January 2026

Some of the most important conversations at school do not begin in classrooms.

This one unfolded beneath the overhang just outside the kindergarten door. Our images were faintly reflected in the bank of windows behind us, doubled but imperfect, familiar and incomplete. About ten yards away, the sandbox spilled outward, its edges softened by use. By the time the sand reached our feet, it thinned to a few stray grains against the firm, rubberized surface of the playdeck. Nearby, a debate about who should go first unfolded with seriousness and conviction. At five, fairness still felt fully achievable.

A few children had paused long enough to turn toward one another. One stood closest to me, her coat zipped neatly to her chin. We were talking quietly, without ceremony. Earlier that morning they had been at story time, and the question lingered with me:

There was no pause. Thought arrived already speaking. One child answered immediately, not with flourish or hesitation, but with the plain confidence of someone for whom ideas have not yet learned to wait.

“Reading is important because you can learn about things that are here and things that are not here,” she said. “You can even learn about things that never happened, but might have happened. You can maybe even tell the difference.”

She spoke plainly. The sentence landed and stayed, doing what true language does before it learns to perform.

What she articulated was not decoding, accuracy, or performance. She was naming orientation.

Anyone raising children recognizes the pattern. Certainty arrives early and with confidence. Children announce what something is before they have learned how partial any single view must be. In a culture that prizes speed, clarity, and decisiveness, that confidence can feel reassuring. It can also mislead.

Reading interrupts that pattern quietly by giving confidence depth and range. Literacy opens a path beneath the surface of a single story, where meaning is tested rather than accepted and possibility remains alive. It allows children to hold more than one perspective at once without retreat or rigidity. Critical thinking emerges not as suspicion or debunking, but as discernment: the ability to weigh, to choose, and to remain free in the presence of influence.

At St. Edmund’s Academy, these habits are cultivated deliberately, year by year, through daily encounters with language, story, and ideas that ask children to slow down, return, and look again. Over time, reading offers a particular kind of freedom. It is the freedom to meet difference without fear, to revise one’s thinking without losing confidence or dignity, and to remain oriented when complexity presses in. It is a freedom that does not promise certainty, but equips children to live well without it.

I returned to that exchange later, still in kindergarten territory but in a different setting. It was bedtime. We were reading Percy Jackson. My son paused.

“Are Greek gods real?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, buying time.

“You know,” he said patiently. “Are they real?”

For a moment, I felt the pull to offer an answer that would settle everything neatly. In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that reality itself is a kind of simulation—signals interpreted by the mind, images standing in for the real thing. It’s the grown-up temptation to say that what we experience is always one step removed from reality, that we live more inside representations than the world they point to. It’s a clever and unsettling idea, and a terrible place to start with a five-year-old. Asking a child who is still learning what is solid and what is imagined to begin by dismantling reality is like pulling up the floor before the foundation has had time to set.

So I reached instead for something steadier. Fred Rogers understood that children do not need truth delivered whole or all at once. They need truth offered in forms they can live inside. Big ideas do not need to be diluted, but they do need to be sequenced. A child can give themselves fully to a story without losing their footing in reality. A story can matter without insisting on literalness. You can imagine deeply and still stay grounded.

This is not evasion. It is developmental wisdom.

Learning how to do this is not a detour from growing up. It is one of its central tasks.

This is where literacy begins its deeper work. Long before children write essays or defend claims, they learn to recognize what kind of thing they are encountering. Is this a fact? A story? An opinion? A feeling dressed up as certainty? Reading gives children ways to sort the world without reducing it. It teaches them to distinguish without dismissing, to question without unraveling meaning, and to resist the false comfort of treating every claim as equally true or equally complete.

Beneath the kindergarten overhang, a child captured that work with remarkable precision: you can learn about what is here and what is not here. You can maybe tell the difference. In the years ahead, children will test that instinct. They will press on their certainty, discover its limits, and learn how unsettling it can be to realize that confidence does not make one complete.

Why does reading matter? Because it trains that capacity. Reading is the long, patient work that lives between what is here and what is not. At its best, it does not rush children toward answers or offer the comfort of premature certainty. It teaches them how to stay oriented as questions widen, how to imagine without losing their bearings, how to judge without hardening into dogma, and how to remain grounded when complexity becomes unavoidable. Reading matters because it gives children the perceptual equipment to recognize what they are encountering, to resist being carried by whatever is loudest or most convenient, and to choose their next thought deliberately. It prepares them not merely to absorb information, but to live responsibly within a shared world.

The clarity of that kindergarten exchange sits against a larger question many families are already holding.

Over the past year, parents have shared articles describing a troubling but increasingly familiar pattern. Students arriving at highly selective colleges having never read a full book from beginning to end. Not because they are incapable. Not because they lack intelligence, curiosity, or ambition. But because sustained reading has quietly slipped out of daily life, replaced by fragments that feel efficient and sufficient until they are not.

National measures confirm what many already sense. Reading comprehension and writing fluency have declined gradually for more than a decade, well before the pandemic. The data itself is not the point. What matters is what it reveals about the conditions children are now asked to learn within.

Children move through a world that rewards immediacy. Language arrives in fragments. Information appears instantly, often stripped of context or continuity. Speed earns affirmation. Revision feels inefficient. Confidence travels farther than clarity. Digital spaces increasingly sort young people into environments where beliefs are reinforced rather than tested, and where the comfort of shared conviction can quietly replace the discipline of evidence. Even curious, capable children absorb these habits simply by living inside systems designed to keep attention captive. In this way, the environment shapes habits long before it produces outcomes.

The risk embedded in these conditions is subtle but serious. Not ignorance, but false certainty. Not confusion, but confidence unsupported by depth of understanding. Youth culture and the broader social environment shape habits that favor quick responses over the slower work of staying with complexity. They move efficiently through ideas without being asked to inhabit them. For a time, this can look like success. Over time, especially in secondary school and beyond, it reveals its fragility.

What families are asking for, underneath those headlines, is straightforward. They are thinking ahead to classrooms where texts grow denser, arguments more layered, and conclusions less tidy. They want their children not only to perform well, but to stay oriented when certainty gives way to complexity. They want them to spend sustained time inside another person’s experience, to walk for a while in someone else’s shoes, and to feel how a novel can challenge easy assumptions, guard against the danger of a single story, and open the door to many worlds. They want their children to find real pleasure in that widening of perspective.

Between those aspirations and the world students will eventually meet lies the long, patient work of reading and thinking. When done well, it builds habits that allow students not merely to manage complexity, but to stand within it—curious, grounded, and prepared for what comes next. Sustained reading teaches young people how to stay with ideas that resist quick answers, how to return when understanding feels incomplete, and how to grow through revision rather than retreat. These are not add-ons or enrichment. They are the habits that make depth possible and learning durable.

The habits formed through sustained reading do not remain abstract for long. As students move into middle school, texts grow more demanding, perspectives multiply, and questions resist clean answers. Understanding begins to depend less on speed and more on the ability to pause, listen, and revise. By eighth grade, that moment arrives not as theory, but as lived experience.

One afternoon in my classroom, we pushed the desks to the edges of the room and opened the center. What followed was not hesitation, but movement. Eighth graders at St. Edmund’s Academy carry a quiet ease with themselves, a comfort in showing up as they are that feels both earned and protected. As the furniture receded, students stepped forward without prompting. The space filled quickly. Everyone wanted a role.

They were performing An Elephant in the Village of the Blind.

Each student embodied a villager and spoke from the part of the elephant they alone had touched. A trunk. A leg. An ear. Each announced, with confidence, what the elephant must be.

Each claim rang true because it was rooted in real contact. Each was persuasive because it was partial. The danger of a single story was not that it was wrong, but that it was incomplete.

Then Grandma Lata spoke.

“Listen to yourselves,” she said. “Each of you has touched only part of the creature, and you mistake the part for the whole. The elephant is larger, stranger, and more wondrous than rope or tree or fan. It is all of these, and none of these.”

The line reoriented the room. Not as a correction, but as an invitation.

The students understood immediately what had shifted. No one had been wrong, and no one had been complete. What felt certain a moment earlier now revealed its edges. The work was not to abandon confidence, but to hold it with greater humility.

Afterward, the conversation widened on its own. History, where a single narrative can flatten a people. Science, where claims earn authority only through testing and revision. Daily life, where quick agreement can feel like belonging and still narrow what one is able to see. No one needed the lesson explained. They had experienced it.

The capacity to weigh evidence, recognize expertise, and revise one’s thinking when the facts require it. These habits do not form all at once. They develop slowly, through standards that hold, texts that demand attention, writing that insists on clarity, and conversations that require listening as much as speaking.

When I think back to that morning beneath the kindergarten overhang, I hear a child describing the earliest outline of discernment.

You can learn about what is here and what is not here.
You can maybe tell the difference.

By eighth grade, that instinct has met the elephant. It has met the discomfort of partial truth. And if we have done our work well, the student does not retreat into cynicism or cling to a single story. The student pauses, looks again, and asks better questions.

Where am I standing?
What am I touching?
What might I be missing?

These are not just school questions. They are human ones, and they follow us well beyond classrooms and childhood. Learning how to live inside them—curious, grounded, and open to revision—is what allows young people to keep their footing in a complex world.

As we begin a new year together at St. Edmund’s Academy, I am grateful for a community that values this kind of work: slow enough to be careful, demanding enough to matter, and generous enough to make room for growth. May the year ahead be marked by deep reading, thoughtful questions, and the steady confidence that comes not from having all the answers, but from knowing how to return, look again, and keep moving forward together. Happy New Year.