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I am delighted to be joined today by Peter Wood, who is president of the National Association

of Scholars. He's also an author of several books, including diversity rules, 1620, a critical

response to the 1619 Project, and Roth, America enraged.

And we're going to be talking about the state of American education.

Now, Peter, I thought I get you on because you are president of the National Association of Scholars.

And there's been some quite troubling statistics recently on the state of American literacy.

It's now something like one in four children in America who grow up subliterate.

And I think in California the statistics are particularly bad.

What's going wrong is, first of all, the American educational system made a detour about 12 years ago into what was called Common Core, which was an approach to the English language arts, which demoted literature in favor of just teaching kids how to argue. This comes at a time when

literacy was already suffering from several decades of what was called whole language instruction

in which efforts to teach children to read through phonics or through being able to decipher new words for themselves,

were displaced by a kind of a gestalt approach to reading, which never worked very well, but it caught on with the teachers' unions and became the mainstay of American basic instruction in literacy.

These things coincide with other social developments outside the school, the decline of the two-parent family,

the astonishing rise in the number of children raised with one parent or no parents.

Conditions were not set for the family to intervene in any constructive way with the deficits

that the schools were imposing. So we find ourselves post-COVID with a rather rapid descent into either further ill literacy than we had before.

This has worked its way through the entire American population.

The United States' literacy compared to the rest of the world is not very

...