There is no one in power who wants the populace to be better prepared to call bullshit
I wonder at the necessity of asserting that reading and writing foster reading and writing. But beyond that there is the familiar disconnect... where the idea of testing and drill and vocabulary lists or word recognition lists being used ad nauseum in the lower grades--exactly the time when doing this induces an abject hatred for and distrust of WORDS as they are offered in the context of judgement--that this method of "education" is extraordinarily invasively "regulatory."
That is to say, the very people who produce an endless stream of invective about government regulations and intervention seek to inundate our schools with a steady diet of content/context regulation... The very people who expound against "eggheads" and academic experts and elites resort time and again to "experts" of their own who offer any number of studies saying that the "method" of learning words best suited to elementary grades is that developed by an expert who seeks to "input/output" lists of information...That is to say, for some reason, one can't just love stories, to read them and write them, anymore. But the further problem is that this is actually non-partisan. The progressives tell you what to read and how to read the same as the conservatives or fundamentalists. Each heaven the one and only truth.
The very institution that I would offer has likely done more than any other to deaden one's sense of discovery and kill one's excitement in learning for its own sake--dammit, it's fun to read and write and talk about stories and ideas!--seems hell-bent of making it worse still.
All via the regulatory control of the state and federal governments; all via the "market" control of Walmart; all via the liege-lords Bush, Gates, Broad, et al.; all via the very groups who constantly scream for the government to get bent. So, it is clear to me that the very society that screams about this or that inability and imbecility--home-damn-grown--is one in which that inability appears fairly irrelevant. Why would managers, owners, politicians, etc., want anyone to be intelligent?
There is absolutely no one in power who wants the populace to be better prepared to call bullshit except as it serves a partisan persuasion; as long as it mimics Limbaugh or Maddow or whoever it is you pretend speaks "for you."
Again, Lincoln, revered and reviled in this country, depending on geography and skin color, read two books to near memorization--(unimaginable to the modern world)--The Bible (which is "books"
and Shakespeare (also books). That is, a library of language committed to memory; a library of wisdom absorbed in such a manner that it informed all his thinking; a library of politics; a library of relationships...
This is hateful. All of your citations are hateful. You participate in the very act of hate that spawns the industrial expertise which produces citations in opposition. Institutions, machines, prisons.
Liberation waits, with no muss or fuss, with no expectation, upon the nearest shelf. It nearly trembles under its coiled kinesis. They are afraid of it. And so they are hateful of it. And so their systems diminish its power; dissecting the method of unleashing the power...focussing on the method, reducing the fissile knowledge by lengthening, thickening, dampening the fuse. Read a book, talk to a child, go for a walk, throw a ball, ride a bike, sing a song, paint a picture, watch ants for hours....
"Romp with joy in the bookish dark!"
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2013/02/a-cereal-box-prize-of-hatred.html