Rooftop Pastor’s Sin Of Illiteracy Shames Chicago Elite

Chicago’s Protesting Rooftop Pastor says the progressive city’s perpetual “broken education system” is key to perpetuating its historical violence. Tell this ex-Chicagoan about it, who wrote a UIC term paper on exactly that point in 1969. The more things change …

High literacy among families on the city’s South Side is “one of the reasons the pastor took to the roof” of an abandoned building nearly 10 years ago in protest and to raise funds for a community center. Now he’s back there for at least another 100 days bemoaning (and drawing national attention to) the same stinking reality. According to the Chicago Citywide Literacy Coalition, and estimated 882K adults in the city still have low to non-existent literacy skills. That makes them hard to employ. And, that joblessness leads to crime. And, it of course sucks their kids and their kids’ kids into the same generational time warp marked by broken homes, poverty & violence. Years earlier as related by Fox News, Pastor Corey Brooks “started a charter school within his church to help reverse the illiteracy trend…yet his efforts felt like a drop in the bucket when the neighborhood public schools were pumping out illiterate graduates year after year.”

So the more things change the more they really stay the same? At least, in Chicago, they do. And, nobody seems to care, even though in “progressive” hands for nearly a century & the richly-endowed University of Chicago sits in its ivory tower right in the middle of it all. Recently Pastor Brooks discussed the dilemma with David Hoag, president of Warner University. Both agreed “education starts at home” while “80% of the Southside households are single parent” & those single moms can barely hold down 2-3 jobs while raising 2-3 kids on their own. So, there Pastor Brooks sits on the rooftop, thinking of ways to get money for his community center … and somehow renew his fight against the “sin of illiteracy.”

Davd Soul