Of all the skills our public schools are expected to impart, reading is, hands down, the most important. This is especially true in this critical era when the media and the Internet combine to wreak havoc upon lingual skills in all age groups, with special emphasis upon the very young. It also gains added significance now as we see, in vivid color, the results of nations being unable or unwilling to communicate successfully with each other and as bitter terrorist enemies are alert for every tool that can be used to do us harm. The language, written, spoken or rendered in music lyrics or even in mere chanting during street demonstrations, when even slightly misunderstood, is an ideal tool for either good or bad intentions.

The members of the journalism profession are not without their own guilt in this matter and those of us who write and speak daily in the act of conveying information are among those – including teachers and entertainers, ministers, governmental officials and experts in technical matters... All of us must begin at once the task of cleaning up our own acts, knowing all the while that we are teaching by example with every word, every phrase, we use in the pursuit of our own professional goals and purposes.

That this matter has not passed unnoticed by educators of the land, note the increasing numbers of remedial reading teachers being trained and employed by public and private school faculties throughout this nation, as the weakness in our communications arena becomes more and more obvious and more and more a challenge recognized by all who care about the future of our children, of our nation, of our world and in fact about the safety and well-being of all generations to come.

One could argue that more intensive training for kindergarten and primary-level educators might be in order. Of course, any step forward at any level is a good idea. But let’s not forget the importance of the training obtained at institutions of higher education. You know, it is bad enough when we see, as we do with growing frequency, high school graduates in the unemployment lines wondering why their education is not making more job opportunities available to them, while issuing their complaint in garbled English right off the computer screen and directly from the vocabulary of the street or the mobs or the alleys where the unlettered tend to share their imaginary tales. Could it be their college and/or university instructors failed to equip them with the necessary means of communication? Does a master’s degree or a doctorate, or a wall decorated with testimony of their high scholastic achievements, alone ensure that they are doing their work well in the classroom? These are questions that need to be asked. The professors of English language, English literature, literary composition, library science, journalism for either print or broadcast purposes and more have a major responsibility for the future well-being of civilization. Greater quality at all levels of learning, more total devotion to duty at all lecture podiums and more sensitivity to the demands of the future which must be met by the students must be accepted and fulfilled by all pedagogues.

And those of us who pay the bills – and we all do ultimately – also need to rise up, recognize the nature of the problem and act with responsible citizenship and the compassion taught by nearly every organized religion to assume our responsibilities, as individuals and as a society, to save our much-touted communications expertise and make it at least as real as we daily are being told from all sides.

Yesterday would be just soon enough to resolve this critical dilemma.