Roughly 2 in 3 of America’s 12th-graders Can’t Read. Here’s Why.

I was chatting with the head of a private school last fall when she made an interesting observation. Like many private schools, her school experienced a flood of parents in the wake of Covid who saw what their children were taught during the online public school classroom experience and wanted to give them a far better education.

However, this headmistress reported such alarm and concern were not as present in newer parents. In fact, those with children born during Covid seemed oblivious to the many education problems unmasked during the pandemic and were happily trotting their children toward their first years in the same old forms of substandard education.

But recent data shows that concerns about American education are still very justified. Nowhere is this clearer than the recent data release from The Nation’s Report Card showing declines in 12th-grade math and reading since the last time the test ran right before the pandemic. Today only 35% of 12th-graders are proficient in reading. Unless things drastically improve in the next few years, it seems fair to say that 2 in every 3 students entering kindergarten this year will exit the education system unable to read proficiently.

Every school out there – public, private, or otherwise – promotes itself as the best at promoting learning and ensuring student success. But the numbers say otherwise.

What are parents to do? How can they know the elements of a good education so they can either provide it for their children themselves, or recognize it in quality institutions?

Author Dorothy Sayers recognized this problem way back in 1947 and laid out some core elements of quality education in her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” For younger students, Sayers offers the following three general categories:

1) Latin Instruction

Sayers recommended this dead language not to advance a hoity-toity, stuck-up attitude in students, but because Latin is foundational to so many other areas of education. “Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least 50 percent,” she writes, going on to note its importance in many foreign languages, science, literature, and history.

2) Memorization and Recitation

Although a technique often scorned by modern methods, Sayers encourages an education that teaches children to commit facts, dates, and figures to heart during their early years, chanting them out loud in order to better ingrain them in memory. Such should be done in history, geography, science, math, and English – with poetry and classical stories taking prominence in the latter.

3) Theology

“Theology is the Mistress-science,” Sayers writes, and without it, a student’s education is “full of loose ends.”

What kind of theology should schools teach? Sayers recommends basic components such as “the story of God and Man in outline—i.e., the Old and New Testament presented as parts of a single narrative of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption—and also with ‘the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.’”

For those in the middle school years, Sayers advances Logic as one of the most important elements of learning.

"Logic is the art of arguing correctly,” Sayers explains. She admits that an argumentative nature in a child is the last thing many of us want to deal with, but as it is a reality, it is better to channel argumentation for good purpose, rather than letting it run wild. Thus, a good middle school education will teach students to properly debate, to ask questions, and to spot the logical fallacies regularly used in media and daily life.

If a student has such grounding in his early years, then he will undoubtedly be off and running in his high school years – sure to be one of the growing few in the category of those 12th-graders who can read proficiently.

Sayers concludes:

We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or ‘looks to the end of the work.’

Sadly, our education system will likely continue to crumble. Only the parents who take heed to these “lost tools of learning” and seek to instill them in their children, both at home and in school, will be able to adequately prepare their children for leadership and success in adulthood.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

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