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The Hill
02-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
How we lost our way on education and how Congress can help us get back
We once had a shared policy thesis about public education. What happened? A glance at the president's recent budget proposal, now coined 'One Big Beautifull Bill' is the clearest indicator that we've lost our shared thesis when it comes to public education — a $12.4 billion cut to public education, with the largest share of the cut being to K-12 schools. For more than 15 years, educational opportunity — ensuring success for all students — was a bipartisan policy priority, embraced by both Republican and Democratic administrations. We believed, together, that public education was a gateway to the American Dream, the most powerful tool for ensuring every child had a fair shot. We also understood that strong public schools were America's most strategic financial and policy investment to ensure a strong democracy for generations. But somewhere along the way, that consensus unraveled. What happened? For 16 years, two presidents from opposing political parties made public education a national priority. Although their approaches differed — and were often debated — what remained clear was a shared, bipartisan commitment to ensuring that every child had access to a quality education. President George W. Bush, with bipartisan support, ushered in one of the most consequential eras of federal engagement in K-12 education with the No Child Left Behind Act. The law aimed to raise academic achievement and increase accountability, ensuring that no student — regardless of race, income or background — was overlooked. The nation saw modest academic gains, largely propelled by strict accountability measures and, at times, efforts to 'game' the system in the name of closing achievement gaps. Under No Child Left Behind's Adequate Yearly Progress framework, schools faced rigorous expectations for student performance in reading and math. Educators from that era will recall the unrelenting pressure — and real consequences — attached to those benchmarks. While No Child Left Behind Act remains controversial — often criticized as an underfunded federal mandate — its core mission of holding schools accountable for every child's success was an important step forward. Like many, I believe in accountability, but it must be paired with adequate resources and support. More than a decade later, with bipartisan support, President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, shifting much of the authority back to states while preserving the foundational commitment that every child must learn to read, write and count and also aiming to provide the resources needed to carry out the rigorous expectations once mutually agreed upon by Republicans and Democrats alike. In fact, no major piece of education has cleared Congress without bipartisan support. Today, however, that bipartisan ethos has faded. The once-powerful belief that public education is the great equalizer began to erode. In recent years, we've witnessed a troubling trend: public education is under attack. From banning books to political efforts aimed at controlling curriculum decisions, the shared national thesis — that public education serves both our democracy and our children — has unraveled. Further, President Joe Biden's administration spent four years fighting efforts to undermine decades of progress from Bush to Obama, rather than continuing the legacy of a bold vision for public education. Many of those efforts had just taken place four years prior during the first Trump administration. We must ask ourselves: when did we stop believing that every child, in every zip code, deserves access to a great public education? It seems that belief began to unravel with the latest presidential elections. As much as I want to deny that reality, it is ours to confront. So the question now becomes: how do we shift the nation's focus back — back to a clear, unapologetic commitment to ensuring that no student, regardless of race, income or geography, is denied a high-quality education? We fight back by holding Congress accountable — and by demanding a renewed commitment to educational equity and excellence for all students. That means restoring the nation's focus on true educational accountability: ensuring that every child, regardless of race, background or zip code, can read, write and count proficiently. That opportunity has been in waiting — Congress still needs to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was last reauthorized in 2015. While policy wonks hash out and await an opportunity to reauthorize the existing law, Congress can begin with resisting political overreach into classrooms and holding the Trump administration accountable for carrying forward the existing protections denying federal over-reach over curriculum decisions — particularly efforts to censor books and control curriculum for ideological gain. It means preserving and expanding investments in teacher preparation programs, especially those designed to recruit and support a diverse, high-quality educator workforce. It also requires a firm recommitment to Title I funding in the latest budget proposals, the federal government's primary tool for ensuring that students in under-resourced communities are not short-changed due to disparities in state and local funding. Most importantly, it requires Congress to put an end to the executive branch's ongoing attacks on public education by rejecting any budget or policy proposal that fails to strengthen, support and invest in our nation's public schools. For 16 years, that was our shared thesis — a bipartisan belief that public education is essential not only to individual opportunity but to the health of our democracy. Today, I refuse to believe that the American people will allow a handful of detractors to dismantle that vision. We know the promise public education holds — not just for improving life outcomes, but for advancing the ideals of democratic participation. It's time to reclaim that shared thesis. Perhaps we can begin to reclaim that shared thesis when Congress decides to take up re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Phelton Moss is an assistant professor of educational leadership in the school of education and an affiliate faculty member in the Wilder School of Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is also a former congressional staffer, school principal and teacher.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Missouri lawmakers add grade-level performance to standardized test results
State Rep. Brad Pollitt, a Sedalia Republican, presents a bill to the House Education Committee to require the reporting of grade-level equivalence data on statewide assessments (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent). Missouri parents may soon have a better understanding of whether their child is performing at or above grade level on the state's standardized test under a sweeping education bill awaiting the governor's signature. The legislation contains a provision that would require the state's education department to add a fifth category to Missouri Assessment Program results, reporting 'grade level' in addition to the current levels of 'below basic,' 'basic,' 'proficient' and 'advanced.' The new provision would include students in grades 3 to 8. CONTACT US State Rep. Brad Pollitt, a Sedalia Republican and former school superintendent, introduced the bill to make student performance more transparent to parents and lawmakers. As an educator, he learned that students at grade level score at the upper end of 'basic,' but many people incorrectly assume 'proficient' means performing at grade level, he told The Independent. 'In order to have accurate conversations about where our students are at, we need to know what grade level is,' he said. The Missouri Assessment Program, often referred to as the MAP test, began in the 1990s with five scoring thresholds. But in response to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, state lawmakers required the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to align MAP with federal performance standards. In December 2005, educators met to determine the new standards in line with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. They set thresholds based on the percentage of students scoring proficient on the NAEP so that the proportion of students deemed proficient on the state test would be close to the amount reported by the national test. The National Center for Educational Statistics and the NAEP's governing board have repeatedly clarified that proficiency reflects 'solid academic performance' and 'does not signify being on grade level.' But policymakers, parents and other stakeholders speak about proficiency and grade level interchangeably. And candidates for public office, misinterpreting what proficient means, have used MAP data to push anti-public-education policies. During former state Sen. Bill Eigel's run for governor last year, he told ABC17 that 'less than a third of our children are able to do reading, writing, arithmetic at grade level.' At the time, 33% of Missouri fourth graders scored proficient or advanced in reading on the NAEP, and math had higher performance levels. Despite the test's administrators explaining that this is not a measure of grade level performance, politicians and media reports still repeat the misrepresentation. 'Part of my frustration has been that people criticize public education pretty hard and say we're failing our kids because 35% of our students in third grade or fifth grade are proficient or advanced in reading,' Pollitt said. 'We may have 35% that are above grade level, but maybe 60% of our kids are at grade level. And I think that changes the conversation.' In a House committee hearing in January, lobbyists for public-education groups spoke in favor of the bill. Brandt Shields, director of governmental relations for the Missouri School Boards' Association, said a fifth category would be more 'informative' for stakeholders. 'Having only four categories is almost a crude way of trying to differentiate how those scores are interpreted,' he said. No one spoke in opposition, but the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's lobbyist warned that the change would require work groups to set the new standards, which is estimated to cost just over $1 million. The language passed by the legislature exempts the department from having to employ work groups, but Pollitt said it is up to administrators to decide. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
This Long-Neglected Law Can Help Parents Get Their Kids Out of Violent Schools
On Wednesday, the Department of Education published a letter reminding states of a little-known school choice provision that allows students attending dangerous public schools to enroll in another public school or charter school in their district. The provision, called the Unsafe School Choice Option, was originally passed as part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and was continued under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. The law allows students attending a school deemed "persistently dangerous," as well as students who were victims of violent crimes at school, to transfer out and into another school in their district. However, the law has gone largely unenforced. In all, just eight states had ever designated a school as persistently dangerous, according to a 2019 analysis from education news outlet The 74. Of those eight states, only New York and Pennsylvania have made more than 100 designations. Why have so few schools received this designation? Since individual states were allowed to define persistently dangerous themselves, most have chosen criteria that are almost impossible for schools to meet. For example, in Ohio, a high school of 1,000 students could have four homicides and 19 weapons possessions without being deemed persistently dangerous. In a letter sent to state-level education officers, the Education Department encouraged states to reconsider their definitions of persistently dangerous schools and "ensure that they have clear and robust communication protocols to ensure that parents know if their child's school has been identified as persistently dangerous and understand the school choice options available to them." "The number of persistently dangerous schools reported nationwide appears low particularly given the number of violent offenses in schools reported through the Department's Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC)," reads the letter. "For example, not a single school was designated as persistently dangerous in the 2021-2022 school year, while public school districts reported through the CRDC approximately 1.2 million violent offenses in that same school year (with physical attack without a weapon and threats of physical attack without a weapon accounting for 93% of these offences)." If states develop reasonable definitions of persistently dangerous, more American parents may soon have the ability to remove their children from public schools plagued by violence—and schools with safety problems could soon face pressure to improve conditions. The post This Long-Neglected Law Can Help Parents Get Their Kids Out of Violent Schools appeared first on
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Senators consider mandating access to military recruiters, restricting school funding requests
A yard sign urging voters to vote 'Yes' on a referendum request for Madison School District in 2024 when a record number of schools went to referendum. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner. Republican lawmakers are seeking to give military recruiters and youth organizations a boost from the state when it comes to reaching students in public schools, saying that some school districts aren't giving the organizations equal access. Lawmakers on the Senate Education Committee considered those along with bills that would add further requirements to school referendum requests. 'I think we have a theme here when it comes to anything that seems patriotic in a way, we're having a little bit of struggles getting into particular schools,' Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara (R-Appleton) said during a Tuesday Senate Education Committee meeting. She said during the hearing that she feels 'discouraged' about the way military recruiters and scouts are viewed by 'certain' communities in Wisconsin. One bill — SB 10 — would specifically require schools to allow military recruiters access to common areas in high schools and to allow access during the school day and during school-sanctioned events. It wouldn't require districts to give recruiters access to classrooms during instructional time. Federal law has mandated since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act during the Bush administration that public schools give military access to students at school and to students' contact information. Families can opt their children out of the release of information. However, Cabral-Guevara said she has heard complaints that recruiters have had difficulty. Cabral-Guevara said she has heard of recruiters being placed in rooms separate from employment recruiters and has also heard of a limit being placed on the number of times a recruiter can visit a school as well as visits to drop off documents being counted as a recruiting visit. She said recruiters said they have the most difficulty with access to Madison and Milwaukee schools. 'There should be no reason why a military recruiter should have restricted access or be placed at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to speaking with students,' Cabral-Guevara said. The bill comes as the U.S. military, including the Wisconsin Army National Guard, in recent years has struggled to reach recruitment goals. 'They have not said they have been denied access to enter the building, what they have been saying is that… they have been prohibited from doing meaningful recruitment,' Cabral-Guevara said. Bill co-author Rep. William Penterman (R-Hustisford) compared military recruiters to students trying to sell chocolate bars to their peers. 'After school and during lunch, they have a table in the commons where they sell those candy bars. It's in a public space, it's in a common area. Now, I can only imagine if they were restricted to, perhaps inside the counselor's office, or in a back room somewhere, how that would negatively impact their sales of chocolate bars,' Penterman said. Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said that school officials in his district had some concerns about whether the bill would lead to excessive access to schools, especially as they already provide access. He said the bill 'seems like it's opening it up to infinite' access. He noted that there are a lot of different groups that seek access to schools. 'They try and button it and say, OK, we have career fairs and they have to make that balance to try and figure that out,' Larson said. 'I think [limitations] would have to be written in, and not just assumed, because if there's a military recruiter who's just like, OK every Tuesday, we're gonna pop in and we're just going to run the rotation.' There's nothing that would stop them if this legislation were passed.' Sen. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) said the bill seems 'problematic' because of a lack of boundaries. 'It says, 'during school sanctioned events' — that could be a ball game, that could be during mock trial, that could be during prom… there's just no boundaries around it with this bill,' Keyeski said. Cabral-Guevara said that she is not seeking 'to change federal code on how many times they can access a building' or give military recruiters more access than others. Rather, she said she wants to ensure that when recruiters are in a school building for what is counted as a recruiting visit, it is a meaningful interaction. 'That's not what it says in the bill though,' Keyeski responded. The committee also considered SB 11 that would similarly require that if a 'federally chartered youth' organization — particularly the Girl Scouts or Eagle Scouts — requests access to a public school that a principal allow them to provide oral or written information to students to help encourage participation in the organizations. The bill is co-authored by Cabral-Guevara and Rep. Barbara Dittrich (R-Oconomowoc). 'In essence, what we're finding is that there again are certain groups that when they look for access for recruitment purposes, they are maybe put in a different room. They are not allowed the same access that other organizations get,' Cabral-Guevara said. 'As a mother of four children who all worked at scout camps, as somebody that's active amongst the world of scouting, it is amazing what these organizations help produce in these children. You're looking at amazing leadership skills. You're looking at outstanding community volunteers.' A similar bill passed the Legislature last session, but was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers. He wrote in his veto message that he objects to 'undermining local decision-making regarding whether organizations may visit school buildings to recruit students for memberships' and said the bill might conflict with federal law. Keyeski said she heard from a local school leader that the bill appears focused on the wrong priorities. 'One of the superintendents in my district said the bill does not address any of the things I'm worried about, and then he said that about every single one of these bills,' Keyeski said, adding that she asked what he meant. 'He said, 'We need funding, we need better school opportunities for technological advances.' This was just not a concern.' Proposed referendum requirements Lawmakers on the committee also considered two bills that would impose new restrictions on school referendum requests, which districts have increasingly relied on to help meet costs. One bill — SB 58 — would require ballots to include a 'good faith estimate' of the property tax impact for a referendum. Ballot questions are currently required to include the dollar amount of the increase in the levy limit. 'It is not the intent of this bill to sway people one way or another on any particular referendum. The point is simply to ensure that voters are given the information that they need so that their decision is informed,' bill coauthor Rep. Scott Allen (R-Waukesha) said. The other bill — SB 81 — would eliminate referendum questions that allow recurring — or permanent — operational funding increases and would limit 'nonrecurring' referendum requests to cover no more than a four-year period. 'There's really no mechanism to say we need to make sure that whoever, sometime down the road, is actually having to pay the bill and also who's responsible for spending the money — if they're completely different people, there should be a mechanism where both sides have to come back to the table and say, 'Let's relook at everything,' Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) said. Keyeski said that she thought the mechanism for ensuring that referendum requests are considered responsibly is the elected officials and voters who decide whether to approve them. 'It's just taking away local control and it's taking away democracy in action,' Keyeski said. School district leaders and representatives of school associations expressed an array of concerns about the bills, saying the ballot requirements could create confusion for voters and that further restrictions on referendum requests could increase the financial challenges school districts face. Dee Pattack, executive director of the Wisconsin School Administrators Alliance, told lawmakers that school districts do not want to go to referendum and said that some of the requirements in the bill would be difficult to meet. The 'good faith estimate piece, that would be really challenging,' Pattack said, noting that there is market volatility that could affect total debt referenda costs. She also said that trying to include all of that information on a ballot could be confusing. School districts seeking a referendum will often have a webpage dedicated to information about the request, will host meetings with local residents and stakeholders, speak with news outlets to spread the word and take other actions to ensure the public knows the purpose of a referendum and the costs. 'It's a long process, and we just think that, you know, we try to be as transparent as possible right now and trying to condense that into a small area on a ballot might not really be the best way to enhance that transparency,' Pattack said. Cathy Olig, executive director of the Southeastern Wisconsin Schools Alliance, told lawmakers that school staff and local taxpayers are suffering from referendum fatigue. There were 94 referendum requests during February and April 2025, with about a third of those representing 'retry' efforts, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Voters approved 53 of those for a passage rate of 56.4%, making 2025 one of the lowest referendum passage rates in a non-presidential or midterm election year since 2011. 'We're concerned [SB 81] will create a constant cycle of referenda for school districts. We would welcome alternatives to referenda, which could be addressed through the budget, but to add further requirements and costs takes the focus away from finding solutions to the larger problems plaguing the school finance formula,' Olig said. Kenosha Unified School District Superintendent Jeffrey Weiss told lawmakers that his district has closed several schools in recent years, including five elementary schools and a middle school. He said the change involved a lot of redistricting of students. He said the district has also cut 200 positions and more than $1 million of staff out of the district office. 'We are very responsible stewards of public funds… We wanted to do all we could to avoid having to go for an operational referendum,' Weiss said, adding that superintendents don't want to go to referendum. The district's $115 million request failed in February. Weiss said he thought transparency was already part of the referendum process because the community holds school districts accountable. 'I think these bills around referendum questions are really treating a symptom,' Weiss said, noting that a Blue Ribbon Commission proposed actions in 2019 that could address the problems with the state's school funding system. 'That is the cure and the conversations that we're having right now, we're talking about the symptoms. I don't want to lose my ability to go to the community. This really is our only lever. There are not another seven schools in the city of Kenosha that I can close.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Don't Wait for Your Teacher
College students and recent grads are favored targets of the think piece mill. In the mid-2010s, TIME targeted the millennials for being 'lazy, entitled narcissists.' More recently, young people are being singled out for being functionally illiterate. The November 2024 issue of The Atlantic featured a viral exposé of elite college students who can't finish or understand books, with one Georgetown University professor admitting that most Hoyas 'have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.' The blame is usually placed—by The Atlantic and others—on the pandemic, the No Child Left Behind Act and Common Core, and those damn phones. It's undeniable that social media and test-based school curriculums have likely contributed to the death of the literary hobby. But I believe the miseducation of American youth began when we abandoned the value of self-education through literary pursuit. When will we stop bemoaning the education system and Big Tech, and start taking responsibility for our own failures of erudition? For all intents and purposes, I am well-educated. I have a Bachelor of Arts from Tulane University. I was always on the dean's list. Growing up, I considered myself an avid reader. Yet, up until a month ago, I had never read The Great Gatsby. No one ever assigned me Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice. When I started work at a major think tank a few days after graduation, the realization set in that I was vastly underprepared for the level of intellectual rigor required for watercooler conversations. By the end of my first week of work, three people told me Middlemarch was their favorite book. I had never heard of it. It would have been easy to shake my fist and curse the course crafters for the sorry state of my literary repertoire, but nobody had actually stopped me from reading the great works. In other words, it was at least partly my own damn fault—and it would be my own job to fix the problem. So, I committed to reading what I perceived to be the most referenced works of literature—commonly referred to as the 'great books.' And once I started, I gained access to what felt like a whole new method of understanding the human experience. For example: When I first moved to Washington, D.C., following a childhood in the Rocky Mountains and a stint in the bayou for college, I had a tremendously difficult time adjusting to life out East. I couldn't put the sense of otherness I felt into words, until F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway did it for me: I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. These lines didn't reveal the secret to happiness inside the Beltway, but they did make me feel less alone. And that means something. In one recent survey of members of Generation Z, 73 percent said they felt alone 'either sometimes or always.' Of course, the fact of loneliness isn't a new problem—but it's unique in this day and age for two reasons. One, because feelings of loneliness are seemingly much more widespread and affecting. And two, because we—in our reliance on short-form, often shallow media for entertainment—have an absence of someone else to articulate those feelings for us. It's one thing to view the experience of a TV character or a #relatable influencer and smile in reaction; it's much more profound to see thoughts and emotions you struggle to express put to page. So I don't think the kids need, en masse, more therapy; they need more books. Not just any books, however. They need great books. Many bestselling novels like The Silent Patient or A Court of Thorns and Roses lack serious mediation on the human condition. They are strictly linear narratives chock full of visual descriptors in seeming attempts to fill a page. The majority of the bestsellers of today fall into three categories: soft-core pornography, written attempts to capitalize on the true crime craze, and a hyper-fixation on 'identity' and representation for representation's sake. But it's not the genres themselves that are the main problem of many popular books; with few exceptions, contemporary fiction makes little to no attempt at articulating complex emotions or invigorating the banal. In contrast, I recently spent a Saturday with Slaughterhouse-Five. At risk of defaming Mr. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse covers all three categories of contemporary fiction. There's spacetime erotica, horrific violence, intense displays of human depravity, and cross-cultural discourses. Yet it is one of the most tender novels I have ever read. Vonnegut captures the senseless nature that life can seem to have in the midst of suffering, something many young people have a difficult time reconciling. One of the primary aims of Slaughterhouse is to help its readers make sense of this dissonance. It's a draught for existential dread. As Vonnegut says: 'So it goes.' Loneliness is not the only scourge on youth today; hustle culture and social media have caused the value of the individual to be determined more and more by vapid metrics of status and maximization. Your worth and intelligence is measured by your LinkedIn experience or the U.S. News & World Report ranking of your college. You don't get any clout for finishing Crime and Punishment. Why would you bother reading The Catcher in the Rye when you could master day trading instead? In order to revitalize a literary culture in America, there must therefore be some tangible value in spending precious time and mental capital on reading. That argument is hard to make to the finance bros and future Zuckerbergs of America—after all, the value in great books has nothing to do with success as defined by wealth or a major tech breakthrough. No, the merits of engaging with great literature as a hobby is the priceless notion that you are not alone in your suffering, heartbreak, and internal turmoil. The Germans, of course, have a word for this process of self-education that achieves a therapeutic aim: Bildung. The 18th-century philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt meditated on the word, stating that education ought to be viewed as a life-long pursuit rather than a formative instruction. Moreover, von Humboldt understood that man required reflection on the human condition in order to avoid the crushing despair associated with being alive. As he wrote: [Man's] nature drives him to reach beyond himself to the external objects, and here it is crucial that he should not lose himself in this alienation, but rather reflect back into his inner being the clarifying light and the comforting warmth of everything that he undertakes outside himself. To this end, however, he must bring the mass of objects closer to himself, impress his mind upon this matter, and create more of a resemblance between the two. In the Age of Information, we have failed to heed von Humboldt's warning to avoid alienating external stimuli. We reach for inflammatory politics, trending aesthetics, and fungible commodities. But by opting to reach for the compositions that formed our mutual ancestral consciousness—that is, great books—we can reacquaint ourselves with that clarifying light and comforting warmth. Reading a great book isn't as easy as staring at your phone. I'll admit it; it's not as much fun either. But once you get past the temptation of cheap convenience and watered-down pleasure, the pursuit of great literature is one of low risk and exceptionally high reward. Revitalizing great books programs in schools across the country is an honorable idea. However, institutional change, especially education reform, is easy to call for but difficult to implement. Call me a cynic, but I also don't think simply assigning the great works will be enough to counter the philistine phenomenon. After all, any college student worth their salt can Chegg their way through a book and ChatGPT an essay. Instead, great books must be sought out and encouraged outside the classroom, and I'm less of a cynic when it comes to independently revitalizing literary culture. After all, many young people are still falling in love with literature—last week, I discussed Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove with a few friends over beers and cheese fries—and we all got there on our own. When I started my highfalutin' research gig, I was inculcated into a culture where a familiarity with literature was required to socially thrive. Critics may call it elitism, but that culture was what pushed me to better my intellect—and the elitist argument would be to dismiss the notion that the masses can or will engage with literature. Great books are for everyone, and this idea should be as commonplace as other ambitious social norms. Integrating great literature into your life is a lot like eating your veggies; it's less pleasurable than eating mac and cheese for every meal, but alas, it must be done. And eventually, you get used to it, for the better. Ultimately, the choice to engage with great books will be an independent one, and not everyone will choose to do so: You can lead the student to Tolstoy, but you can't force him to read. Still, I'm certain that those who do choose to do the hard thing by reading the great books will reap the benefits—less loneliness, assuaged anxieties, and victory over cultural entropy. Gen Z will always have its own problems. But illiteracy and alienation don't have to be among them.
