream is a decades-old crisis birthed in Schools of Education, who constantly require more courses on teaching methods and less on content. In other words, teachers, especially at the elementary and junior high level, spend more time learning how to teach than what to teach. And the new, cutting-edge methodologies have been consistently yielding worse results.
Academia, in general, is addicted to the new and novel. The latest emphasis on emotional learning, diversity, and critical theory results in deconstructing everything that has come before. The traditional canon of great books has been replaced with articles, excerpts, and things considered more “relevant” to students. Great ideas are replaced by the ideas teachers and professors were trained to promote. This has left students unable to read or understand books, something that C.S. Lewis predicted and explained when he wrote of the importance of reading “old books.”
We now risk losing the literate, creative, intellectually curious, and fruitful society born of the printing press. Thankfully, there are growing movements within education offering wonderful alternatives and producing well-read, literate graduates. Predictably, many are led by Christians who believe that words matter. This makes sense, given that we also believe the creation and our redemption are direct products of the Word of God.
Photo Courtesy: ©GettyImages/Sanja Radin
Published Date: February 3, 2025
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
