A University of North Carolina “learning specialist” (i.e., someone who helps students who cannot possibly do college work) found that a majority of the school’s football and basketball players cannot read above an elementary school reading level. Mary Willingham has received death threats and dozens of hate messages, according to The Daily Mail.

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George W. writes:

In 1994, I was in Cal State Northridge’s library doing accounting research.  Three girls walked up to me and asked if I could help them.  I responded, “What is your problem”?  They said they needed to do research on whales.  I asked which whales, the sea mammal or country?  None knew of Wales.  After determining they wanted to learn about whales, I walked them over to the card catalog drawer containing “wh.”  Nothing happens.  I write out “W-H-A-L-E-S” on a piece of paper and hand it to one of them.  Nothing happens.  I pull out the card catalog drawer to whales and leave.

Imagine, not one of the three girls could spell whales. They had no business getting past fourth grade!

Thomas Bertonneau has never said it in so many words, but I will: scholastic standards have been reduced to prevent some from having to fail!

Sarah Sams writes:

My husband taught English in a public high school for a short time, a few years ago. He was hired with specific instructions to help the students prepare for and pass the state graduation exam. Imagine his surprise when he took the eleventh grade class to the library and they attempted to check out picture books. It was not a prank. The students were themselves surprised and dismayed to find that he required them to read “chapter books.”

Diana writes:

Mary Willingham is a brave woman. And what she says exposes how messed up a country America is.

The whole idea that the lower 50% of the bell curve should thrive in higher education is a joke. What’s even scarier is the fact that the boys Miss Willingham teaches are probably unsuited for anything but the most undemanding, repetitive, stoop labor but they have been brainwashed into thinking that stoop labor is beneath them. So what are they good for?

I’ve seen this ad in various places.

I’ve actually suggested the idea to parents of college-educated kids. (I don’t know if anyone has taken me up on the suggestion.) The ad specifies you need an 8th grade reading level and a 6th grade math level.

To be a woodworker, you need to be a careful, conscientious person. I believe that to a degree this can be taught. By nature, I’m neither, but I benefited from a rigorous educational system, which is now gone.

Dr. Thomas Bertonneau writes:

In response to George W.:

My argument is that American education public and private has the goal, not of producing independent thinkers who can make sound moral and political judgments based on knowledge and logic, but of inculcating as universally as possible the vetted correct opinions, and that this goal is incompatible with genuine literacy, real reasoning ability, and actual knowledge.  The victims constitute what the Left likes to refer to as the rainbow: i.e., it’s everyone regardless of race, creed, or color.  For the record, I am of mixed-race descent.  My father was a light-skinned black man (a member of the New Orleansian gens de couleur libres) who, like his brothers and sister, passed (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) as white.  My maternal grandparents were an Englishman and a Swede.  Neither the Englishman nor the Swede had anything formally beyond what we would call a high school education, but both were fully literate.  My grandfather wrote beautifully composed love-letters to my grandmother when he was displaced from her, in order to get work, during the Great depression.)  My paternal grandparents were massively literate in both English and French; and my great-grandfather and his elder brother were public orators and journalists also in both French and English.  My great-grand uncle Arnold Bertonneau’s Address to the Massachusetts Legislature (1864) is rhetorically and logically so far above the highest literary attainments of the best kids in my courses that there is no measuring the difference.

The miracle of alphabetic literacy is that only the actually retarded are cut off from acquiring it.  Given the proper educational framework in the proper, healthy social context, even people with below-average IQ (no matter what their melanin endowment) can learn the basics of reading and writing.  The catastrophe of modern education has served this segment of the population worst of all.

Laura writes:

The multicultural education system has served blacks poorly. Whether it has served them worst of all, I cannot say. It has so many victims.

James N. writes:

Several separate issues are mixed together in the commentary on the Daily Mail article, not necessarily in the interests of clarity.

First – Division I FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) players have a full-time job, playing football. These programs have a MEDIAN annual income of $40.85 million, and some generate income of over $100 million a year. The players get nothing, other than full scholarships as long as they are healthy and a chance – in many cases, quite a slim chance – to get a degree.

Secondly, generating these enormous sums of money, easily billions of dollars in the aggregate, requires the illusion that the full time athletes are college students. The entire economic structure of “college” football is premised upon a web of laws and customs that allow “institutions of higher learning” to be treated differently than for-profit businesses.

Third – the genetics of ultra-high level athletes and high-achieving academics are not the same, although there is some overlap.

Fourth, and most important, the vast majority of persons, athlete and non-athlete alike, who are enrolled in baccalaureate programs don’t belong in college. Most of them did not belong in a real high school.

Our education establishment sits atop a mountain of lies. The issue of college athletes is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Laura writes:

College football has long since become a professional sport. The charade of pretending that the athletes are students should end.

Diana writes:

Now UNC is officially saying Mary Willingham is a liar, on their stationery (although I don’t see who signed off on this).

Questioning someone’s truthfulness is serious. I think this is a major academic scandal brewing. Or are we past that point?

UNC basketball coach Roy Williams denies Willingham’s findings. More from Williams here.

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