Deep Reading Pt. 2: Why Schools Failed To Teach Literacy

Welcome back to pt. 2 of our series on Mortimer Adler’s reading system, and today, we’ll cover a key distinction between information & understanding and introduce you to the first level of reading: Elementary Reading.

If you’re new to the series, my goal here is to distil the key ideas from Adler’s How to Read a Book into actionable frameworks to help you excel in your reading. This system is the bedrock of all my work for the last 10 years, and I’ve split it into 5 parts:

1: Overview

2: Elementary Reading

3: Inspectional Reading  

4: Analytical Reading

5: Syntopical Reading + Building a syntopicon

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Mortimer J. Adler’s Reading System pt. 2: Elementary Reading. 

Before we introduce the first two levels of reading, we have to ask ourselves a thorny question:

What is the point of reading well?

As I’m writing this piece, I’m surrounded by technologies that make reading seem more like an antiquarian pastime than a necessity for the mind. My Safari browser can retrieve any fact from the entire body of human knowledge, my headphones can play podcasts on any subject I can think of, and there’s probably an AI chatbot that can interpret complex texts for me.

But notice: all of the things I’ve described are information, and yes, technology has made it far easier to accumulate more and more of it. But when it comes down to achieving understanding, I’m afraid that a simple GPT prompt will no longer do the trick.

Adler put it beautifully here:

‘[Looking up facts] may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started.’

In other words, information does not add to our understanding of the world. It’s merely additive knowing without insight. Whereas if we are reading something that promises understanding, it will give us a

‘Shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth …'

In that sense, easy reading (like AI-generated answers or news headlines) will actually hinder our understanding of the world. Whereas the idea that confuses us at first is usually a sign that we're about to learn something new.

Hence, active reading is all about exposing ourselves to difficult shifts in our perspectives. This is where intellectual growth comes from, and if anyone tries to convince you otherwise, they might just be, in Alexander Pope’s words, a 'bookful blockhead' who is 'ignorantly read'.

And getting to this level of active reading requires us to master the first level of reading: elementary reading.

The 4 stages of elementary reading