Enlightened Literacy Beyond the Reading Wars

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. … Write the truest sentence you know.”

Ernest Hemingway wrote these words in the last year of his life in his memoir, A Moveable Feast.1 This was how you begin a story, he said – with one true sentence. And this is how I begin my story. We talk a lot about literacy in the United States while, at the same time, the talk is often about a lack of literacy and the failure of our nation’s schools to develop literate citizens. That’s the truest sentence I know as I begin a journey to understand how my country, the United States of America, views literacy and how I believe we can do better as a nation and as citizens of the world as America continues the great democratic experiment.

This is the story of my journey to understand literacy and, more specifically, develop a conceptual framework for literacy education that benefits the students in our classrooms learning to be literate, the teachers who labor to create literate students, the researchers who seek wisdom about how literacy should be taught and learned, and the society that is intended to benefit from all these endeavors. The conceptual framework I hold to be the most promising is what I call “enlightened literacy” -- a framework that acknowledges the contributions of the sciences and the humanities in developing a more expansive view of literacy that provides hope for humanity, the flourishing of democracy, and global citizenship.

I began my career in education amidst the so-called “reading wars.” In fact, the reading wars began before I was born and have been waged unabated throughout my decades as an educator. In a way, I feel a bit like a war correspondent. Not, of course, in the vein of Hemingway as he transmitted messages from the war front in Europe, but as a correspondent who has been on the front lines of the reading wars serving in many varied capacities – as an elementary teacher, literacy specialist, reading professor, director of teacher education and literacy programs at institutions of higher education, and now chronicler of literacy education. To understand and explain the current state of affairs with regard to literacy and literacy instruction, I must begin my journey with an account of the events and ideologies that brought us to this point in the reading wars. Because, yes, the wars continue. The December 2024 issue of The Atlantic features an article about the once leading education expert, Lucy Calkins, who is now “cast as the reason a generation of students struggle to read.” 2

If Lucy Calkins is now envisioned as the reason for a lost generation of readers, she is simply the newest iteration of the supposed enemy. There have been others that have received this dubious distinction and have been vilified for the ruination of previous generations of readers. It begs the question – has there ever been a generation of truly literate citizens? It’s reminiscent of the politicians who hearken back to a great America and perpetually seek to make “America great again.”

The reading wars were officially launched in the 1950s but reached a fever pitch in the 1980s and 1990s. When large governmental grants funded research, for example the Report of the National Reading Panel about how to create a nation of readers -- research that culminated in federal mandates like No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards -- it seemed that the end of the reading wars had been successfully negotiated.3 Obviously not everyone was happy, but, at least in my mind, it was time to move on. After all, the reading wars had commenced with the publication of a small book, Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955.4 Its author, Rudolf Flesch, who advocated for a phonics-first approach to early reading instruction, became the pied piper of every critic of our America’s public school system for decades to follow. His name appeared in newspaper columns, books, and in Congressional hearings. He garnered the status of a general in the reading wars and, by the time No Child Left Behind became the law of the land in America’s public schools, he could arguably be described as a conquering hero for the side that envisioned phonics as the first and foremost important issue in literacy teaching and learning.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, I wondered if it was possible that the education community at large could finally move beyond the essentials of early reading instruction as a primary focus of research, professional development, and instruction in teacher preparation programs. Could we now move beyond the reading wars, recognizing the essentiality of phonics in early reading acquisition?