Why Americans Stopped Reading Books

The kids can’t read. Such has been the impli­ca­tion, even the dec­la­ra­tion, made by a wave of arti­cles in recent years. But the state­ment needs some qual­i­fi­ca­tion: the kids in ques­tion are Amer­i­can; what they can’t read is entire books, espe­cial­ly lit­er­ary fic­tion; and it isn’t just the kids in the first place. It would be the rare read­er, espe­cial­ly of a site like Open Cul­ture, who could resist feel­ing any despair when con­front­ed with, say, a study find­ing that only five per­cent of col­lege Eng­lish majors test­ed could under­stand the open­ing of Bleak House. But the real prob­lem is broad­er, as reflect­ed by the fram­ing of the Jared Hen­der­son video above, “Why Every­one Stopped Read­ing.”

Hen­der­son points to sev­er­al explana­to­ry fac­tors. The first is the way many Amer­i­can schools teach read­ing: for a time, they aban­doned the method of phon­ics, which starts with basic indi­vid­ual sounds and builds from there, and went all in on some­thing called “whole lan­guage learn­ing,” which was based on teach­ing stu­dents to “infer the mean­ings of words from con­text.” The idea was that, rather than rely­ing on rote drilling, the new sys­tem could cul­ti­vate a nat­ur­al love for read­ing in young stu­dents. “The only prob­lem is that whole lan­guage learn­ing did­n’t work,” and the result­ing drop in lit­er­a­cy rates sure­ly has some­thing to do with the dra­mat­ic falloff of read­ing in gen­er­al.

Oth­er U.S. edu­ca­tion­al reforms, such as the nation­wide push toward short infor­ma­tion­al texts and stan­dard­ized test­ing, which pri­or­i­tized infor­ma­tion extrac­tion over tex­tu­al engage­ment, must also share the blame. This has pro­duced an abun­dance of, to bor­row the head­line of Rose Horow­itch’s much-cir­cu­lat­ed Atlantic piece from 2024, “Elite Col­lege Stu­dents Who Can’t Read Books.” Those same stu­dents, of course, have all come of age in the time of the smart­phone, which does pro­vide us with an “end­less stream of text,” albeit of low-to-nonex­is­tent lit­er­ary mer­it — to say noth­ing of the infi­nite scroll of hyper-stim­u­lat­ing short-form videos absorb­ing ever-greater pro­por­tions of dai­ly life, and not just that of the young.

“Amer­i­cans, once mem­bers of a proud­ly lit­er­ate soci­ety, read much less than they used to,” writes Horow­itch in a new, in-depth piece on the coun­try’s “post-lit­er­a­cy.” “Few­er than half of all adults report­ed hav­ing read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 per­cent read a nov­el or short sto­ry.” At the same time, “gam­bling has become a more com­mon leisure activ­i­ty than read­ing a book: Last year, 57 per­cent of Amer­i­cans placed a bet.” The now-main­stream notion that Amer­i­ca (and, in time, the world) is revert­ing from a tex­tu­al to an oral cul­ture was first fore­seen by the likes of Mar­shall McLuhan, Neil Post­man, and Wal­ter J. Ong. But many here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry might hear their con­di­tion described in a more relat­able fash­ion by David Bowie, in his Tin Machine peri­od, near­ly forty years ago.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Read­ing Increas­es Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence & Brain Func­tion: The Find­ings of Recent Sci­en­tif­ic Stud­ies

How to Read Books That Chal­lenge Your Mind: Advice from Robert Greene, Author of The 48 Laws of Pow­er

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

How to Read Five Books Per Month & Become a Seri­ous Read­er: Tips from Deep Work Author Cal New­port

The Virtue of Own­ing Books You Haven’t Read: Why Umber­to Eco Kept an “Antili­brary”

W. H. Auden’s 1941 Syl­labus Asked Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Lit­er­ary Works, Total­ing 6,000 Pages

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.