Charlamagne Tha God offered a "teachable moment" on The Breakfast Club this week, delivering a belated “Donkey of the Day” to Juelz Santana for claiming kids "don't really need to learn how to read."
"I understand a lot of what Juelz Santana is attempting to say, and I wanna tell you why I don’t agree," Charlamagne said of Santana's remarks on the No Funny Shit podcast last week.
During the appearance, Santana argued that financial literacy is more important than reading, saying, “By the time they get to ninth grade they should be learning how to start businesses,” before adding, “But they don’t really need to learn how to read.”
Charlamagne pushed back, insisting that one shouldn’t be prioritized over the other—mainly because financial literacy still requires the ability to read. “There shouldn’t be an either/or to this discussion,” he said. “You should be able to read, and you should learn financial literacy. If you’re going to learn financial literacy, you need to know how to read.”
Santana also suggested that math is more important than reading since there are alternatives to reading a book, such as audiobooks. "You could listen to a book on YouTube," he said. "You can still obtain the information. You don't have to know how to read."
"If you rely on the apps and audiobooks, then you're always going to be dependent on someone else’s translation," Charlamagne argued. "But if you know how to read, then you have direct access to the information yourself. And what you can’t comprehend, what you don’t understand, then you can ask questions. That is the beauty of reading."
"But you can't comprehend or understand, if you don’t know how to read first," he continued. "Kids need to learn how to read full stop. Adults need to learn how to read full stop. Reading matters so much, man."
The Breakfast Club co-host went on to rattle off the benefits that come from reading, such as strengthening your brain, building vocabulary and reasoning skills, and training critical thinking skills.
While Charlamagne concedes that financial literacy is also "vital," he believes that being able to read is equally important. "There are studies that show financial education efforts produce better outcomes when coupled with general literacy," he said.
Charlamagne cited statistics from the National Literacy Institute, which found that, in 2024, 21 percent of adults in the United States are illiterate, and 130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.
"You don’t know how to read to your kids, man?" Charlamagne said. "That's something that money can't buy. Reading to your kids before bedtime, you can’t put a dollar amount on that. But the way this world is going, you’re gonna have kids in first grade reading to daddy before he goes to bed, if the father is even in the house."
While offering up his opinion, Santana also proposed that people are not "supposed to be illiterate."