Restoring Trust in Literacy Education

Written by: Josue Sosa

When I began my career in education, I did not expect to become an English teacher. My first classroom assignment was teaching Spanish in the same school where I still work today. Like many young teachers, I arrived with enthusiasm, ideas, and very little understanding of how a school truly functions day to day.

Early in those first years, I benefited from the quiet guidance of a more experienced colleague who loved language and literature deeply. Through ordinary conversations about teaching, books, and students, I began to see literacy differently. Language was not simply a subject to teach. It was a gateway that allowed students to understand the world, express their thoughts, and encounter ideas that shape their character.

Teaching Spanish was rewarding, but the curriculum often left little room to explore the deeper connections between language, reading, and critical thinking that fascinated me. Over time, those hallway conversations and shared reflections began to reshape my professional direction. The joy that others had for literature slowly became contagious. Eventually, I pursued an English teaching license and began the transition into a new role in the classroom.

Those conversations about teaching never really stopped. In many schools, ideas about literacy grow informally long before they appear in official plans or programs. Teachers talk in hallways, compare lessons, share frustrations, and celebrate small victories with students. In those simple exchanges, visions begin to take shape.

Over the past few years, many of those discussions have centered on a larger question. How do we help restore confidence in elementary literacy during a time when the nation faces a growing reading crisis. Across the country, educators are wrestling with the reality that too many students reach middle school without the strong reading foundations they deserve.

That question became one of the reasons I enrolled in a Reading Education program. I wanted to better understand how literacy develops and how schools can build systems that support struggling readers while also cultivating a love of learning. The deeper I studied literacy instruction, the more convinced I became that reading is not simply an academic skill. It is an inheritance that one generation passes to the next.

When children learn to read well, they gain access to knowledge, history, and stories that help them understand both themselves and the world around them. Literacy gives people the ability to think critically, evaluate ideas, and pursue truth with discernment. In this sense, teaching reading is not only an educational responsibility. It is also a cultural and moral one.

For Christians, the pursuit of truth through literacy carries a deeper meaning. Augustine once wrote that every Christian should understand that wherever truth is found, it belongs to the Lord who created all things. That idea reminds us that education does not exist in conflict with faith. Instead, the search for truth through learning can be part of honoring God.

This conviction has shaped the way I think about my vocation as a teacher. The goal is not merely to help students pass tests or complete assignments. The goal is to equip them with the tools they need to seek truth throughout their lives.

In a time when many people feel uncertain about the future of education, I remain hopeful. Schools are filled with dedicated educators who quietly invest in their students every day. Many of them are building ideas and programs that may not yet appear in policy documents but are already changing lives in classrooms.

Literacy grows in these quiet places. It grows in conversations between teachers. It grows in classrooms where students are encouraged to read carefully and think deeply. It grows when communities decide that passing knowledge forward is one of their most important responsibilities.

Just as families pass down land, traditions, and faith, communities must also pass down literacy. When we teach children to read well, we give them more than a skill. We give them access to truth, wisdom, and the accumulated knowledge of those who came before them.

That inheritance may be one of the most important gifts we can offer to the next generation.