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