Jonathan Kozol

I was shocked until I figured out that can't read did not refer to actual illiteracy, but to lack of sufficient reading and writing skills to function in everyday life.

Illiterate America by activist educator Jonathan Kozol came out in 1985.

As a student at Rutgers University in 1987, I wrote a review for the Detroit News of Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which asserted that, quote, our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading, and portrayed a generation addled by rock music and television.

I thought Bloom was overgeneralizing.