Are Books and Reading Extinct?
“Bring back beautiful book covers.”
So tweeted Bobbie @bo66ie29. (I find tweeted nicer than posted on X).
I couldn’t agree more.
My passion for books dates back to my childhood — before I could decipher all the words and sentences — when my mother would read me stories, nursery rhymes, poems and words to songs, a tradition I carried on with my daughter.
The books were heavy, bound in thick materials and had beautiful covers. Paperbacks weren’t as ubiquitous. Publications with color drawings or pictures attracted me and livened the narratives.
Thanks to a regular supply of books, magazines and newspapers in English, Arabic and French that entered our house in the pre-TV, much less digital media and generative AI era, and long thereafter, I became a voracious reader.
The late British prime minister Winston Churchill reportedly said: “If you cannot read all your books…fondle them — — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
So it pained me to read in Business Insider that “For Gen Alpha, learning to read is becoming a privilege.”
“Across the US, kids are struggling to read. Last year (2023), reading performance for fourth graders hit its lowest level since 2005, and teachers expect that number to keep tumbling,” wrote Joan Ridley and Ayelet Sheffey in December 2024.
The panic to turn things around quickly is driving a wedge between teachers, politicians, and parents, all pointing the finger of blame at one another, they added.
Perhaps an ominous precursor to the Trump administration’s decision to eliminate the federal Department of Education.
A December 2024 Washington Post article featured a young woman with learning disabilities who sued her Connecticut school district after she graduated from high school because she couldn’t read.
I was gobsmacked the school let her out into the world as an illiterate person. Is that even legal?
Aleysha Ortiz was surprised to get an A on a sophomore class assignment she hadn’t even written or typed. She apparently spoke it to her computer and used speech-to-text software to transcribe it, like she did with all her schoolwork at Hartford Public High School in Connecticut, the report said.
Despite this, Ortiz alleges in her lawsuit that she was never provided adequate therapy or special education support. In elementary and middle school, she exhibited behavioral issues and was frequently kept in her principal’s office instead of class and ignored by administrators when she lobbied for additional support. She was still illiterate when she graduated — with honors — last spring, she said.
“The long-term implications will be dire” if literacy does not improve, Sen. Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate education committee, said in February (2024), as reported by Business Insider. “We are at risk of having an entire generation of children, those who were in their prime learning years during the COVID-19 pandemic, fail to become productive adults if reading proficiency does not improve.”
Another Washington Post article last month pointed to the adverse effects Covid-19 had that appeared in federal data showing reading and math test results had slipped in the years following the pandemic’s outbreak.
“The data showed that reading scores, which had fallen dramatically from 2019 to 2022, fell again in 2024, with a record portion of eight-graders scoring in the lowest category for proficiency,” it said.
It quoted an education researcher who explained that test scores were correlated with wages so the drop in achievement has direct consequences for the economy that are hard to detect now but would become clear over time with damage likely to amount to a loss of trillions of dollars in earnings down the road.
In a Radio Atlantic episode entitled “Why Reading Books in High School Matters: You’ll Understand When You’re Older,” Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic’s assistant editor who wrote the article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, spelled it out.
She said college professors she’d interviewed saw a change in the way students were prepared to read when they arrived at college, adding that high schools were assigning far fewer books.
In the November 2024 issue of The Atlantic magazine Horowitch shed light on college students, even at elite institutions of higher learning, who can’t read books and are stumped by the idea of reading several books per semester.
A far cry from my freshman college course in cultural studies requiring us to read one to two books per week, discuss them with the class, and write a report on each.
A Columbia University literature professor recounted how students were overwhelmed by reading with one student telling him “that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.”
How ironic this would happen in a country with the wealth and resources of the United States.
“‘National crisis’ as children’s reading enjoyment plummets to new low, report warns,” headlined Britain’s Sky News in a piece decrying the steepest decline since records began by the National Literacy Trust in 2005.
It said education experts were calling on the UK government to establish a reading task force in an era when children are “more used to having a device.”
Only about one in three (34.6%) children and young people aged eight to 18 said they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2024, down from 43.4% the previous year, according to the research.
The Economist magazine referred to a once-in-a-decade survey on adult intelligence by the 38-state Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showing worsening basic skills across the rich world.
A telling graphic accompanying the piece is entitled “Are adults forgetting how to read?”
Are you smarter than a ten-year-old? New data suggest that a shockingly large portion of adults in the rich world might not be. Roughly one-fifth of people aged 16 to 65 perform no better in tests of maths and reading than would be expected of a pupil coming to the end of their time at primary school, according to a study released on December 10th by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Worse still, adults in many places have grown less literate over the past ten years.
The Financial Times nailed it with Mia Levitin’s opinion piece “Social media, brain rot and the slow death of reading.”
The easy dopamine hit of social media can make reading feel more effortful by comparison. But the rewards are worth the extra effort: regular readers report higher wellbeing and life satisfaction, benefiting from improved sleep, focus, connection and creativity. While six minutes of reading has been shown to reduce stress levels by two-thirds, deep reading offers additional cognitive rewards of critical thinking, empathy and self-reflection.
She took the words out of my mouth.
I can’t remember how many times I hammered away at my former charges (university journalism students and professional journalists I trained) on the importance of reading until their eyes popped out of their sockets to acquire the necessary knowledge that would make their reports accurate, contextually solid, fair and balanced.
It’s what I’d practiced in a previous incarnation as a foreign correspondent and editor, and still do.