The last year or so has witnessed mounting critique of rising illiteracy and the decline of reading.
Everyone from Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic to the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has sounded the alarm. “Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books,” wrote Horowitch in late 2024. Another Atlantic essay by Idrees Kahloon titled “America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy” was even more direct. “At the start of the century,” Kahloon wrote in October, “American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically.” Last autumn, Matt Walsh went on a diatribe against all things AI, claiming that we may just be witnessing the last literate generation in America. Are all of these voices pointing to something real?
Literacy in its basic form just means the capacity to decode linguistic symbols and link them together to form a meaning. The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which measures cognitive skills primarily across developed countries, defines literacy as the following: “The ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” If that’s the baseline, then most Americans today probably meet it: We can still order from a menu, read captions on Instagram, or see that a road sign says “Maple Avenue.” However, there is data to show that literacy is indeed declining in the United States. This alone is worrisome. But what else are people missing out on when reading goes by the cultural wayside?
If we go beyond mere comprehension and consider being able to make connections in complex arguments or follow a narrative through an entire novel, then the warnings of the past year feel more apropos. We might still manage to consume information. Basic literacy, however, is not enough. We need to remember how to read again. And that’s a different prospect entirely.
Walsh isn’t alone in his laments over the fall of reading and deep thinking. James Marriott, a culture writer for The Times of London, wrote a viral essay in September about this very topic on his Substack. Speaking of college students, he wrote,
Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children.
Marriott goes on to connect reading’s decline with a myriad of other problems. When people opt more for screens and short-form content over long-form printed material, their attention spans decline, their memory devolves, and they risk cognitive issues later on in life. He also notes that beyond the utilitarian benefits of reading, we miss out on literature’s soul-enriching beauties. Marriott writes,
The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. … Smartphones are robbing us of these consolations.
It is worth wondering why, even though we interact with images and videos of other people every day on social media, these digital forms of content don’t seem to instill an actual interest about the lives of other human beings. Social media and its currents of short-form content might expose us to the lives of others, but are more like a crass form of voyeurism than studious explorations of the human experience. Perhaps a big issue here is length. Short content gives us little time to process anything significant. Reading a novel, on the other hand, gives the reader an immersive portal into the lives of complex characters and offers a texture of an alternative world. When fiction is done well, we snap out of the fictive dream with more awe and appreciation for the real world around us. Reading enriches. Scrolling impoverishes.
Marriott’s alarming essay reminds us that reading well is a skill. It must be practiced and cultivated, and deep and thoughtful reading doesn’t come naturally to any of us. Those who love to read probably got hooked on books early in life and made a consistent habit of it. Today, parents pop an iPad in front of their 2-year-old and give their kids smartphones before they’ve lost their baby teeth. How can we expect them to become curious readers when digital devices destroy their appetite for good books?
I don’t have a good answer for this other than encouraging parents to keep smartphones from their kids, which is now shown to be correlated with higher grades, better attention spans, and higher happiness levels. I think we should also continue to uphold the value of a college education, or at least the institutions which still take reading seriously and believe that contemplation of truth, goodness, and beauty is among the highest forms of activity. If we want young people to read again, parents have to pluck their kids from the cesspool of smartphones, and the culture must shift in its notions of what a college education is for. At this point, if a student comes to college and emerges as a deep reader, it is worth it: Cultivating the ability to pay attention to any subject or field for a sustained period of time is sure to benefit a person.
C.S. Lewis, while known more for The Chronicles of Narnia and popular works of theology like Mere Christianity, was also a literacy scholar and critic who spoke wisely on the value of reading. His book An Experiment in Criticism has helped shape my own approach to reading well. Beyond simply skimming information or being quick to make judgments, we must practice a kind of patient attention in order to truly read a certain work. In addition, motivation matters when we read. Are we reading to appear intellectually or culturally elevated? To read well, we have to have a receptive attitude and a certain humility. Using visual art as an example, Lewis wrote,
We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
It’s this kind of patient receptivity, so key to reading longer written works, that our generation is struggling to cultivate. It takes practice. It takes, dare I say, a kind of virtue.
But reading also requires something else that we often fear the most as human beings: solitude. Solitude, it turns out, is a highly underrated condition in the 21st century. In a 2003 interview, the novelist David Foster Wallace noted that many of his friends disliked reading because it required them to sit alone for long periods of time. TV shows make us feel like someone else is with us in the room talking to us. Today, our iPhones offer us an endless supply of faux companionship and conversation. Perhaps this is why so many of us love to listen to podcasts. It makes us feel as though we are not alone.
Reading quietly does indeed force us to put aside our distractions and pay imaginative attention to a story, an idea, a character. As Lewis put it, reading lifts us out of our “provincialism.” We travel to other worlds, inhabit different perspectives, and live other lives. All of this, I would argue, is worth the initial discomfort of occasional solitude. While getting away from smartphones, going to a college that still values reading books, and learning to read well are all important, maybe the biggest need we have is to learn how to sit still with our own thoughts, our own souls, and dare to think. Anyone can do that. As my old professor used to say, “Five minutes of self-knowledge is worth more than a lifetime of self-delusion.” Reading deeply is ultimately a path to this kind of introspection and insight.
