The Pittsburgh Press (April 25, 1941)
BAD READERS
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Chicago University’s gadfly, Dr. Mortimer Adler, stings so hard he raises welts when he talks about his own profession – education.
His first puncture is the statement that the average high school graduate has only the competence of a sixth grader in reading. He follows that with an up-to-the-hilt stroke: Most individuals with college degrees don’t know how to read.
Why? Because it’s been made too easy for them. Our silly habit of pre-digesting everything for the kids started it. And I, for one, think intelligence began to wane and self-reliance to die n the United States at that very moment.
There was a deluge of children’s books, beautifully illustrated, of course, but with all the two-syllable words left out. Thus we protected the little dears from meeting strange and unusual letter formations and wrestling with more complicated sentences, which, in turn, led in due time to a shrinking from anything that required concentrated mental effort.
The fashion has grown to such proportions that I am now told special simplified editions of Dickens are provided for high school students. The poor things mustn’t strain their brains with his sermonizing.
Short cuts to culture are a spreading evil of our time. Magazine that publish condensed versions of books serve a good purpose because they bring busy people a great deal of information they might not otherwise get. But it is deplorable when they lend themselves to the murder of a book by hashing it into morsels for lazy readers to gulp.
If learning is to survive we’ve got to do something besides fight Hitler. He is trying to destroy it, and we aid him with our mutilations.