We Applaud Ourselves.
—Poster seen in a school entrance hall

Of the many dispiriting statistics cited in William Henry’s brief but important new book, In Defense of Elitism, perhaps the most dispiriting comes from a recent (1992) study by the Department of Education. Based on a survey of more than twenty-six thousand adults, this study estimates that fifteen million American adults are entirely illiterate. It also projects that an additional seventy-five million American adults have only minimal reading and computational skills: a third of this group can just manage to tote up the weekly grocery bill, almost none can compose a simple business letter. Even if this projection overstates the case by 50 percent, it is still a frightening bit of news and a staggering indictment of our culture. How is it, after the long war on illiteracy waged in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, that we now find ourselves slouching toward illiterate barbarism? No doubt there are many pieces to this distressing puzzle, of which the failure of inner-city schools is perhaps as much a symptom as a cause. Mr. Henry, who had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural commentator for Time magazine before his untimely death shortly before the publication of this book, does not supply a direct answer.

We are all