It’s a secular attempt to equate literacy with morality.
I haven’t seen it or read whatever book it was based on. However, I happened to read a truly awful but very popular (among the critics) book called the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It was a stupid book that implied that learning to like “great literature” (thanks to a local leftist bluestocking) converted Guernsey farmers into members of the Resistance in WWII.
Of course, nothing of the sort took place. Either you had moral standards at the beginning - and suffered the penalties - or you didn’t have them and just went along with Hitler, regardless of whether you just knew how to read or were among the most cultivated people in Germany, which described many of Hitler’s followers.
Our “intellectuals” are out there right now, fawning over our own Hitler, President Bambi, and years hence people will be asking what made them do this. But literacy has nothing to do with morality.
You are spot on, 100 percent. A former lib friend of mine (an educated person - a veterinarian) gave it to me because her book discussion was reading it. After I finished she asked what I thought.
I said it was about the banality of evil. That the characters were too lazy, to full of ennui to make a choice to turn from evil.
She gave me a cow-new fence look and said “I thought it was about what happens when people don’t read”.
AS IF NAZI GERMANY WAS FULL OF ILLITERATES!!!
My respect for her nosedived at that minute.