I’ve thought a lot about my New Year’s resolution. I resolve to be the best English teacher I can be. The finest service I can provide to others this year is doing my job.

The inadequacy of Americans’ reading skills is a big white elephant that most people, even many educators, don’t notice or pretend not to see. Recent findings by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy revealed that 5% of adults are illiterate. Thirty million Americans have “skills in prose […] so limited that they may not be able to make sense of a simple pamphlet.” Forty-four percent possess “intermediate prose skills” equal to “consulting a reference book to determine which foods contain a certain vitamin.”[1]

“[C]onsulting a reference book” does not allow for nuance, critique, or interpretation. Roughly 59% of American adults can’t recognize written words or only recognize their surface meaning. This is cause for worry. To synthesize multiple articles about Plamegate or troop levels in Iraq, a discerning citizen needs more complex language skills than are necessary to flip through an almanac. The raison d’être of a democracy is in jeopardy if only 41% of voters can detect innuendo, irony, or dissimulation. A quick jog through time will show that advanced reading skills have been at the heart of most important debates on democracy, and we need to talk about literacy now more than ever.

When Thomas Jefferson said, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that a republic depended on worldly citizens who knew enough to “qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men” and “know ambition under every disguise; and […] defeat its views,”[2] he expected the average person to be more critical than current reading skills permit.

Jefferson thought it vital to teach Greek and Latin to students “from eight to fifteen or sixteen years of age, when the mind, like the body, is not yet firm enough for laborious and close operations.”[3]

He also set a high bar for a curriculum in world history, insisting that “apprising [students] of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations.”[4] Jefferson wasn’t implying fluffy assignments like “what I did last summer” or an after-school special about driving drunk. Democracy depended on people reading closely enough to weed out red herrings.

Jefferson’s views matched his generation’s concern about the average person’s readiness for suffrage. The author’s preface for Notes was dated February 1787, eight months before Alexander Hamilton published Federalist 1 under the name Publius. In September 1787 the Constitution was approved through a precarious compromise in which an electoral college, rather than a popular vote, elected the President. Constitutional scholar Linda Monk notes, “the underlying assumption […] was that, in a nation as large as America, the citizenry would not be able to make an informed choice.”[5]

In Federalist 1, “Publius” had to explain why the Constitution advocated popular participation while still installing barriers to mass rule. At the heart of Publius’ rationalization was the people’s susceptibility to manipulative language. Publius said, “[the idea that] our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiassed by considerations not connected with the public good […] is a thing more ardently to be wished, than seriously to be expected.” He lamented the influence of “views, passions, and prejudices little favourable to the discovery of truth.”[6]

For Hamilton, citizens clumsy with language were not innocuously self-limiting, but destructive to the nation. Linguistically deficient people lay as abundant prey for “the perverted ambition of another class of men,” who “hope[d] to aggrandise themselves by the confusions of their country.”[7] Publius cautioned against “angry and malignant passions” and nefarious demagogues seeking “to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations, and by the bitterness of their invectives.”[8]

In Federalist 6, he rationalizes limited popular rule by citing historical examples, saying “There have been […] almost as many popular as royal wars.”[9] He reviews history:

Sparta, Athens, Rome and Carthage were all Republics […] yet […] as often engaged in wars, offensive and defensive, as the neighbouring Monarchies of the same times. Sparta was little better than a well regulated camp; and Rome was never sated of carnage and conquest […] Venice in latter times figured more than once in wars of ambition; ’till […] the other Italian states […] gave a deadly blow to the power and pride of this haughty Republic.[10]

Since war often resulted from the mediocre ability of masses to interpret things that powerful people told them, the Electoral College was a necessary safeguard. Hamilton believed that if people knew the mistakes of earlier republics like Sparta and Venice, they would see the hopeless flaws of direct democracy, and capitulate to checks and balances.

Jefferson believed that if people learned about the past and how to read, they would be better than Spartans or Venetians, and wouldn’t be duped into wars.

It is easy to dismiss Hamilton as cynically elitist. But Jefferson’s prescription has been hard to fill. One glaring flaw was Jefferson’s failure to account for the gap between basic literacy and the more astute reading that was, for him, a sine qua non of citizenship.

In Notes Jefferson discusses a Virginia code meant to “diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of people,”[11] but the code only proposes that citizens be “entitled to send their children [to the town tutor] three years gratis, and as much longer as they please, paying for it.” The code stipulates that through an elimination process “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.”[12] Little remedy is offered to ambitious families who lack the funds to finance full-blown schooling in Greek, Latin, literature, and history. Early American ambivalence about universal education may have left us our dilemma: the average Joe can read, but only reference books. The “twenty best,” now the upper 2/5, can read more but can’t convey political ideas to the other 3/5.

When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled America in the 1830s, he found that most Americans read newspapers. He also noted that the press was vapid:

In America three quarters of the bulky newspaper put before you will be full of advertisements and the rest will usually contain political news or just anecdotes; only at long intervals and in some obscure corner will one find one of those burning arguments which for [Europeans] are the readers’ daily food.[13]

De Tocqueville didn’t necessarily condemn the inanity of written discourse, since he found America’s unaffected attitude inspiring. Rather than blaming readers, he blamed writers: “American journalists have a low social status, their education is only sketchy, and their thoughts are often vulgarly expressed.”[14]

James Fenimore Cooper authored his treatise, The American Democrat, at almost the same time. Though aristocratic, Cooper was famous for writing the Leatherstocking Tales, which romanticized rustic woodsmen and Indians. He knew firsthand how many people could read, but he considered the next step, from reading to artful rhetoric, beyond the capacity of most. “American people use their language more correctly than the mass of any other considerable nation [but] a smaller proportion than common attain to elegance in this accomplishment.”[15] Cooper’s antidote was the ideal of an educated gentleman whose “language should rise with the subject,” seeing “the highest quality of eloquence” “in the thought, rather than in the words.”[16] The gap between literacy and finesse was pivotal.

In 1838, Cooper grappled with the founders’ unsolved contradictions. Jefferson’s model couldn’t move a critical mass from literacy to the “highest quality.” But since a critical mass knew how to read (even if poorly), it would be impossible to keep the majority from meddling in politics in the way Hamilton feared.

Cooper seeks to solve the stalemate with renewed attention to manners and taste, but he concedes, “All cannot reach the highest standards in such manners, for it depends on early habit, and […] early associations.” The compromise is to make sure that the bottom rungs of society don’t fall beneath a lower limit, adding, “we are not to abandon all improvement, because perfection is reached but by few.”[17] Neglect of uncritical masses is perilous because “in a democracy, misleading the publick mind, as regards facts, characters, or principles, is corrupting all that is dear to society at its source, opinion being the fountain whence justice, honors, and the laws, equally flow.”[18]

H.L. Mencken’s introduction to the 1931 republication of American Democrat adds coded anxieties about the reign of Roosevelt. Mencken says in his panegyric to Cooper:

[The American Democrat] is devoted to an argument that the gentleman […] has a plausible place in a democratic society, if only as a standing protest against the leveling that everywhere goes on […] [T]he mob suspects and resents superiorities[.] It would be dangerous for a man aspirant to the Presidency to be a man of learning, or to excel at any of the fine arts[.][19]

Twenty years ago, Allan Bloom denounced post-60s relativism on college campuses, claiming it blinded students to the natural rights expounded by the “Founders.” But Bloom chose only to address “young persons who populate[d] the twenty or thirty best universities.” He admitted he couldn’t help “other kinds of students whose circumstances of one sort or another prevent[ed] them from having the freedom required to pursue a liberal education.”[20] His nostalgia for good old days was self-defeating because he longed for a tutelary tradition that was not democratic and liberal, but elitist and anachronistic.

Three years after Bloom’s polemic, feminist Bell Hooks[21] countered by urging the academy to dismantle “the notion of a definitive work” as well as “the very idea of ‘authority.’” She hoped that “scholarship from diverse groups could flourish.”[22] This thread advanced over the next decade, with a rejection of teacher-centered pedagogy and canonicity. Later she went further and called teaching “a counter-hegemonic act.”[23] Authority, not mediocrity, was the problem. In keeping with this new ideal, some instructors rearranged desks in circles and sat Indian-style while they “facilitated” rather than “lectured.” In many freshman English classes, group work flourished and personal reflections displaced the rhetorical curriculum that Bloom vaunted. Writing eclipsed reading. But transgressive teaching was as elusive as Bloom’s cabalistic humanism. Many students took away the message that if they weren’t personally privileged, they shouldn’t have to read too much about anyone who was.

Most English classes now exist in the middle ground between Bloom’s sanctimony and the anarchy promoted by Hooks. The multiculturalism hated by one and the traditionalist rigor that offended the other can both be credited, in their own ways, for progress in higher education. In a sense both sides gained ground by losing their argument. Twenty years later, the urgency is no longer cultural, but political. Democracy won’t work unless the median reading level rises. And if democracy can’t work, nothing that Bloom and Hooks fought for will survive the next ten or twenty years.

2004: why intermediate reading won’t cut it in a climate full of red herrings

After Bush’s re-election, the British Daily Mirror ran a scathing headline below his picture: “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?”[24]

Some of the 62 million people who voted for Bush desired the policies that Bush espoused.[25] They were not dumb. Bush voters who knew what they wanted, and voted for it in good faith, don’t worry me as much as voters who decided their vote the way they would consult a reference book to determine which foods contained a vitamin. I’m equally skeptical about prose abilities among the 59 million who voted for John Kerry.

But whatever Kerry voters misunderstood, the fallacies among Bush supporters attracted more criticism because Bush won and Kerry didn’t. Most indices implied that a bloc voted for Bush even though they preferred Kerry’s domestic qualifications and they ranked domestic issues as their highest priority.[26] Commentators have agonized over the voting results. Did people get sidetracked by the swift-boat ads? Was gay marriage the smokescreen? Did a perfect storm of red herrings (Janet Jackson’s nipple, Howard Stern’s cussing, Senator Edwards’ toddler sucking his thumb, and Theresa Heinz Kerry’s mouthy aesthetic) fog people’s consciousness? A full postmortem should look frankly at the effect American literacy rates have had on all American politics, including the Left.

Polls didn’t give us a clear picture of how intently people were analyzing what they heard and read. Pollsters asked simple questions and solicited basic answers. They might ask 1,000 respondents, “do you think that Kerry understands people like you?”

Simple yes/no thoughts were not enough to vote wisely in 2004. The election was more than usually nuanced. The issue of military leadership was particularly multilayered and required a person to reflect carefully before reaching a conclusion. Most Iraq-related talking points were intricate, in addition to being partly false. A discriminating voter had at least to keep track of uranium, aluminum tubes, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, multilateral ceasefire terms from a 12-year-old war in Kuwait, and penumbrae around the putative healing powers of democracy overseas. As extras, people could benefit from a rudimentary grasp of Islamic theology, Persian and Arab history, physics and biochemistry to understand the weapons inspectors, the Geneva Convention, the UN, the psychology of occupation and terrorism, and geography.

I could never fault citizens who don’t have expertise in every branch of the humanities and sciences. But information relevant to convoluted issues may never be accessible to readers at the reference-book level. Even if they went to a library, no issue mentioned above could be expressed in the accessible terms of an almanac.

On July 22, 2004, The 9/11 Commission Report turned up in bookstores across the country.[27] The report was 567 pages long, in tiny typeface. There were thousands of footnotes. To get through it, a reader had to navigate deep tiers of prose. Consider a passage from the section entitled “Foresight—and Hindsight”:

[T]he large, unwieldy US government tended to underestimate a threat that grew ever greater. The terrorism fostered by Bin Ladin and al Qaeda was different from anything the government had faced before. The existing mechanisms for handling terrorist acts had been trial and punishment for acts committed by individuals; sanction, reprisal, deterrence, or war for acts by hostile governments. The actions of al Qaeda fit neither category. Its crimes were on a scale approaching acts of war, but they were committed by a loose, far-flung, nebulous conspiracy with no territories or citizens or assets that could be readily threatened, overwhelmed, or destroyed.[28]

To use the report to decide which candidate would lead better after Iraq, a voter had to: (1) consider the possible biases in the report (2) understand that the passage criticized leaders for using war tactics against a terrorist threat, (3) figure out that the war tactics used to invade Iraq were what the commission deemed ineffective to combat terror, (4) infer that attempts to cast Iraq as a victory against terrorism defied the logic of the commission’s report, and (5) figure out whether Kerry would be more or less likely than Bush to make better decisions. Adding confusion about a war to deception about its motives, Iraq issues were probably unintelligible to marginally literate voters. If so, Hamilton’s concern about republican wars has not been solved by Jeffersonianism.

Not surprisingly, commentary avoided epistemology and focused on more digestible questions of a statesman’s “character.” Yet both Bush and Kerry had led fluxing, multifarious lives. To assess their characters one needed sophistication above intermediate reading levels. Underneath their rivalry was melodrama worthy of the House of Atreus. Both men descended from the ancestors of Puritan John Winthrop, who in 1630 envisioned the New World as a “city upon a hill” built on Christian notions of justice and mercy.[29] Bush had not served in Vietnam because of a reckless adolescence that later religious conversion cured. Kerry had gone to Vietnam but later criticized the war. The born-again bad boy started two wars that the decorated veteran supported but then criticized. Two inflammatory videos, the swift-boat ads and Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, introduced baffling details about Bush and Kerry’s military records. The details were picayune and over-generalized at the same time, focusing on secret documents and memories of gunshots from decades ago, while appealing to glossy notions of heroism.

Afterwards, some analysts blamed Kerry for failing to convey his message and letting Republicans gain the upper hand. Some blamed Democrats for picking Kerry in the first place. But few pathologized the median American’s language skills. No campaigner could budge the big white elephant, which was the median aptitude to which political strategists had to appeal. When you are a complex candidate, how do you win over 125 million people who can’t process complex language?

In the 1780s Jefferson argued about the value of three years of free schooling. Today Americans can receive twelve years of free schooling.

When Jefferson was President, Mary Wollstonecraft had recently asserted, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, that men could only save society from degeneracy by educating females. Few people in America knew who Wollstonecraft was, and women’s education was in its infancy. Today, women make up a majority of college students. In 1838, it was illegal to teach blacks to read. Today racial inequality plagues education, but there are ups and downs in racial indicators. The literacy report indicates that black adults “made gains on each type” of reading, while whites were not making any progress. Hispanics declined in all categories of reading.[30] In the 1990s Hispanics attending college increased by 75%, blacks by 37%, and Asian-Americans by 54%. For all three groups, the increase outpaced growth in the general population.[31]

Today, 5% of America cannot read English. By contrast, UNESCO found illiteracy rates in developed countries between 2-3%.[32] US illiteracy is higher than that of Cuba (3.3%), Costa Rica (4.4%), Italy (1.8%), Russia (0.4%) and Spain (2.4%). If one chooses to compare the US based on size rather than economics, other demographic giants have much higher illiteracy rates: China (14.8%), India (42.8%), Indonesia (13.2%), Brazil (13.1%), Mexico (8.8%), Bangladesh (60.0%), and Pakistan (56.8%).[33]

The most damning statistic is not the 11 million Americans who cannot read, but rather the 19 million readers who can’t make sense of a pamphlet and the 95 million who only read well enough to consult a reference book. The latter are more incriminating because so many Americans have had extensive schooling. For example, only about 16% of the US adult population has less schooling than a high school diploma.[34]

The challenge isn’t to stay in school but to be in a school where people learn to read critically. Most high schools are no such place, so colleges carry the burden of instilling people with the language skills that Jefferson expected. Twenty-two percent of those older than 25 have taken college classes but did not get a degree; 7% percent have an Associate’s; 17% a Bachelor’s; and almost 10% a graduate or professional degree.[35]

Despite Mencken’s claim in 1931 that the hordes despise education, the country remains committed to learning, especially for self-betterment. In a national poll by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 93% of US respondents described universities as “the country’s most valuable resources” and 94% “think that every high school student who wants a four-year college degree should have the opportunity to earn one.”[36] But even though over 55% of adults have taken college classes, around 60% of adults are intermediate readers. High schools and colleges both have some explaining to do.

In spite of all our progress, a higher bar for reading is necessary because Americans now grapple with subtlety and inexactitudes. Our enemy is not a superpower but a shadowy conspiracy. Racism and sexism are diffuse instead of de jure. Class inequality is murky rather than caste-based or genealogical. Our political parties differ more in inflection than platform. Industries of the future deal with complex information and symbols. In the past, nuanced readership betokened elegance. In the future it will be our only hope of survival.

American citizens are up the challenge. A 2005 press release by the Stanford Graduate School of Business reports that “88% of the nation’s post-secondary students aspire to attend college, the highest percentage in the nation’s history.”[37] The college-education craze in the United States persists even in the face of daunting financial barriers. In 2004, states spent $69 billion financing public colleges,[38] while an additional $13 billion in direct financial aid went to students from private scholarship funds, and even more came from federal sources like the Pell Grant program.[39]

American institutions, including the government, may not be as ready for the task of college literacy as the people whom they serve. Tuition is rising more quickly than incomes or subsidies. In 1980, American families in the middle quintile had to allot 18% of their annual income to educate one child at a private college. By 2000, that allotment rose to 25%. The corresponding increase for public colleges was from 4% to 6%.[40]

Public schools are riding the same curve as private ones, albeit on a lower scale. At public colleges, students in the middle quintile took on an average of $6,300 in educational debt in 1990. In 2000 that average rose to almost $13,000 and it continues to grow. Along with growing debts go long work hours and longer times to graduate.[41]

After changes proposed by Republican Congressional leaders in December 2005, borrowing for college will be costlier. Of the $40 billion to be cut to reduce the deficit, $12.7 billion, the largest chunk, will come from college loans. Changes will force lenders to pay the government for any excess interest collected on educational debts. Fewer banks may finance low-rate loans, since their profits will drop. Terry Hartle, of the American Council on Education, called it “a sad step.”[42]

As statistics, the situation looks bad enough. With a human face, it’s enough to make you cry. Teaching since 1999, I became accustomed to hearing pupils say, “I’m working forty hours a week, raising two children, and taking eighteen credits; I need full-time student status for health insurance and have to finish in four years.” Much like a hospital nurse jaded by groaning patients, I hardened my heart: no more concessions, no more breaks, no more heart-to-heart confessionals. But the students’ pain was real and their circumstances cruel. It’s hard to excel in reading under inhuman conditions. Students work longer hours, giving them less time to study. They’re sleepier and more irritable. Many live with parents and get all the family squabbles but none of the youthful license.

Students often get scant rewards for great financial sacrifices that look unremarkable on a ledger. Of the 175 public-university students who took my great books survey in a noisy lecture hall with no TA, only 55 passed a cumulative final exam that required advanced reading and analysis. I had to put the scores on a curve so seniors could graduate. The 120 students who failed the final will probably be stuck at reference-book reading, because it was their last such requirement before graduating. With more time, more attention, a better setting, or less interference, I could’ve made each of them a talented reader, but limited resources hamstrung us. It is a crime for which both political parties will pay dearly. As Bush is learning, semiliterate masses change their minds quickly.

English teachers ask a lot of “what” and “how.” What are students reading? How are they responding to what they read? All the “what” and “how” questions are important to ask from time to time. But this year I want to ask “whether” and “how much” questions.

Some professors insist on time-honored classics like Shakespeare and Dickens. Others object to the whiteness of the canon and think contemporary diversity is more relevant. But instead of arguing about what students read, we need to investigate whether students are reading at all. I went to grad school for a PhD in English and an MA in Classics. I can honestly say that any well-written text will get a student thinking, if conditions are right. Students should read all of it. My students do read all of it. Last semester I covered rhetoric from Pericles and Cicero to Angela Davis and Malcolm X.

But whatever an individual teacher assigns, success depends on whether students actually buy their books, sit down, and go page by page. I have seen enough to know that a shrewd college student can make it through four years without reading a book. He can get Sparknotes, buy papers online, cheat on quizzes, and forge excuses to defer assignments that prevent him from bluffing. Red tape makes it risky to investigate cheating; so to save their sanity, many professors pretend it isn’t happening. But maybe our sanity has been saved at the expense of our students’ long-term reading aptitudes.

“How” questions have also backfired: “how do the students like the class?” and “how do they feel about the teacher?” With the growth in student advocacy, people have come to believe that classes are supposed to make pupils feel comfortable. If students are bored, alienated, or offended by offhanded comments, why not do as Penn State student Jennie Mae Brown did, and bring it to the attention of lawmakers? A recent New York Times article recounts how Brown turned her hurt feelings into a statewide crusade:

Ms. Brown [spoke to] Representative Gibson C. Armstrong two summers ago, complaining about a physics professor […] who she said routinely used class time to belittle President Bush and the war in Iraq. As an Air Force veteran, Ms. Brown said she felt the teacher's comments were inappropriate for the classroom. The encounter has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry[.][43]

David Horrowitz has lobbied more than twelve state legislatures to pass an “Academic Bill of Rights” to “protect students against discrimination for expressing their political beliefs.”[44] Horrowitz’s bill has little to do with protecting students and much to do with opening teachers to ideological censorship by conservatives. Otherwise these cases would focus on what students tried to say instead of what professors said. Horrowitz rages against liberalism in the Clintonian sense, but also against liberalism in the Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Tocquevillean, Cooperian, multicultural, and classical sense. It is fair to say that he wants to take us pre-Erasmus and pre-Luther.

Horrowitz’s initiative is founded on a misunderstanding of professors, students, and their respective roles. Professors may slip and say things they shouldn’t, because they aren’t saints. Even with occasional mishaps, they know more than students and need to be in charge. Instead of sharing outrage with legislators or watchdogs hundreds of miles away, students need to learn the subject, much of which depends on whether they read assigned texts. If a professor’s authority is taken away, so is his ability to compel students to read.

The Horrowitz approach also misunderstands reading. Most challenging reading won’t confirm students’ pre-existing, often uneducated opinions. Becoming a better reader can be uncomfortable. You struggle to figure out what paragraphs mean. New vocabulary sends you to a dictionary. You think you’ve figured the book out and then you find out that you were wrong. If you hunger for an A that a teacher won’t give you unless you get better, then you will get better. But for years after the stress of a challenging syllabus, a student isn’t in the position to define what is inappropriate.

Finally, offensive comments won’t scar young people unless their elders have raised them to be fragile. I heard teachers say many racist things, but I focused on what I had to do, not how I felt. In 2000, when I was tutored by the aging Leslie Fiedler, he told me, “I love using the word nigger. Last time I gave a talk, I must’ve used that word about forty times.” My gut told me Fiedler was kidding around, but I wasn’t sure. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided to tease back. Since Fiedler was Jewish, I said, “If you asked me who the biggest Jew of all time was, I’d have a tough time choosing between Christ and St. Paul.” He laughed hysterically and cried, “Paul would top my list!”

I reached adulthood before “sensitivity” became a buzzword, so I dealt with offensiveness by ignoring it. Fiedler could call me a spic or a fag, as long as he taught me to read. I fear students nurtured by self-accommodation will never attain that strength of spirit. In search of comfortable things, they’ll stick with reference books. Rather than plaguing feminists and minorities, hypersensitivity will debilitate white conservatives more than anyone else in decades to come.

Instead of asking how students feel, I vow this year to ask, how much reading have my students done? Instead of asking myself how students like my class, I vow to ask, how much can my students do with the reading practice I’ve given them? If the answer, after a semester, is that they can flip through a reference book to find out which foods contain a certain vitamin, I’m doing something wrong.

[1] Associated Press. “No advances made in adult literacy, study says.” 15 Dec 2005. Cable News Network. 16 Dec 2005. http://www.cnn.com.

[2] Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia (written 1781-2 and published in 1787). Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. The Portable Thomas Jefferson. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1975. 198.

[3] Ibid., 197.

[4] Ibid., 198.

[5] Monk, Linda. The Words We Live By. New York: Hyperion, 2003. 68.

[6] Hamilton, Alexander [as “Publius”]. Federalist 1. Ed. Jack N. Rakove. The Federalist. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 36.

[7] Ibid., 36.

[8] Ibid., 37.

[9] Ibid., 42.

[10] Ibid., 43.

[11] Jefferson, Notes. 193.

[12] Ibid., 196. Emphasis added.

[13] Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Trans. George Lawrence. Ed. J. P. Mayer. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1988. 183-4.

[14] Ibid., 185.

[15] Cooper, James F. The American Democrat. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1956. 146-7.

[16] Ibid., 154.

[17] Ibid., 154.

[18] Ibid., 155.

[19] Mencken, H.L. Introduction (1931). James F. Cooper. The American Democrat. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1956. Xvi-xvii. Emphasis added.

[20] Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Touchstone, 1986. 22.

[21] Though bell hooks prefers for her name to be written in lower case, I have chosen to use capitals so it is easier for readers unfamiliar with her name.

[22] Hooks, bell. Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End Press, 1989. 45.

[23] Hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. 2.

[24] Thomas, June. “Brits to America: You’re Idiots! Well 51% of you anyway.” 4 Nov 2004. Slate. 22 Dec 2005. http://www.slate.com/id/2109242/.

[25] The Daily Mirror headline ran before all the votes were tallied, and was therefore short by a few million votes. The actual number of people who voted for Bush was 62,040,606. The number of Kerry voters was 59,028,109. Cable News Network. “Election Results 2004.” 22 Dec 2004. CNN.com. 22 Dec 2005. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/.

[26] In April 2004, a poll by the New York Times and CBS, found that 54% of Americans disapproved of Bush's economic policies and only 4% of respondents ranked terrorism as an interesting issue in the campaign—compared to 18% who wanted to hear about the economy, 13% about jobs, and 7% health care.

[27] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. “About the Commission.” 21 Aug 2004. National Archives and Records Administration. 23 Dec 2005. < http://www.9-11commission.gov>.

[28] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 348.

[29] Winthrop’s Modell of Christian Charity was written in 1630 and widely republished in the early nineteenth century. More of the essay discussed mercy but Protestants have tended to focus on his strict concepts of justice and his exclusionary insistence on Christ as the metaphor for a social compact..

[30] Associated Press. “No advances made in adult literacy, study says.” 15 Dec 2005. Cable News Network. 16 Dec 2005. http://www.cnn.com.

[31] Associated Press. “College counselors adapt to diverse, reluctant students.” 23 Dec 2005. Cable News Network. 23 Dec 2005. <http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/12/23/uncommon.counseling.ap/index.html>.

[32] UNESCO Institute for Statistics. “Estimated World Illiteracy Rates by Region and Gender, 2000.” UNESCO. 8 Sept 2002. “International Literacy Day.” 23 Dec 2005. http://www.uis.unesco.org/en/stats/statistics/ed

[33] UNESCO Institute for Statistics. “Literacy and Non Formal Educational Sector.” UNESCO. July 2002. 23 Dec 2005. http://www.uis.unesco.org/en/stats/statistics/literacy2000.htm (downloadable table through link entitled “Adult illiteracy for population aged 15 years and above, by country and by gender 1970-2015”.

[34] National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. “Policy Alert.” Nov. 2005. Higher Education. 16 Dec 2005. http://www.highereducation.org/reports/pa_decline/decline-impact-edlevels.shtml. 1.

[35] Ibid., 1.

[36] American Association of Colleges & Universities. “Surveys find high level of public confidence in higher education but growing concern about college access.” Jun 2004. AAC&U News. 16 Dec 2005. http://www.aacu-edu.org/aacu_news/AACUNews04/June04/facts_figures_print.cfm. 1.

[37] Venezia, Andrea. “Bad Preparation Puts Community College Students at Risk.” June 2005. Stanford University Research. 16 Dec 2005. <http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/socialinnovation_kirst_collegestudents.shtml>. 1.

[38] National Council… “Measuring Up 2004: the National Report Card on Higher Education.” 2004. Higher Education. 16 Dec 2005. <http://www.highereducation.org>

[39] National Center… “Losing Ground.” 2005. Higher Education. 16 Dec 2005. <http://www.highereducation.org/reports/losing_ground/ar2.shtml>. 3.

[40] Ibid., 2.

[41]Ibid., 5.

[42] Associated Press. “College loans bear biggest part of budget-cutting plan.” 20 Dec 2005. Cable News Network. 23 Dec 2005. <http://www.cnn.worldnews.com>.

[43] Janofsky, Michael. “Professors' Politics Draw Lawmakers Into the Fray.” 25 Dec 2005. New York Times. Source: forwarded via email 26 Dec 2005 from Kyle Wegner.

[44] Ibid.