In a viral social media video, teacher Darius Williams described breaking down in class after discovering that some of his high school seniors could not complete an exercise requiring them to fill in just four missing words.
“These kids are leaving high school and going to college, hopefully, and they couldn’t fill in four words. Four words. I literally broke down in the middle of class. This is only day two, and I have seniors who simply cannot read and seniors who cannot write,” the teacher, Darius Williams, said in a reel on Instagram.
“They can reason. They have the ability to defend their reasoning if it’s talking to their homeboy, but applying that to a written text, two paragraphs, and they couldn’t do it,” he added.
BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock is disturbed, but not surprised.
“High school seniors could not fill in four words,” Whitlock says. “Not calculus, not philosophy, four words. A grown man wept on camera because the next generation cannot read. That is not a school story. That is a funeral for the mind.”
Whitlock points out that “enslaved black men and women once risked the whip, the auction block, and death for the ability to read.”
“Literacy was contraband. Freedom. A free mind started with a page you were not supposed to touch,” he says.
What slaves understood back then is something “this generation pretends not to know.”
“The man who controls your access to words controls your access to God, to law, to contracts, to your own name on a document,” Whitlock says.
“Now, too many black Americans treat reading like optional equipment. Something you outsource to a phone, a caption, a clip, or a machine that summarizes so you never sweat through a hard paragraph,” he says. “That is not progress. That is a people walking backward into dependence and calling it culture.”
“We used to bleed for the page. Now we scroll past it and get offended when a teacher cries about the wreckage,” he adds.
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