It’s often preached that high school students struggle in places afflicted with poverty, family breakdown, and other social woes. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that students from wealthier regions are demonstrating academic excellence. So argues a Substack writer known as Dissident Teacher, who writes on issues facing contemporary K-12 classrooms. Youth literacy is a widespread issue across demographics. Something else is going on here. Reflecting on his own interaction with students in a wealthy district, Dissident Teacher writes,

Many kids were functionally illiterate and innumerate. The writing of 9th-12th graders in English was often incoherent, full of fragment sentences and errors in English grammar, usage, and mechanics. Students couldn’t seem to organize their thoughts meaningfully and employed little vocabulary beyond the 6th grade level. Only the most proficient and frequent readers produced work that didn’t require major revision. Students didn’t know enough about Western civ to turn out an intelligent paper on any piece of literature, whether novel, short story, or poem. They hadn’t read enough in any genre to have a working model of how to produce good, clear writing.

Technology in classrooms is often cited as a primary reason so many kids struggle academically these days. Screens distract kids, encourage scattered attention spans, and are correlated with cognitive decline. That’s why the “phone-free” school movement has seen quite positive results so far in helping students concentrate and actually learn the material.

An emphasis on storytelling might at least partially serve as a solution in K-12, argues Denise E. Agosto. Agosto writes how storytelling, particularly oral storytelling, can help students with their reading and writing skills. While kids naturally develop storytelling skills as toddlers and young children, growing up in families and schools that make it a point to tell stories out loud goes a long way in forming students to become literate. After commenting on storytelling’s benefits for students, which include creativity, thinking, and interpersonal skills, Agosto writes,

All of these benefits can be achieved with just three elements: the teller, the story, and the listener, as it has been done for thousands and thousands of years.

Schools make a blunder when they stop telling stories in the classroom. Kids are done a disservice when they are no longer expected to read great books from the past. Storytelling is an ancient practice that flows in our very DNA; educators should therefore be inclined to champion the practice of storytelling in all of its exciting forms.