Children Who Read Are Harder to Control

The workforce case for literacy is dead. The emancipatory case is more urgent than ever.

Conventional wisdom tells us to raise literate children because of the capitalist and related respectability benefits such literacy confers. They’ll get into a good college, they’ll get higher degrees, and, someday, they’ll command higher pay. They’ll be so well spoken. So respectable.

In the age of AI, when LLMs can read, summarize text, and write a persuasive essay better than most college grads, these reasons fall apart, especially for those of us with young kids today. My kids are 4 and 7. The academic or workforce development value of literacy skills by the time they’re college-aged is strongly in question.

A far more defensible reason to take the time and effort to teach our children to read well is for its emancipatory value. And not just for their liberation—for all of ours.

Children who love to entertain and inform themselves away from devices managed and watched by the AI oligarchy are harder to surveil and they are harder to control.

If we live in a society where all of our worldviews are formed and informed by algorithmically-driven content on platforms owned and operated by the oligarchy, then we are defenseless against the oligarchy’s propaganda. Any narratives, ideas, or dreams with teeth to transform the world into one that is antithetical to the oligarchy’s interests has no soil in which to take root.

Where would those conversations happen at a societal level? How could those ideas spread, take hold, set the old world on fire, and inspire the new?

The infrastructure of the most technologically sophisticated surveillance state the world has ever seen is being built out around us, and rapidly. We need to get very real about what it means to live under an AI-powered surveillance state. And we need to equip our children with the skills to resist it and to organize outside of the watchful eyes of the powers that be.

To raise children who read is to build the counter-infrastructure.

Our children are our future and our future needs tools to communicate, educate, inform, strategize, organize, co-create knowledge, and build parallel systems outside of oligarchic systems of control. Let literacy be that tool.

Children who love to read are a cultural vaccination against our techno-fascist oligarchy’s propaganda machine.

I read all kinds of books with my kids—including books banned by the right and authors canceled by the left. Problematic books, books that didn’t age well, books I disagree with. Books where I have to stop every few sentences and say, “we never talk to someone this way.” It’s about every 50th book or so that I’ll tell my kids—we are reading this one time and then we are not reading this again because I do not want you to start to see the world this way. There are a smattering of books that are strictly off limits because they make my skin crawl. But we always talk about why.

Of course, most of the books we read are not lessons in how not to see reality. Most are joyful, playful, whimsical, informative, and give us new ideas and a richer perspective on our world. We are all born hungry to know our world better, and I teach my children that when we feel that hunger, we reach for books.

Most parenting arguments against screens implicitly use a contamination model. Screens are a pollutant; children are vulnerable; the parent’s job is to build a wall—screen-time limits, device-free bedrooms, no phones until 16, Waldorf-style zero-tech environments. The metaphor underneath is quarantine.

But an invasive species doesn't win by being stronger in single combat—it wins by exploiting disturbed ground, empty niches, and the absence of the coevolved competition that would keep the ecosystem in balance.

sk any noxious weeds specialist and they will tell you: the best way to supplant an invasive plant is to nurture and protect a native one.

Screens don’t colonize children’s attention because they are irresistibly powerful, but because the attentional ecosystem has been left bare. Reading isn’t the opponent of screens—it’s the incumbent species that holds the soil, and makes the invasive’s establishment harder because the ground is already claimed.

We must live a global network of locally governed regenerative skill-sharing communities into existence. Raising our children to love reading and to understand its power is part of that work. Do not underestimate its importance.