the underlying assumption you are missing here, is a political one.
That better reading skills would create a better public voter base would who would vote democratic or more progressively.
That’s a projection based on the current stat, which show that generally, democratic voters are higher educated than republican voters and/or the assumption that a literate public is a good thing.
And TBF the USA founders based a lot of the constitution on the presumption of a educated well-informed public as a foundation for it’s architecture.
So in the liberal sphere, an uneducated, less literate public is a political threat both towards conservatism, and an eroding on the American political project.
And a lot of praise of the USA model in the 18th and 19 centuries was precisely because we were one the first nations to have a public education system and were were such a highly literate nation.
There are also economic concerns here. A more literate/educated public is generally more economically productive.
And a lot of our ‘educational slide’ has been a product of the last 30-40 years.
Anyone who has read a Free Press article or Ross Douthat column or subscribed to The Economist knows this isn’t true.
Conservative Intellectuals are a dime a dozen. The Ivy League is full of them. The courts are packed with them. Legions of Ben Shapiro wanna-bes goose step across Twitter and Facebook daily.
Reading skills won’t make you progressive if all you’re reading is Rand and Heinlein. Intellectuals wrote The Bell Curve and justified the invasion of Iraq. Education is not ideologically neutral and being “smart” does to turn your vote Blue.
The Causation on this is backwards. Progressives venerate academia. Academics don’t venerate progressivism.
the underlying assumption you are missing here, is a political one.
That better reading skills would create a better public voter base would who would vote democratic or more progressively.
That’s a projection based on the current stat, which show that generally, democratic voters are higher educated than republican voters and/or the assumption that a literate public is a good thing.
And TBF the USA founders based a lot of the constitution on the presumption of a educated well-informed public as a foundation for it’s architecture.
So in the liberal sphere, an uneducated, less literate public is a political threat both towards conservatism, and an eroding on the American political project.
And a lot of praise of the USA model in the 18th and 19 centuries was precisely because we were one the first nations to have a public education system and were were such a highly literate nation.
There are also economic concerns here. A more literate/educated public is generally more economically productive.
And a lot of our ‘educational slide’ has been a product of the last 30-40 years.
Anyone who has read a Free Press article or Ross Douthat column or subscribed to The Economist knows this isn’t true.
Conservative Intellectuals are a dime a dozen. The Ivy League is full of them. The courts are packed with them. Legions of Ben Shapiro wanna-bes goose step across Twitter and Facebook daily.
Reading skills won’t make you progressive if all you’re reading is Rand and Heinlein. Intellectuals wrote The Bell Curve and justified the invasion of Iraq. Education is not ideologically neutral and being “smart” does to turn your vote Blue.
The Causation on this is backwards. Progressives venerate academia. Academics don’t venerate progressivism.