I just ran across a bunch of dumbasses on Bluesky—I am not going to link to the thread because it is too stupid—arguing about whether it is important to teach the reading of books in high school, or to teach them in college, or what the teaching of reading books is even good for, and all I can think of is how broken our entire “outcomes-based” education system is.

The “outcome” of being able to read, view, and listen to long-form creative works like novels, films, and albums is that you get comfortable digesting complex narratives that have text and subtext and ambiguity.

That may not be a marketable skill, but it is necessary for interacting with the world around you and the other humans who live in it.