Literacy: Is America done with reading?

“I can’t imagine a world without books,” said Nicole Russell in USA Today. But most Americans already “live in that world.” That’s the “devastating” takeaway from a viral new story in The Atlantic, which details why “the age of reading is over.” It notes that the number of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped more than 40% over 20 years — the decline cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels — and that fewer than half of adults read a single book a year. Reading progress for elementary students has stalled and only about a third of high school seniors are “proficient” at analyzing complex fictional themes. We can blame smartphones, social media, and short-form videos, all of which deliver “perpetual hits of dopamine” at the expense of the deeper analysis and comprehension gained by reading. It’s no wonder President Trump was re-elected, said Marsha Lederman in The Globe and Mail (Canada). When the electorate relies on TikTok for knowledge, “you get today’s dumbed-down, polarized world on fire.”

Reading is not “going extinct,” said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. Yes, fewer Americans are reading for pleasure, but those who do are reading more. Book sales are near-record highs; there are now 70% more independent bookstores than in 2020; and the amount of time that young Americans spend reading has actually crept up from 8.4 minutes a day in 2003 to 11.7 minutes in 2022. And let’s not pretend there was ever a golden age of reading, said Joel J. Miller in his Substack newsletter. In the supposedly idyllic pre-smartphone age, the best sellers were often genre junk and millions of Americans “read nothing, read little, read badly, or read mainly to kill time.” Worrying about the future is “easy to do when you romanticize the past.”

My worry is we’re not alarmed enough, said Rod Dreher in his Substack newsletter. Hitler came to power in a highly literate Germany, but the Nazis took advantage of movies and radio to push simple messages with immediate emotional impact. We know how that ended, and in our postliterate age, a future dictator would “have an incomparably easier time of it.” Don’t believe me? Consider “the college students who are being memed into hating Jews” by social media. And things will only get worse as more people use AI to digest, analyze, and make judgments on everything from study papers to legal documents and news reports. By giving up on the hard work of reading, Americans “are training themselves not to think, but to obey.”

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