Illiterate Reading

The social, political, and spiritual implications of bad reading.

Photo by Héctor J. Rivas on Unsplash

Decoding is not reading.

So often we think that if we can teach children to sound out C-A-T and say “cat,” we have taught them to read. But this is not the case. Students can’t possibly read words they do not understand, or texts they do not have the background knowledge to comprehend.

This has become a hot topic in education. The Science of Reading movement has done a good job of making educators more aware of the importance of phonological awareness and phonics in reading instruction. But phonics alone do not create strong readers. No amount of phonics instruction can compensate for poor language comprehension, and language comprehension is largely built by building knowledge. If we can’t decode and comprehend, then we can’t read.¹

If we want our children to be strong readers, real readers, we must be helping them build background knowledge. As Charlotte Mason said, children must be put in contact with a wide variety of knowledge and ideas:

“EDUCATION IS THE SCIENCE OF RELATIONS; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts…”²

ILLITERATE READING

A failure to build background knowledge has significant consequences. Those consequences affect the child, of course. But this “illiterate reading” (as Dorothy Sayers calls it) has consequences beyond the individual. There are social, political, and spiritual implications as well.

“The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense—that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print—nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with the actual cat, even if unable to spell its name.”

Dorothy Sayers³

This is what is meant by “illiterate reading”: being able to “read” the words on the page, but lacking the adequate background knowledge to actually understand it. According to Dorothy Sayers, this is even more dangerous than illiteracy, because if you do not understand what you are reading about, you are vulnerable to any “mischievous nonsense” a writer says.

Someone who has appropriate background knowledge will not be easily deceived by “irresponsible writers.” And let’s be honest. We have WAY more access to “irresponsible writers” in the day and age of social media than Dorothy Sayers could have even imagined.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES

When we become an entire society largely lacking background knowledge, we become a public that does “not care whether they are being told the truth or not.”⁴ And this is what we have mostly become. In our age of nonstop online publishing and content creation, AI, biased media, and nasty online discourse, we are rarely seeking to truly read and understand (or to even have a robust understanding of what we are writing about). We can read the words on the page, sure. But we can’t fully understand what’s being said, and we really aren’t trying to. Allow me another long Dorothy Sayers quote:

“It is a plain fact that ninety-nine interviews out of a hundred contain more or less subtle distortions of the answers given to questions, the questions being, moreover, in many cases, wrongly conceived for the purpose of eliciting the truth. The distortions are not confined to distortions of opinion but are frequently also distortions of fact, and not merely stupid misunderstandings at that, but deliberate falsifications. The journalist is, indeed, not interested in the facts. For this he is to some extent excusable, seeing that, even if he published the facts, his public would inevitably distort them in the reading. What is quite inexcusable is that when the victim of misrepresentation writes to protest and correct the statements attributed to him, his protest is often ignored and his correction suppressed.”⁵

This was written in 1941! The problem is not new. But our media age does make it more rampant.

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. claims that there are political consequences to this lack of background knowledge. He believes that what makes a group of people a nation is their shared background knowledge.

“It is not too much to say that shared knowledge is essential to a functioning democracy. It is a truism that literacy is essential to democracy. It should become a truism to recognize that specific shared background is essential to literacy.”⁶

If background knowledge is necessary for true literacy, and literacy is essential for democracy, then we have more than an educational crisis on our hands when our citizens lack strong reading skills. We have a political crisis as well. And those reading skills will not improve if we are not giving children access to real knowledge. “As more and more Americans gain greater mastery of its implicit background knowledge,” writes Dr. Hirsch, “our democracy becomes both more stable and more fair.”⁷

Skills-based curricula (instead of knowledge-building curricula) are frequently used in American schools. A recent survey showed that the majority of teachers believed teaching generalized skills was more important to text comprehension than background knowledge and vocabulary.⁸ Many schools have stopped reading full-length books or stories⁹, many children are only accessing leveled readers¹⁰, and many teachers are not given adequate resources for building systematic knowledge, especially across grade levels. And, strangely but unsurprisingly given America’s current cultural climate, the conversation has even started to include what political party you vote for.¹¹

But the truth that we all benefit from a robust knowledge base that allows us to think and read beyond the words we see on the page (or screen) is not a party issue. It’s a human issue. It has consequences for the nation as a whole.

“Knowledge is key to language comprehension. And language comprehension is key to the flourishing of any modern nation.”¹²

THE SPIRITUAL CONSEQUENCES

There are spiritual consequences, too. What happens when we don’t have a strong understanding of books, literature, and language as we follow a God who gives us his word in a book, and that book calls him the Word made flesh? What happens when we try to read, understand, and apply Christian doctrine without the background knowledge that makes it possible to do so? In terms of Christianity and its doctrine, the consequences of “illiterate reading” can be devastating.

“And particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading. Words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense, statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition, arguments founded in misapprehension are accepted without examination, expressions of individual preference are construed as ecumenical doctrine, disciplinary regulations founded on consent are confused with claims to interpret universal law, and vice versa; with the result that the logical and historical structure of Christian philosophy is transformed in the popular mind to a confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity.”¹³

It is too easy to automatically recite the “right” answers to questions of doctrine. It is much harder to build deep comprehension and understanding (of our doctrine and of each other). I suspect you’ve seen evidence of the “confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity” that, unfortunately, still exists today. I certainly have.

LEARNING TO SEE

“Knowledge begets knowing.”¹⁴ The time we spend teaching and helping our children build background knowledge is helping them access even more knowledge. Every book we read or offer to our children helps them access every other book.

The more extensive one’s knowledge-base is in terms of both its breadth and its depth the more easily new knowledge is acquired and remembered.”¹⁵

And this is true for grown-ups, too!

In Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival, the authors write, “What you know determines what you see.” If we do not give our children a “full and generous curriculum” that gives a child “all knowledge proper to him,” as Charlotte Mason puts it, our children will be short-sighted, indeed. And if we do not do this for ourselves, we too, will be short-sighted. We aren’t only improving our ability to read, but we are also improving our ability to see. And if we can see, how much better can we live? As Charlotte Mason says, education is a life:

“In the saying that EDUCATION IS A LIFE, the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children [and moms!] should have a generous curriculum.”¹⁶

This is one of the reasons why this course exists! When we read widely and build background knowledge for ourselves, across a wide variety of domains, we expand our vision just a little bit more.

So let’s read, really read, together. The stakes are much too high if we don’t.

1. See The Reading League’s Science of Reading: The Defining Guide

2. Charlotte Mason in her preface to the Home Education series

3. Dorothy Sayers in the preface to her book Mind of the Maker

4. Dorothy Sayers in the preface to her book Mind of the Maker

5. Dorothy Sayers in the preface to her book Mind of the Maker

6. Shared Knowledge: To Renew a Nation by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

7. Shared Knowledge: To Renew a Nation by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

8. What Teachers Think About the 'Science of Reading'

9. https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2025-2026/wexler

10. Debunking the Leveled Reading Myth

11. Does Arguing for "Knowledge" Make You a Republican?

12. Building Knowledge Podcast, A Chat with Dr. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., May 9, 2023

13. Dorothy Sayers in the preface to her book Mind of the Maker

14. Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival by Tim Surma , Claudio Vanhees, Michiel Wils, Jasper Nijlunsing, Nuno Crato, John Hattie, Daniel Muijs, Elizabeth Rata, Dylan Wiliam, and Paul A. Kirschner

15. Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival by Tim Surma , Claudio Vanhees, Michiel Wils, Jasper Nijlunsing, Nuno Crato, John Hattie, Daniel Muijs, Elizabeth Rata, Dylan Wiliam, and Paul A. Kirschner

16. Charlotte Mason in her preface to the Home Education series. I added the moms 😊