With all the furor about inequality of income, inequality in education, and statistics being tossed out about how poorly minorities do on standardized tests, maybe all the experts and education consultants ought to take a hard look at some basic facts. The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 37% of U.S. high school seniors could read proficiently and less than 25% were proficient in mathematics. Interestingly enough, in 2018, roughly 37% of Americans had a bachelor’s degree.

The bottom line is fairly simple. If a student isn’t proficient in reading and mathematics, the odds are extremely high that they won’t do well college or in most high-paying fields. Not only that, but roughly half of adolescents and young adults with criminal records have reading difficulties. Similarly, about half of youths with a history of substance abuse also have reading problems.

Study after study has shown that the vast majority of students who don’t learn to read well in grade school never will catch up, which is borne out by the fact that 63% of high school seniors still can’t read proficiently. This isn’t helped by the fact that high school students have moved from reading to other leisure entertainment venues over the last 50 years. In 1970, 70% read from magazines or books daily; today the figure is 16%, and reading bits and pieces from a computer screen isn’t the same as reading a book.

In addition, individuals who develop reading skills are far more likely to develop writing skills, and the decline in writing skill among students entering college is at least partly, if not largely, linked to the decline in reading – both reading required in school and reading for pleasure or self-education.

As I’ve noted in other blogs, basic reading and writing are skills that need to be learned before the brain’s linguistic centers mature, which generally occurs in the mid-teens – certainly well before students enter college. What politicians and bureaucrats – and too many activists – tend to overlook is that mastery of the basic skills of reading and mathematics at an early age is far more important than all the furor over tests, GPA, social/economic inequality… or even a broad curriculum or cultural diversity.

Admittedly, students who come from higher economic backgrounds have a tremendous advantage because their background boosts the skills and referents essential to become a proficient reader. But as certain schools have demonstrated, those skills have been successfully taught to the most economically disadvantaged children. The larger problem is that too much is being “taught” too early to far too many students who don’t have the linguistic skills to really grasp that knowledge… or to learn material on their own, which becomes increasingly important in secondary and higher education.

The furor over tests such as the SAT or ACT misses a fundamental point. The test scores reflect, not just raw intelligence, but also the ability to process the material swiftly and accurately. Since most tests are timed, students who cannot read quickly and well and calculate quickly and accurately are penalized and classified as less able. And, unfortunately, they’ll be “penalized” for the rest of their life, because employers want jobs done quickly and well. Slow readers and calculators may be accurate, but in the real world time is money.

The solution doesn’t lie in removing or changing standardized tests, or in fiddling with college admission criteria. It lies in improving those two basic skills at a young age, and I don’t see the many educators or any politicians on any level addressing that in a meaningful or useful way. Until it is, all the proposed reforms involving colleges and higher education are essentially rearranging the same old flawed furniture.

There’s been a great deal of talk about words, and their power, and a great deal of disagreement about that power. But while I’ve heard a great deal of rhetoric, from what I’ve seen and heard, far too much outrage, energy and effort has been placed on attacking verbal minimization and micro-aggressions, which – although painful, discriminatory, and symptomatic of racism, sexism, and just plain rudeness and bad manners – are not where the real damage is caused by words.

The real damage caused by words is the ever-growing web of untruths, knowing misstatements, and blatant lies harnessed in service of oppression and discrimination. Restrictive voting rules that benefit those in power do far more damage than the micro-aggressions and verbal “sins” that seem to consume the “woke” community. So do the words in laws that establish and maintain income inequality through massive tax breaks for corporations and the affluent. Or the words that pit lower income whites against minorities, when both are victims of preferential treatment of the affluent.

We now have the greatest dichotomy between the wealthy and the poor in our history. We have an education system rigged against minorities and the poor. We have a crumbling infrastructure in every state in the union. I live the state with supposedly the best infrastructure, and Utah gets a C minus – and we’re the best?

Yet the Republicans are consumed with the big lie of a stolen election, one that election officials in both parties have called the fairest ever with absolutely no actual evidence of any fraud that could have changed the outcome anywhere. And the use of that lie has resulted new discriminatory laws and legislation across the nation.

At the same time, the left, perhaps in frustration, is spending far too much time and effort on attacking individuals for how they address people, rather than addressing the real problem with words and attacking the misuse of words in matters that affect the structure of society and its power base.

Most of the micro-aggressions and verbal assaults will diminish markedly if the poor and minorities gain political power… and that’s where the battles need to be fought.

Or, put more crudely, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, “If you got ‘em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

Language follows power, not the other way around.

I’m so sick and tired of people – especially the extremists – insisting that they deserve the freedom to say whatever they please, regardless of the consequences. And I’m particularly angry at people, particularly the far right, who insist that they have the “right” to lie, to reject verified facts, or to present facts in a misleading context. The fact is, as illustrated by the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, that lies and distortions undermine social order and can lead to injury and death.

This isn’t anything new. The idea of a peaceful ante-bellum south was also always a lie. The pre-war southern political power structure continually feared a slave revolt, and the oppression and physical abuse of slaves has been well-documented. Even the “gallant” Robert E. Lee is documented to have beaten a slave.

The 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was acceptable was a lie, because the white power structure had no intent whatsoever in providing “equal” access or facilities, and when black communities managed to create prosperity, all too often white vigilantes tore them down and terrorized and/or killed blacks who had the temerity rise toward equality.

When the last election showed that minorities were getting close to equal rights to vote, what happened? Republicans in state after state immediately pushed, and often passed, legislation that makes it harder for those in less affluent communities to vote. And they’re justifying it with the lie of almost non-existent “voter fraud.” Even the far-right Heritage Foundation’s vaunted study on voter fraud could only find a handful of individual cases in over twenty years of federal elections.

Trump and his supporters are pushing for the legal right to lie under the guise of free speech and the idea that they have the right to lie and distort and to use public media to do so

The problem is, of course, is that the unscrupulous and corrupt will use any tool to obtain power and to maintain that power. Those who are honest and law-abiding don’t want to restrict free speech, but without a government check on unregulated freedom of speech in a high-tech mass communications society, it’s beginning to appear that the lies will eventually prevail. Yet if government has the power to stop the lies, whoever controls the government will eventually control the people.

The only way to stop the loss of real freedom is for people, both as individuals and in groups, to reject the lies and insist on “all the facts, all the time.” The facts, all the facts. Not what you believe, not what you want, but the facts.

Unfortunately, too many Americans are more vested in believing comforting lies espoused by the leaders of their “tribes,” rather than in looking for a truth based on facts. To maintain freedom requires the strength to face the facts, both when they’re comforting and when they’re not. Insisting on comforting lies has always led to authoritarian rulers and loss of freedom.

The “cancel culture” is close to being out of control – or maybe it is already. On the one side, there is an extreme left that sees the current socio-economic structure and culture as fatally flawed and that takes even slight lapses and misunderstandings as intentional slights or attacks, and on the right, a mass of conservatives who insist that everything is just fine the way it is and that, even if it’s not, the extreme leftists are taking things far too far.

What I’ve noticed repeatedly is how often matters are taken out of context. For example, a performing arts instructor who had worked with a student for more than three years, giving that student additional instruction, alerting the student to opportunities and funding, and going the extra mile, wrote the student an email to point out that the student had showed a considerable lack of courtesy and respect in handling a situation, adding a note that such behavior would hurt the student if repeated in professional situations because the performing arts community can be a very small world at times. The student ended up filing a grievance that almost resulted in the instructor being dismissed. The instructor was trying to be helpful, alerting the student to an unprofessional behavior, nothing more, but because of the ultra-sensitivity of the words along the lines of “it’s a small world,” the administration panicked. That situation was far different from the ones where Harvey Weinstein used those words to threaten young actresses not to report his physical assaults.

Instances like those of the instructor are far from rare and are getting more and frequent, and I suspect it’s because the “cancel culture” is far too focused on “forbidden” buzzwords than on evaluating words and phrases in their context, and, from what I’ve observed, often too little attention is paid to actions that indicate that the speaker certainly meant neither offense nor harm.

Likewise, conservatives have little or no understanding of the pain that lies behind the use of various phrases that anger the left, because they don’t or can’t understand the context in which those words and phrases were used, both in the past and at times still in the present.

All too often context is everything, but the shouts are so loud that context is lost.

Life is messy. People are complex, and it’s always been that way.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and was an untiring champion of religious freedom, but he was also a slave holder and made a slave who was a half sister to his deceased wife his mistress.

Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the United States and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, but never believed blacks to be the equal of whites.

Martin Luther King fought valiantly and effectively for equal rights, but was an incorrigible womanizer.

Charles Lindbergh was the first man to fly the Atlantic solo and an aviation pioneer, who risked his life in WWII to improve combat flight operations; he was also an America-first isolationist, closet Nazi supporter, and a bigamist.

Richard Wagner was a great composer, but also an avowed anti-Semite who seduced the wife of his greatest financial supporter.

Almost invariably, people want to believe that people of great achievements were better individuals than they actually were, and now, when history and scholarship reveal the full scope of their lives, there’s a growing movement to destroy statues and monuments and to denigrate important historical figures because they weren’t perfect.

Some of this backlash is understandable and justifiable. I can see why the descendants of slaves, in particular, would want monuments glorifying figures of the Confederacy destroyed, but trying to erase or change the view of history only makes it more likely that the evils will reoccur. In a sense, that’s exactly what happened in much of the American south, when in the post-Reconstruction period, southern whites papered over the evils of slavery and erected monuments to the “valiant” soldiers of the Confederacy, so effectively that for generations to follow the southern “story” was of lost glory, the destruction of states’ rights, and Yankee carpetbaggers, rather than the real story, which was the destruction of a socio-economic system based on dehumanization and oppression.

But there’s a difference between removing “propaganda” statues and monuments and removing those who made a difference in history. Removing statues of Lincoln or Jefferson because they weren’t “pure” ignores the basic fact that none of us are. Like it or not, the military ability of Robert E. Lee made an awful difference in prolonging the Civil War, but those abilities are part of history.

The preservation of some of the Nazi death camps helps keep alive a reminder of just how evil governments can become if people allow it. When the history of evil is buried – or white-washed – it becomes so much easier for subsequent generations to repeat those evils, as it was in the American south, if on a lesser scale.

As always, balance is vital.