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Larry Elder used his appearance on Ed Henry’s “The Big Take” to deliver a blunt message every patriot should hear: our literacy crisis is not some abstract education statistic, it is a public-safety and economic emergency. He warned that when children leave school without reading skills, communities pay the price in poverty, dependency, and rising crime — a problem the mainstream media and career politicians refuse to fix.
The data back him up: federal assessments and international studies show millions of American adults reading at low proficiency, and far too many students failing to master the basics that used to be nonnegotiable. This isn’t an abstract policy debate; it’s a real gap between what employers need and what our schools are producing, and that gap funnels people toward welfare rolls and, for some, into criminal behavior they wouldn’t have considered if they had a chance at a decent education.
Make no mistake, the root causes are political. Decades of coddling bad curricula, soft discipline, and a bureaucratic monopoly on education have produced a generation that often cannot read well enough to compete. Conservatives have been right to push evidence-based reading instruction — phonics and rigorous accountability — and to call out the failed experiments that left too many kids behind.
The consequences spill into every neighborhood. When young people lack the basic skills employers demand, the temptation to survive by illicit means rises, and taxpayers get stuck paying for the social wreckage. If we want safer streets and stronger families, we must stop pretending that woke pedagogy and endless administrative excuses are acceptable responses to illiteracy.
Solutions are simple and unapologetically conservative: restore school choice so parents can escape failing districts, demand transparent reading outcomes, expand vocational pathways for students who want to work with their hands, and reassert local control over curricula. We also need to restore law and order so communities that are trying to rebuild aren’t punished by permissive policies that let crime flourish.
Larry Elder’s message is a wake-up call to every American who cares about work, family, and the future of this country. We can win this fight — but only if we stop rewarding failure, trust parents, cut the ideological nonsense out of classrooms, and insist that every child learns to read, because everything that follows depends on it.
