Not a ton here that I hadn't already read in the introduction or other Adler articles. I think the thing that was most interesting is when Adler talks about what you need to be ready to learn to read, and talks about speaking and hearing. I guess this refers to needing it to be able to be taught to read, since there are obviously people who are deaf but learn to read. In 1971, more than half the incoming class of CUNY students needed remedial reading (when CUNY discontinued their remedial program in 2023 it was around 78% across reading and math for incoming associates degree students). People whine about grade inflation, but I don't think that we, as a country, have ever really grappled with what a high school diploma should mean (hurray for local control of education)/what it means to be college ready. I guess it's not surprising. We went from less than a third of the country having high school degrees to pushing 90% in about 50 years (see here). That's an incredible reshuffling, and it doesn't seem there was a ton of serious consideration to go with it. Just get more kids in school and find a way to push them through.
And that dovetails nicely with one of Adler's other points: We basically stop effective reading instruction in late middle school. Once a student is hypothetically capable of doing high school work (which basically means being able to read a couple sentences and say the main idea) that's it. I think there's been some effort to correct this recently, but not nearly as explicitly as it needs to be. It doesn't help that English classes have been largely coopted for social justice and what not. I think it'd probably serve the huge swaths of disadvantaged kids to be able to read better than to stumble through an audio book about how much being poor, black, gay, etc. sucks, (because they wouldn't know anything about that themselves...) but what do I know?
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