Across classrooms, newsfeeds and legislative chambers, we are watching an erosion of the very things that make us human. Humanities departments are dismissed as indulgences. Degrees are framed as debts rather than academic pursuit. Book bans spread through the United States with chilling speed. Students in Britain are failing GCSEs at record levels. Meanwhile, comprehension, nuance and basic media literacy slip further out of reach.

 

The message is loud and insidious: thinking is optional and reading is obsolete.

 

We refuse to accept this.

 

So what’s in your trousers? What are you carrying into the world that interrupts its slide into ignorance?