But only by virtue of its results

From A Jacques Barzun Reader by Michael Murray, an essay, The Centrality of Reading

Several comments worth calling out.

What is the present situation of literacy? It is a state that does little credit to our efforts. The universal light which, according to the hopes of one hundred years ago when most of the great Education Acts were passed, was supposed to bathe the world in knowledge and reason is not as dazzling as our generous ancestors expected. Its great source was to be literacy, and literacy is not in the ascendant.

[snip]

. . . Simple blindness to the truth that reading and its necessary twin, writing, constitute not merely an ability but a power. I mean by the distinction that reading is not just a device by which we are reached and reach others for practical ends. It is also and far more importantly a mode of incarnating and shaping thought.

[snip]

Here we touch the political and social causes of the whole sad odyssey that has brought America to the condition of being a land of semi-literates. Make no mistake about it: the causes are not ignorance, poverty, or barbarous instincts; they are "advanced thinking," love of liberty, and the impulse to discover and innovate. It is from the action of the literate, the cultivated, the philosophical, the artistic that the common faith in the power of reading as central to Western civilization has been destroyed. The target of the separate attacks and collective animus has been the very notion of power, discipline, constraint.

For it is true that none of these resemble the rival goals which sophisticated thought preferred - the free play of fancy, creativeness, and immediate enjoyment; self-expression, novelty, and untrammeled choice. The intellectual elite had learned the value of these meritorious pleasures in the writings of the best philosophers, artists, and political thinkers, and with impatient contempt of school dullness and rote learning resolved to emancipate the child and "give" him these joys.

The folly consisted, not in wanting the lofty results, but in thinking they were an alternative set that could be reached directly. I have elsewhere defined this fallacy as "preposterism" - seeking to obtain straight off what can only be the fruit of some effort, putting an end before the beginning. It should have been obvious that self-expression is real only after the means to it have been acquired. Likewise, for the other pleasant exertions, there are conditions sine qua non. And these justly praised parts and privileges of a free spirit are in fact used in meeting these conditions, in learning itself: the child is self-expressive when he painstakiingly forms the letters a, b, c, - though he is not quite ready to "create" a "poem." Nor can creativeness be the object of his learning, since it is by definition unlearnable.

[snip]

These constrasts do not mean that tradition is right and innovation wrong; that artists ought not to try making all things new; that scientists may not experiment ad lib; that imagination should not have free play; that equality is not the noblest of political ideas; that children should not be treated with courtesy and affection. The point of the contrast is that what we have from our expensive schooling is not what we thought we were getting.

[snip]

Nothing is right by virtue of its origins, but only by virtue of its results.