On what we lose when we replace the ability to read with the ability to critique
We talk about literacy as if it’s a single thing: the ability to read words on a page, to decode symbols, follow syntax, extract meaning. While this is foundational, there’s more to literacy than that. And according to recent research, over half of American adults can’t do it above a basic third or fourth-grade level. That’s not a statistic about struggling schools in underserved areas. What’s surprising is that this is the average. English literature majors included. (And while I’m an art historian, I was also an English major, so I take this personally.)
I came across a video by Hilary Layne (Second Story) this week, sent my way by a friend, that traced this decline to a specific and uncomfortable moment: when “critical literacy,” a pedagogical framework concerned with social consciousness and ideological awareness, quietly replaced actual literacy as the goal of education. Not as a companion to it. As a replacement. The idea being that what matters isn’t whether you can read a text fluently and independently, but whether you can identify the power structures embedded in it.
There’s a certain irony in teaching someone to deconstruct a text they cannot actually read.
I work in the visual arts, so I couldn’t help but follow this thread somewhere else. Because visual literacy has its own version of this problem, and it’s been developing quietly for just as long.
My first instinct was to reach for iconography as the visual equivalent of phonics. Both are technical systems. Both unlock meaning that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Knowing that a woman with a lily is the Virgin Mary, or that a skull signals vanity and mortality, does give you a key that others don’t have.
But the parallel breaks down quickly. Phonics is democratising. Iconography, historically, has been the opposite: a gatekeeping mechanism that made art history feel like a members-only club. “You can’t really understand this without knowing your Ovid” is not the foundation I want to build on. So I’ll set that comparison aside, useful as it initially seemed.
What is the visual equivalent of simply being able to read?
I think it’s something more immediate than iconography and more sustained than a quick glance. It’s the willingness to stand in front of a work and actually look at it. To notice what draws your eye and why. To sit with what it makes you feel before reaching for an explanation. That process is not unsophisticated. It’s the foundation on which everything else, including critical thinking about art, has to be built.
The Croatian case study nobody asked for (but I’m giving you anyway)
I can speak to this more specifically than most, because I spent years teaching art history at the university level, and I’ve written about the Croatian Visual Arts curriculum and its tortured history at length (you can read my article on the current curriculum and its history here, though it’s in Croatian). The pattern in Croatia maps almost exactly onto what Hilary Layne describes for language literacy in the US.
Visual arts education here has been chronically marginalised. Croatia has one of the smallest allocations for visual arts in the entire EU: a single hour per week across all four years of secondary school. For comparison, most Western European countries allocate between two and four hours weekly. This isn’t incidental. Rather, it reflects a systemic undervaluation of visual education that researchers Gordana Košćec and Jelena Bračun have documented as producing measurable consequences in everything from architecture to public space to general visual culture.
When the Croatian Ministry of Education introduced a new Visual Arts curriculum in 2019 (which I’ve analysed critically in my own published work), it made a genuine effort to move away from rote chronological art history. The new approach emphasises critical thinking, contextual interpretation, and interdisciplinary connections. All worthy goals. But there’s a structural problem embedded in it: developing critical thinking about artworks requires students to first be able to perceive them properly. You can’t meaningfully contextualise something you haven’t genuinely looked at. The curriculum’s ambition is admirable; the conditions for its implementation are not.
Art historian Josipa Alviž, writing about the history of this subject in Croatian schools, traces a long-running tension between foundational visual literacy and higher-order analysis. That tension has never been resolved, just periodically renamed. The 1984 curriculum introduced a thematic, synchronic approach to artworks; the 2019 curriculum does much the same thing with updated terminology. The goal of teaching students to think critically about art keeps arriving before the goal of teaching them to see it.
Back to the general problem
What we increasingly offer instead is critical visual literacy: it teaches people to interrogate the ideological content of images before they’ve learned to see them properly. The emphasis shifts from the work itself to the frameworks brought to it. From looking to labelling.
The result is a growing number of people who can tell you whether an artwork is problematic but struggle to describe what it actually looks like. Who can speak fluently about representation and power while remaining genuinely disconnected from the physical and perceptual experience of standing in front of a painting. Who have opinions about art without having much of a relationship with it.
Both kinds of literacy are eroding in the same way and for similar reasons. We’ve replaced the slow, foundational work of building perception and comprehension with the more immediately satisfying work of interpretation. Interpretation without foundation isn’t insight, though. It’s pattern-matching with borrowed frameworks.
More visual literacy would mean more people who can walk into a gallery and feel something without needing permission. Who can be moved, challenged, or simply curious without needing a guide to tell them how to respond; who develop their own relationship with art over time, rather than inheriting someone else’s conclusions about it.
That matters beyond the art world. There’s substantial and growing evidence that genuine engagement with art contributes to human wellbeing: to emotional processing, to attention, to a sense of meaning. But that engagement requires a certain quality of looking that we’re not really teaching anyone anymore.
Which is worth thinking about.
Bibliography:
Alviž, Josipa. “Uloga i mjesto srednjoškolskog predmeta Likovna umjetnost u okviru umjetničkog područja hrvatskog odgojnoobrazovnog sustava.” Peristil: zbornik radova za povijest umjetnosti 62, no. 1 (2019): 203–19. https://doi.org/10.17685/Peristil.62.12.
Košćec, Gordana, and Jelena Bračun. “Marginalizacija vizualne kulture i umjetnosti u obrazovnom procesu.” Život umjetnosti: časopis o modernoj i suvremenoj umjetnosti i arhitekturi 88, no. 1 (2011): 34–43.