If you’re struggling to make it make sense, you’re in good company. Among parodists, even the highly skilled can’t top our current state.

“It’s just so absurd that it doesn’t leave much room for a novelist to work,” said Percival Everett, speaking to The Times of London about the Trump administration. “How can you come up with anything crazier than this?”

Everett had just received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for James , his reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the conversation with Times literary editor Robbie Millen was dominated —much as it is elsewhere—by topical events.

“The seriousness of it is frightening,” said Everett, citing parallels between the United States in 2025 and 1933 Germany. Not only are Americans “increasingly deprived of an education, he added, “but critical thinking about history is discouraged.”

Indeed, striking the civil rights movement from K–12 curricula, wiping the achievements of Americans of color from government websites, and similar efforts proceed apace in the fervent campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The fate of our shared narrative concerned Carla Hayden, who restated the public’s right to access reliable, accurate information and why it matters.

“What’s at risk is the loss of a more complete picture of the history of this country,” the then Librarian of Congress told Paris Alston, GBH News, about preserving the Black experience. “And when you don’t have a complete picture of history, it almost makes you blind to context to what’s going on right now and what’s going to happen in the future.”

On May 8, just days after the interview, President Trump fired Hayden, the first woman and first Black person to serve as the “nation’s librarian,” for her pursuit of DEI, per White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Open books in classrooms 

Trump’s priorities have been clear; in 2023, at a Moms for Liberty gathering, he pledged to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.” He’s gone on to revoke millions in funding for education research, including measurement of student progress, long-standing efforts that historically have received bipartisan support.

“None of it adds up to an agenda on learning,” writes Dana Goldstein. Meanwhile, Democrats are opposing book bans and funding cuts, without offering much of a plan either.

In her May New York Times piece “Has America Given Up on Children’s Learning?” Goldstein describes one dynamic classroom in Louisiana, where fifth graders are discussing the Renaissance. The kids are deeply engaged, via a skilled teacher, and actively using books open on their desks, which are remarkably absent of laptops or tablets.

Championed by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, this mode of maximizing learning over ideological strategies to education, as Goldstein puts it, “starts with reading.”

In this “new” approach, reading skill and academic performance grow in tandem and promote independent, critical thinkers and an informed citizenry. No wonder educators are enabling more class time for students to read.

Librarians know this, of course, and there’s plenty of research to back the benefits of reading to cognition. In fact, researchers have found that engagement with social studies is more effective than literacy instruction for developing reading comprehension. That’s civics, geography, and history—in all its complexity. A complete picture, as Hayden noted, will better us all.

Seeking quality education, Goldstein posits, could be a political platform, bridging the divide. One can hope.