In this article, I explained how library organizations focus on Leftist obsessions like race and sexuality instead of education. The downsides of Leftist content in classrooms are obvious—instead of acquiring knowledge, students are indoctrinated into Marxist views of history, economics, and biology.
But the real danger of this focus on Leftist drivel, however, runs much deeper than merely lost instructional time. In many ways these theories are a continuation of the same flawed ideas that inflicted “Balanced Literacy” on millions of new readers, with the same disastrous consequences.
These flawed theories of reading and literature pushed by the American Library Association and the National Council of Teacher of English actually teach students how to read, and therefore think, wrong.
The decline in literacy was caused by two changes in the way reading and literacy were taught in schools. As has been well documented, in the early grades, when students are just learning how to read and spell, phonics—the method of associating letters with sounds—was replaced with the concept of “balanced literacy,” which instructs students to essentially guess the meaning of words based on their context.
And later in their educations, children are not taught to seriously engage with the text. Instead, they are taught to use “critical literacy” skills, i.e., to pick out words based on their race, sexuality, and other identities, get offended by them, and loudly proclaim their righteous indignation.
Not surprisingly, this results in neither critical thinking nor literacy.
Yet the organizations that should be promoting literacy, like the American Library Association (ALA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Coalition of Reading and English Supervisors of Texas (CREST) are acting as agents of chaos.
The ALA gives a full-throated endorsement of critical literacy, saying that “there is no single ‘correct’ way to read and respond to a text,” which sounds like something you would tell your English teacher if you had no clue what a poem meant.
The NCTE similarly promotes critical theory in all its forms: Their conference in May 2025 featured two separate discussions about “culturally and historically responsive literacies” that highlighted their policy brief which exhorted teachers to “model and instruct students on how to read through a critical lens across a range of literary theories (e.g. postcolonial criticism, Black feminist criticism, Chicana feminist criticism).”
No matter what name it is given, the philosophy is the same: Students are taught to analyze literature based on racial, class, and sexual identity, always with the goal of discovering narratives of oppression.
The same policy brief says that the purpose of literature is to “foster imagination and empathy.” In other words, being able to see yourself in the literature, or becoming incredibly irate at not seeing yourself, far supersedes such considerations as understanding and analyzing what the text means.
This is where what started as poor literacy begins to damage students’ psyches, as students are discouraged from the demanding task of wrestling with the text as something that might illuminate or even challenge them. Instead, they are rewarded for the simple task of perpetual engagement with the politics of resentment. For a discipline that claims to “challenge” so many paradigms, it leaves students remarkably unchallenged.
Students who can’t read is one thing; students who can’t read but are confident in their ability to “analyze” text and are inoculated against texts that might edify them are a danger to society.
