Transcription
At universities all around the country, professors are reporting a problem: students can't read books. This is true even at elite colleges and universities. In one required class at Columbia, students are often expected to read about a book a week, but in the past couple of years, students have started telling their professors that they can't do it. One student told her professor that she had never been required to read an entire book.
This is part of a larger trend. People aren't reading anymore. This is true for men and women, people who went to college and people who didn't. So, what's going on? It turns out that there are many pieces to this puzzle, but it all begins with how we teach kids to read.
For a very long time, we taught kids to read in a very particular way. We called it phonics. With phonics, you start with individual sounds, you work your way up from those sounds into more complex sounds, and then you see how those sounds build words. If you come across an unfamiliar word, you're told to sound it out.
But starting around the 1960s, a new approach to language education emerged, and we called this whole language learning. In whole language learning, and some successor ideas like balanced literacy, the idea was that you should learn to read at the level of a word using a method called three-cueing. Students were taught to infer the meaning of words from context. This whole approach was pitched as a very natural, almost kind of organic way to teach kids how to read. The idea was that actually that kids had a natural propensity to read, and that all you need to do was put them in the right context and maybe give them a few small techniques or nudges, and they would basically teach themselves how to read. You wouldn't have to go through a kind of boring process like learning phonics. It's actually kind of a romantic idea, right? It'd be lovely if kids just had this natural ability to read as long as we just put them in the right environment. And it makes reading feel more like an art than a science.
The only problem is that whole language learning didn't work. Literacy rates fell, and in the countries which had adopted whole language learning—that would be parts of the United States, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia—more and more kids weren't able to read at grade level. It was a systemic failure of education systems across multiple countries. And if we're trying to explain why people don't read anymore, well, this has to be part of the story. If you weren't taught how to read properly, reading is never going to be something that you do for fun. It's never going to be pleasurable. It's going to feel really difficult and like a lot of work. And so if more and more people find reading difficult, then they're just going to stop reading.
Now, whole language learning and balanced literacy, these were never uncontested ideas. Despite the fact that they were adopted in so many countries, there were always people who were pushing back, and this was something that became known as the reading wars. In some states, it was described as the most vicious debate in politics. Journalists and scientists have been reporting on the damaging effects of whole language learning. And actually, we might be able to say that COVID-19 is going to lead to a change in how kids learn to read. Because during the pandemic, when more kids were learning at home, their parents got to see how ineffective whole language learning really was, and that added a lot of political will to solving the problem. More and more states and even countries are bringing back phonics into their reading programs. And while some of the insights from whole language learning might stay in the classroom, at least kids are going to be learning those basic building blocks, which the data do seem to indicate actually would help them. So maybe we'll see a turn in the future where more people want to read for pleasure again.
For the students who were never taught phonics, though, much of the damage is already done, and I don't know how to fix that problem. Now, this is speculation, but I would be willing to bet that kids who make it into a school like Columbia or other elite universities are probably able to read at grade level. But they were still telling their professors that they didn't feel capable of reading a book in even a week. And these are kids, remember, who are mostly full-time students. They have a lot of free time, and actually their studies should be their main focus. So just pointing out sort of the disastrous effects of whole language learning isn't going to adequately explain why fewer people are reading.
But part of the explanation does still seem to come from the way that these kids were taught in school, and it has to do with education reforms, most infamously things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Those are, at least, the names for education reforms in the United States. Other countries have different systems; I'm not talking about those here. The push to reform education in the United States emphasized two things: informational text and standardized testing. When students were being taught how to engage with the text, they were learning how to extract information from it. You would even see people say that books were outdated and that we needed to to teach kids about the text that they would actually encounter in real life, like articles or web pages.
So, as an exercise, a student might be presented with an excerpt from a longer text. They would be asked to analyze the argument, or talk about what evidence was presented in the text, or even what the thesis statement was. And a lot of this would happen in English classes, where traditionally you would be first exposed to reading longer and more difficult books. So instead of learning things like analyzing symbolism or theme, or being able to practice your close reading of text, you were mostly focused on extracting information from those excerpts.
Doing that traditional English stuff, like close reading, builds something that we could call your reading stamina. And when a student who is fully capable of reading says that they can't read a whole book in a week, it's likely because they haven't had a chance to develop their reading stamina. In fact, some professors and teachers, even in high schools or middle schools, say that kids' reading stamina has been declining steadily over the years as well. If you're trying to build your reading stamina, one of the things you can do is just read books. Just sit down and try to see how many pages you can get through before you have to go and do something else. But students increasingly aren't actually being given those opportunities in the classroom or even in assignments. In one survey, only 17% of educators said that they were teaching primarily with whole text.
So when it comes to those students at elite colleges and universities, or even just colleges and universities in general, who say that they can't read a whole book, I think it has more to do with this than it does with problems with whole language learning. I think this is the better explanation for why students at Columbia or other great universities aren't able to read whole books. These students were able to get into some of the best colleges and universities in the world, but they were never taught how to be great readers. They were taught how to be great test-takers. So when these students get to college and they're asked to read whole books, they can't do it because this is a completely different skill than they've been told that they need to develop in high school. So much of their education has been about optimizing themselves for standardized tests and then eventually to take something like the SAT or the ACT. And if you're just trying to do really well on a standardized test, you need to focus on reading excerpts and being able to answer multiple-choice questions, or maybe write a five-paragraph essay about what you just read. You don't have to focus on analyzing themes in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens. You don't have to worry about reading great books.
So then, if you have a required freshman class that's about great novels in the Western tradition, well, this might be your first time being exposed to many of those great novels in the Western tradition, and it's going to be hard because you're not used to it. So when we look at the big picture, we have some students who were never taught how to read properly because of things like whole language learning, and then we have students who were never taught how to read books because of an emphasis on standardized testing.
But when we want to talk about why other people have stopped reading for fun, or just stopped reading in general, there's one more thing we have to talk about, and it's the phones. So something that gets overlooked in a lot of these discussions is that many people actually do spend their days reading. It's just that they're not reading books. If you're scrolling on YouTube or Twitter, then you are actually encountering an endless stream of text, more text than many people throughout history would have encountered in a week or a month. TikTok is maybe the most addictive of these platforms, and practically every video has burned-in captions, so people are constantly reading something when they are online. And if you're driving, you're seeing road signs, you're seeing billboards, you're seeing advertisements. The world wants you to read. It just doesn't really want to give you the time that it takes to read a good book.
So this is my backyard, and occasionally I'll come and I'll bring a book and I'll try to get some reading done. It's peaceful and it's quiet, and it's one of the places that I really love. So maybe I start reading the book, and I'll feel really good, and then within just a few seconds, this thing wants my attention. So if I want to get any reading done, I have to be disciplined and I have to decide that my phone needs to stay inside, some place where it can't distract me.
Now imagine that you're a college student, and you've never read a full book in a week, or really ever been asked to read a hard or long book for your education, and your professor says, "Hey, I want you to read Homer's Iliad in a week." Let's say you're a good sport, too, and so you go to your dorm room, you get your book, and you say, "You know what? I'm going to do it." But now think about all the things that are there ready to distract you: other people, or your phone, or your laptop, anything with a screen, really, is there and it's ready to just make you feel more stimulated. Because let's face it, even if we're people who really like to read, compared to doing other things, the act of reading is really boring. It is the antithesis of our sort of constant need to be overstimulated.
A lot of schools, high schools, middle schools, things like that, have decided to start banning smartphones from the classroom, and my reaction, of course, is like, "What took you so long?" Of course, students aren't going to be able to read or learn properly if they're constantly distracted by their phone. So not only have we systematically failed students as we've taught them to read or not taught them to read in some cases, we've also just designed a world that is there to constantly demand our attention, and that takes us away from those deeper, reflective, sort of focus-heavy practices like reading good books.
So when adults try to say why they don't read anymore, they usually cite three things: they don't have time, they can't pay attention long enough, or they blame social media. And I suspect that all of these are related. The fact that we don't have time, or that we can't focus, is in part because of things like social media. Other forms of easy entertainment are there to take up all of our time. I often like to read before bed, and occasionally I'll tell myself that I need to check my phone before I start reading, and I'll find that I end up scrolling for an hour without even realizing it. Time seems to flow differently when I'm on my phone compared to when I'm trying to do something more demanding like reading. It's easier, it's more instantly pleasurable, even though at the end of the day I feel terrible about it. So I expect that a lot of the things that I found are true for me could be true for you, or for many other people, and are part of this broader explanation of why nobody reads anymore.
So the result of all this is that fewer and fewer people read books. You have your super-readers who read tons of books, and they keep the average numbers up, but you have more and more people who decide that reading just isn't for them. I don't know exactly what we're supposed to do about that, but that's where we are.