High School Seniors Can't Read — Their Souls Are in Jeopardy | Jason Whitlock Harmony

**Jason Whitlock** (0:01)
Listen to this man break down in tears. Listen to the reason why.
We should all be crying. His tears are justified. He doesn't explain it exactly, but he's crying because he knows his students' very souls are in jeopardy. Their futures are severely compromised.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:24)
Listen, these kids are leaving high school and going to college, hopefully, and they couldn't fill in four words. Four words. I literally broke down in the middle of class. This is only day two.
And I have seniors who simply cannot read, and seniors who cannot write.
They cannot write. They can reason. They have the ability to defend their reasoning, if it's talking to their homeboy, but applying that to a written text, two paragraphs, that they couldn't do it.

**Jason Whitlock** (1:15)
High school seniors could not fill in four words. Not calculus, not philosophy, four words. A grown man wept on camera because the next generation cannot read. That is not a school story. That is a funeral for the mind. This is that fire. Grab your Bible.
If you cannot read, you cannot open the Bible for yourself. You can hear a preacher, stream a sermon, or let artificial intelligence chew a Psalm into mush and spoon it back to you.
None of that is reading. Faith that never learns the page becomes rented faith. Somebody else holds the text, picks the verse, and decides what God really said. A man who cannot read is easy to lead, easy to lie to, and easy to sell. He is cut off from the book that judges kings, exposes frauds, and rebuilds broken men. Hosea 4 and 6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge because thou hast rejected knowledge. I will also reject thee that thou shall be no priest to me.
Destroyed, not inconvenienced, destroyed. God tied destruction to rejected knowledge. Illiteracy is rejected knowledge wearing a hoodie. Your soul is in jeopardy when the word of God is always secondhand. Your future is compromised when you cannot sit alone with scripture and let it cut you.
That teacher knows it. His body told the truth, his mouth barely found the word for. Reading is the ultimate flex. It says without a speech, without a flex video, that you can think for yourself. If you cannot read, you cannot think for yourself. You can react, repeat, and ride a mood and call it opinion. You cannot follow a long argument, test a claim or hold two ideas and decide which one survives. Timothy 2 and 15
Study to shoe thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. Study, not vibe, not summarize, not outsource. Study so you can rightly divide truth instead of swallowing whoever yells the loudest. Comprehension demands vocabulary, and vocabulary grows on the page. Skip the page and your mind stays small no matter how loud your mouth gets. Being read to is not reading. AI is not understanding. A voice in your ear is not a sentence you decode with your own eyes. If you cannot pull meaning off the line yourself, complex truth never lands. You feel a vibe. You do not own the thought. And a man who does not own his thoughts will rent someone else's forever.
Enslaved black men and women once risked the whip, the auction block and death for the ability to read. Literacy was contraband, freedom.
A free mind started with a page you were not supposed to touch. They understood something this generation pretends not to know. The man who controls your access to words, controls your access to God, to law, to contracts, to your own name on a document. Now, too many black Americans treat reading like optional equipment, something you outsource to a phone, a caption, a clip, or a machine that summarizes so you never sweat through a hard paragraph. That is not progress. That is a people walking toward, walking backward into dependence and calling it culture. We used to bleed for the page. Now we scroll past it and get offended when a teacher cries about the wreckage. Here's the uglier lies stacked on top of illiteracy. The culture decided reading is a white man's skill, unnecessary for black men, maybe even suspicious. Rap music popularized the habit of butchering language. It promoted Ebonics, a dialect sold as authenticity, a language that puts you in touch with your so-called blackness rather than submission to your lord and savior. That is the trade, not clever wordplay as seasoning, butchery as identity, broken English as proof you belong, a private code that flatters the flesh and starves the spirit. Too many black people now think reinventing language is mastery and slang is a skill that replaces literacy. They think sounding black matters more than being able to read the book that saves black souls. Wordplay can be clever. Code can be fun on a block. Neither is the language. God used to form conscience, covenant, law, and wisdom. Hebrews 4 and 12 For the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit in the joints and morrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. God's word is sharp. Ebonics as lifestyle dulls the blade. When the whole diet is butchered speech, you pull yourself off the edge of the language meant to clean or meant to cut you clean and bring you under Christ. Scripture is not written in temporary street weather. It is written in words meant to correct and strengthen. Trade that for a closed circle of cool phrases, and you shrink the tool God gave you to know him and to know yourself. Reinventing English is not elevation when you cannot read the English God already gave you.