My 12-year-old is a compulsive reader. To the point of me telling him, put the book down, go do stuff.
My 9-year-old has no interest in reading.
No bowl of porridge in this house is “just right” apparently.
I’m more alarmed by the 9-year-old of course. Our environment conspires against reading so it’s more important than ever to establish the habit early.
Warning: Old man yells cloud moment
My niece goes to the local public school that is consistently in the top .50% of public high schools in the US. She had no summer reading assignment. She will be asked to read 3 books all school year.
Going into my freshman year of Christian Brothers Academy in NJ back in 1992, I was assigned 7 books to read over the summer. Every summer after that, we were assigned at least 4 books just for the summer. CBA is a good high school, but I live next to one here in CA and our local public school has a better reputation on academics. What if you don’t go to a top school? Or is this lack of reading some perverted thing that top schools do?
(My niece is taking AP Physics as a sophomore which used to be unheard of, so times have changed in good ways too. My niece’s favorite subjects are math and science and I’d like to think I had something to do with the math, given all the nerdom I’ve embarrassed my family with. What is not encouraging is discovering that there are only 4 girls out 40 students in AP Physics.)
Is standardized testing reflecting a reduction in standards or just the reality of dilution that you’d expect if a large majority of HS kids expect to go to college, as opposed to a few generations ago?
Some time back, I was in a conversation on Twitter about the SATs. Someone mentioned that the scores are inflated these days and you can’t compare across time. I didn’t realize that but sure enough one of my Twitter mutual follows chimed in. No other than Princeton Review founder Adam Robinson. He left a brief reply saying that while it’s complicated, it’s true.
Poking around online (a good place to start is the wiki for History of the SAT) you will find many calculators that allow you to compare SAT scores or at least percentiles between years. There have been many adjustments over the years, but the largest was the 1995 recentering. While my math score would be basically flat after adjustment my verbal was an 800 by today’s system. I haven’t delved into the decomposition of why verbal scores needed to be so inflated, but since the recentering occurred as early as 1995, it doesn’t make me think this is related to the decline of reading that has garnered more recent attention.
[To further muddy the waters, I’m not sure to what extent SAT verbal evaluation maps to any real-world acumen. I got a 790 on my SAT II – Writing, one of these subtests you needed to take back then, despite being a B student in English and literally walking out of a play at BAM in my late 20s because I was too stupid to understand it. My wife and I still think about how high-schoolers were laughing at Shakespeare’s jokes as we sat puzzled, trying to get cultured, only to give up by intermission. Yes, I write on the internet today, but it’s more like talking than the writing I saw in the classics I was forced to struggle through.]
This post by James Marriott suggests the decline is real. And why wouldn’t it be? Everyone sold 4 hours of their day to the biggest companies.
(Hey, at least your absentee ownership of cap-weighted indices investments benefit.)
The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (James Marriott)
Select excerpts:
- “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”
- In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record
- The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record
- Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students
- “Most of our students”, according to another despairing assessment, “are functionally illiterate”. This chimes with everything I’ve heard in my own conversations with teachers and academics. One Oxbridge lecturer I spoke to described a “collapse in literacy” among his students.
- The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.
- Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they arepersuasive to many people.
- Postman cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in which both presidential candidates spoke at incredible length and in remarkable detail as one of the summits of print culture: Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed . . . on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond…When Postman was writing in the late 1980s, such debates were already impossible to imagine.
Marriott’s post is dramatic. Its strength is more in diagnosis than in bridging the decline of traditional literacy to its ramifications.
A librarian writes a terrific criticism of the post which articulates the concern I feel but didn’t put my finger on.
The real crisis isn’t that people can’t focus. It’s that we’ve built information environments actively hostile to contemplation while simultaneously lamenting the loss of contemplative practices. We’ve created attention casinos and then diagnosed the players with moral weakness. This is a design problem masquerading as a cultural catastrophe.
Consider what actually happens in a modern library. We don’t just house books anymore. We create what I think of as “containers for attention”: spaces and practices that enable different kinds of engagement with ideas. The silent reading room remains sacred, but it’s joined by maker spaces where people think with their hands, recording studios where oral traditions find new life, collaborative zones where knowledge emerges through conversation. We’re not abandoning literacy. We’re expanding what literacy means.
Marriott is right that we’re living through a profound transformation. Where he sees collapse, though, I see metamorphosis. The challenge isn’t to preserve the aristocracy of print but to democratise the conditions for deep thought across all modes of engagement. This means designing information environments that support sustained attention, teaching people to navigate multiple modes of meaning fluently, and recognising that human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain.
The future Marriott fears, where we’re all reduced to emotional, reactive creatures of the feed, is certainly one possibility. But it’s not inevitable. The teenagers I see who code while listening to philosophy podcasts, who annotate videos with critical commentary, who create elaborate multimedia presentations synthesising dozens of sources: they’re not the degraded shadows of their literate ancestors. They’re developing new forms of intellectual engagement that we’re only beginning to understand.
The question isn’t whether civilisation will survive the death of traditional literacy. It’s whether we’ll have the wisdom and imagination to build institutions, practices, and spaces that support human flourishing in an age where meaning moves through light and sound as readily as through ink. That’s the real work ahead, and it’s far more interesting than mourning a monopoly that was always going to end.
There’s a compromise between Marriott and the librarian. A minority of people will have the “wisdom and imagination” to be empowered by new mediums and not be “reduced to creatures of the feed”.
Maybe it’s not your fault or “moral failing” if you can’t focus when We have decided to outsource our principles to “what’s good for the market is Good”.*
* I’m not sure when this happened but here’s how I see it:
When I was a teen, the Jeff Lebowski played by David Huddleston’s character was the villain. Jeff Bridges’ Lebowski was the hero.
Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost.
The dude extracts a mini-revenge when he tricks Brandt into giving him an expensive rug.
The spirit of today would be to lock the Dude up for pulling one over on a guy who turned out later to be an empty suit:
We did let him run one of the companies briefly, but he didn’t do very well at it…I give him a reasonable allowance. He has no money of his own. I know how he likes to present himself. Father’s weakness is vanity.
You don’t need to mainline kumbaya to notice how much rebellion-coded acceleration optimism is corporate-cuck fluffery.
Here’s a fun one:
There are only 2 possible reactions.
- You hate this interview
- You love this interview and hate yourself
I’m still stuck in the 90s, so you can guess where I live on this.
In honor of Jane Goodall, I’ll share a letter I saved in my notes years ago sharing her exhortation to make kids read:
Dear Children,
I want to share something with you — and that is how much I loved books when I was your age. Of course, back then there was no Internet, no television — we learned everything from printed books. We didn’t have much money when I was a child and I couldn’t afford new books, so most of what I read came from our library. But I also used to spend hours in a very small second hand book shop. The owner was an old man who never had time to arrange his books properly. They were piled everywhere and I would sit there, surrounded by all that information about everything imaginable. I would save up any money I got for my birthday or doing odd jobs so that I could buy one of those books. Of course, you can look up everything on the Internet now. But there is something very special about a book — the feel of it in your hands and the way it looks on the table by your bed, or nestled in with others in the bookcase.I loved to read in bed, and after I had to put the lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a torch, always hoping my mother would not come in and find out! I used to read curled up in front of the fire on a cold winter evening. And in the summer I would take my special books up my favorite tree in the garden. My Beech Tree. Up there I read stories of faraway places and I imagined I was there. I especially loved reading about Doctor Doolittle and how he learned to talk to animals. And I read about Tarzan of the Apes. And the more I read, the more I wanted to read.I was ten years old when I decided I would go to Africa when I grew up to live with animals and write books about them. And that is what I did, eventually. I lived with chimpanzees in Africa and I am still writing books about them and other animals. In fact, I love writing books as much as reading them — I hope you will enjoy reading some of the ones that I have written for you.