This is more about the why than the what. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

This is the point. As University of Tennessee professor James Tucker writes, the deterioration

of reading achievement in the U.S. has been noted for decades, and the many attempts to correct

this decay have been unsuccessful. He then quotes a sobering stat. At least 44 million adults in the

U.S. are now unable to read a simple story to their children.

The question is why.

Obvious factors include poverty, technology, education, but so are our ideas about what literacy is for.

We've largely rejected wisdom from the great books of the past, preferring subjective and personal experiences instead of universal truths. So why study?

Also today's emphasis on race, politics, and sex in education has transformed literacy from a gift into a weapon.

Simply put, literacy is not ideologically neutral.

It's not just about what we read or that we read, it's also about why we read.

Consider William Tyndale, who rightly sensed that all people should be able to read scripture.

He believed that the boy that drives the plow could be more knowledgeable of scripture than the Latin-speaking elite.

Words are powerful things.

That's why literacy matters.

I'm John Stone Street.