Rose Horowitch
Appearances
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And only 17% said that books were the main part, and they were teaching mainly or wholly books. And one other example of this is when I spoke with a high school teacher at a public school in Illinois. She told me that she used to structure her classes around books, But now she focuses them on skills and uses books as one piece of that.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So, for example, she'll teach parts of Homer's Odyssey and a unit about leadership and then supplement that with music and articles and TED Talks. And so she's using books sort of in service of teaching about skills.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And there's definitely an argument to be made there. There, I think, are advantages to reading smaller portions of text, but analyzing them much more deeply and using these other forms of media to help supplement that. A lot of professors talked about that, the advantages of just kind of focusing in on something instead of having students skim it. And we also know that, you know,
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
it is likely to make students more engaged and that there is an advantage to kind of teaching them, you know, about specific skills. The problem though arises when that replaces reading full books. And, you know, this teacher was very clear that she also teaches two full books, you know, in at school.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
But when this, you know, focus on skills or focus on other media ends up replacing reading, I think that we lose something unique and beautiful.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I think that that's a big factor, and it's something that surfaced continually throughout my reporting, that we aren't really seeing a change in skills so much as just a shift in what we as a society value. And I think that's a compelling argument because we know that these students know how to read. So if they aren't, then we could think maybe they're just choosing not to.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And, you know, one professor of literature humanities, that course at Columbia, said that students come up to him year after year and say that they loved the course and the opportunity to read great books, but they were going to major in something more useful for getting a job that would make their parents happy.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
You know, and students are under a lot of pressure to major in computer science or economics. And even when they do take classes that are focused on reading or assign a lot of reading, there's a lot of pressure to pursue things more and more outside of the classroom. A recent survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend about as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And, you know, Seeing as basically all of them are going to get an A, I think about 80% of students at Harvard or grades at Harvard are in the A range. There's a lot of pressure to differentiate yourself outside of the classroom because you're not really going to do it in it. And so they do that with internships and extracurriculars, which feel like they are going to be what secures you a job.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I quoted one literacy scholar who wrote that every generation at some point discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect. And she wrote that in 1979. So we're not being original here.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And going back even further, the most famous example of this is in Plato's Dialogue Phaedrus, where Socrates worries that writing things down will make people forgetful because they won't practice using their memory. So I think it's always good to approach these claims with some healthy skepticism. Just knowing that throughout history, people have been making them.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
But at the same time, you know, I think that this example of Socrates kind of shows something different because the way we interface with information does change. Like, who could memorize the Iliad today? Like, we don't train our memories to do that. And so... I think that if we look at the amount that people read, it's been declining for decades.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So it's possible that, you know, as people have been making these arguments, maybe it's been a slower, less dramatic shift, but that they've kind of been right and that it's just been happening this whole time in the background.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Well, I think that there's a couple things that are so valuable about reading books. And one is just the content that's in books. You know, it's where we have access to kind of a lot of things that are just passed down through generations.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And certainly you could read a summary or it could be translated into a different form, but that would take you kind of ever further away from the original form and therefore the original meaning of a text. Yeah. So I think that that is sort of one bucket, what's contained in the text. And then I think the second is what reading books does for us.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And I spoke with the neuroscientist Marianne Wolfe, who told me that deep reading, that really immersing yourself in a text, stimulates critical thinking and self-reflection. Another professor said that engaging with someone else's ideas or experiences can really expand our empathy and reading can really train us to engage with nuanced arguments.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
I think a lot of this is bound up with changes in our attention because we don't know the causation of whether we read less and then that weakens our attention muscles or did our attention atrophy and therefore we read less. But
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
We know that a lot of the discovery of new ideas and the understanding of existing ones really requires sticking with them and thinking about them for an extended period of time, even when it's not immediately gratifying. And reading can really train us to do that. And I think if we aren't reading, we're missing out on something that we kind of can't get in any other thing that I can think of.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yes. And I will say, since the article came out, a lot of teachers and parents have reached out to me and a lot of them did have those same concerns or have the exact same observations about what was happening. I spoke or I heard from a prep school teacher who said that English teachers sometimes can't assign more than 10 to 15 pages of reading a night. But
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
At the same time, I also heard from a lot of people who were fighting back against this and who were offering optional courses for students who just wanted to read or were giving students the opportunity to read books for pleasure in the place of other assignments and trying to inspire a lifelong love of reading.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So certainly a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the decline of reading, but there was also something heartening about hearing people trying to retrain their attention.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yes. So he's taught the course for more than two decades. And one day in 2022, a student came to his office hours to tell him how challenging she was finding it. And this course, you know, it is hard. It asks students to read, you know, a book, sometimes a very long book in just a week or two.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And she told Dames that, you know, at her public high school, she had never been asked to read an entire book, that she'd been assigned excerpts and news articles and poetry, but not a whole book. And that experience, he really unlocked something for him, he said, because it helped explain this broader change he was seeing among a lot of his students.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
where they were really struggling to, you know, have sophisticated conversations about these really challenging texts and telling him that the reading load just felt impossible and that they didn't really know how to navigate, like, attending to small details in a text while also keeping track of the larger architecture.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So this was, I mean, I had went through the same experience where this was shockingly widespread. I mean, the majority of the 33 professors that I spoke to all relayed the same thing and they had discussed it in faculty meetings. So they knew that it was felt more broadly at their universities. Several of them had changed their courses. So they were now teaching far fewer books online.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And they described a really clear shift in their students. A literature professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students were shutting down when they were confronted with ideas they didn't understand and that they were just less able to get through a challenging text than they used to be.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And the chair of Georgetown's English department told me that he notices his students having trouble staying focused even when they're reading a sonnet, which is 14 lines. So it was very widespread and also very shocking to me.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So the challenge is no one has studied the exact question of, are college students worse at reading full books? But we have a lot of different data points that do really point to this. We know that young teens are much less likely to say that reading is one of their favorite activities or that they enjoy going to the library.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Americans of all ages are spending a lot less time reading than they used to. And the share of people who read books at all has gotten a lot smaller over the past two decades, according to the American Time Use Survey. So we do have very strong evidence that people are reading much less, even though no one has studied the exact question of, are we worse at reading full books?
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So they really spoke about it with two forms. So phones having kind of two main effects. One is that they just take up a lot of students' time and it's really hard to get students to read books, you know, when they can spend their time on TikTok or YouTube.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And the best kind of evidence for that is that 50 years ago, about 40% of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the past year, compared to about 12% who hadn't read any. And now those percentages have flipped. And so that is sort of one way that phones are just really fun to spend time on so people read less.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And then the other is that phones have gotten us sort of very accustomed to being entertained. One psychologist told me that it's changed expectations about what's worthy of attention and that being bored has just become unnatural. And so he was sort of talking about how...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
you know, persisting through something challenging and when it's not immediately interesting, like that's a skill and like a muscle that needs to be worked out. And it's just something that we're not exercising.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
So my reporting showed that that is likely one of the most significant factors. For more than two decades, there's been these educational initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Common Core. And a really common theme of them is that they emphasize informational texts and standardized tests. And so that leads teachers to teach to the test.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
They use short informational passages and then ask you questions like, what's the author's main idea? Cite this specific example. And that's the format of standardized reading comprehension tests. And a Stanford education professor told me that these new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and learn how to analyze texts.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
And so they're really bound up in ideas of global competitiveness. But he said, and this is his direct quote, in doing so, we've sacrificed young people's ability to grapple with long form texts in general. And I spoke with school administrators and education experts who travel the country to train teachers. And they all told me that just excerpts are replacing books across grade levels.
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Yes. So I was struck in my reporting by finding this document, this position statement from the largest professional organization of English teachers, where they argued that the time had come to de-center book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education, and that it was instead...
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The End of Reading
Time to be teaching students media literacy and preparing students for what they're encountering in the real world. And that's obviously a very extreme example. But in a recent survey of middle school teachers, nearly a quarter said that books are just no longer the center of their curricula anymore. And then half said that books were part of it, but they'd also really emphasized excerpts.