Tom’s Big Picture

On the last two road trips my family has taken, we have attempted (when not distracted by children’s needs, thank goodness for steering-wheel audio controls to pause and play) to listen to audiobooks of classic literature. The first one was The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most famous Sherlock Holmes novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The second, for the trip we took this weekend, was Paradise Lost by John Milton (if you follow this link, disregard the modern “reinterpretations” of the work), written in the 1600’s. It is an epic poem dramatizing Satan’s war against God in heaven, his casting into hell and finally the temptation of Adam and Eve- 9 CD’s worth.

The thing I most felt while listening to the first CD was an awareness of my own lack of literacy compared to the norm during the height of our civilization and before our own degraded age. The density and content of the poem coming out of the speakers was almost more than my brain could process- ideas upon ideas layered so thick and quick it took my whole brain to process just some of them before yet another line was read.

From my experiences reading ANY document over 100 years old, whether Holmes or Milton or the Federalist Papers- all documents meant for wide public consumption- it is clear that the average illiterate person then (who lacked the technical skill to read and write) was probably more literate in their thoughts than the average “literate” person today who has been taught enough phonics to digest People Magazine.

Lack of literacy really means an inability to express ideas precisely, both externally AND internally. The lack of an ability to think precisely weakens the reasonable, rational parts of our nature and makes us more susceptible to those parts more apt to make foolish decisions.

Yet many Christian leaders see no value in literacy, and mock those who see it as a necessary prerequisite to truly understanding God’s Word. So we continue to dumb down church, dumb down the Bible into sixth-grade level paraphrases that cannot possibly contain all of the original meaning, and dumb down our culture and people.

Yet a great hope lies ahead- as more fathers and families take charge of their family’s education (through whatever means, but primarily through homeschooling), a great literary renewal should happen among our people. Did you hear the one about the homeschooled kids who took down the Ivy League in moot court competition?