Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can’t read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. Why, with everything happening in the world, would I want to talk about reading? The business podcaster Joe Weisenthal has recently turned me on to the ideas of Walter Ong and his book 'Orality and Literacy.' According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It is a specific means of structuring society's way of thinking. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition, mnemonics, and stories. Writing and reading, by contrast, fix words in place. One person can write, and another person, decades later, can read precisely what was written. This word fixing also allows literate culture to develop more abstract and analytical thinking. Writers and readers are, after all, outsourcing a piece of their memory to a page. Today, we seem to be completely reengineering the logic engine of society. The decline of reading in America is not the whole of this phenomenon. But I think that it’s an important part of it. Today we have two conversations—one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rose Horowitch and Nat Malkus Producer: Devon Baroldi Links "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books" "Testing Theories of Why: Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Achievement Trends" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is reading declining in America?
Today, the decline of reading in America. So I recently read a wonderful short story by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, which is called The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling. It's featured in his collection of short stories entitled Exhalation. And this short story unfolds along two parallel tracks.
In the modern narrative, which takes place sometime in the near future, a journalist is assigned to cover a new technology called re-mem, which allows people to film their entire lives and play back memories on a retinal projector. In other words, it's a technology that grants every person perfect photographic memory of every event in their life.
Chapter 2: How does technology affect reading habits?
A little bit like that great Black Mirror episode written by Jesse Armstrong. And this journalist explores the ways that re-mem changes people's lives, how it resolves fights between couples over who said what to whom, how it makes it impossible for certain people to forget fights in their past that they might want to forget.
But what makes this story so cool is that the modern sci-fi narrative is interspersed with another story that's set in the past. Here we have a Christian missionary introducing written language to a young man named Djingi in a preliterate African tribe. And Djingi initially finds the technology of writing very strange and not helpful.
His tribe has relied on oral tradition to remember and to share knowledge. But over time, Jujingi learns to read and to write, and he realizes that the process of reading is changing the texture of his thought, his own relationship to the past and to ideas.
And as he changes, he begins to have fights with the elders in his tribe when they tell one story and he can consult a written document that tells another. And the story by Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, essentially pings between these two narratives.
Two different technologies introduced in two different societies, re-mem versus reading, looking at how they change the texture of our relationship to ideas. That's the sci-fi story, in any case. In reality, we don't have anything like technologically perfect photographic memory. And in many cases, we seem to be losing reading as well.
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Chapter 3: What are the educational impacts of reduced reading?
Leisure reading, by some accounts, has declined by half so far in this century alone. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers and professors that they can't read entire books at, say, Columbia University because they were never taught to read entire books in high school or middle school.
The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. So why does this matter? Why, with everything happening in this country and around the world, would I be interested in reading?
Well, at the end of Ted Chiang's story, he appends a little author's note where he thanks a scholar named Walter Ong and a book called Orality and Literacy. Orality here meaning a culture of spoken language. According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It's a means of restructuring our thoughts and our knowledge.
In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition and mnemonic and stories. Orality requires the synchronous presence of multiple people in a place at the same time. And for that reason, oral cultures tend to be highly social.
Writing, by contrast, fixes words in place, which means one person can write their thoughts and another person decades later can read those precise thoughts with no error in the transliteration. This word fixing allows literate culture to develop abstract thinking. They are, after all, outsourcing the work of memory to a page, right?
When I write something on a note, it acts as an extension of my memory. And this allows for more complex and analytical thought. It's amazing and incredible to me that ancient storytellers could memorize the Iliad or the Odyssey, but you simply could not, say, invent calculus or quantum mechanics. without writing stuff down from time to time.
And even by some miracle, if you did, if Isaac Newton did like just think of calculus in his head, he would have to explain it in a story to someone who would explain it in a story to someone. And you would have to pass down this incredibly complex system of thought across generations.
The Bloomberg writer and podcaster Joe Weisenthal has written several wonderful riffs over the last few years about what he sees as this shift today from written culture to oral culture. He's called it the biggest story of our time.
Quote, many of the things that modern institutions are built on, formal logic, reasoning, examining the evidence, are downstream of the ability to contemplate the written word. End quote. Today, however, Joe thinks we're completely rewiring the logic engine of the human brain.
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Chapter 4: Why are books being sidelined in education?
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.
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.
And this essay really struck me because I had just been to dinner with some friends in the area with kids. And I was telling them about this reporting that you were doing on students who cannot read books at Columbia University. And the mother goes, oh, my God, it's the same thing. with our kid. I don't understand it. They don't read books anymore in middle, early high school.
And I go, okay, that's obviously not true. Your child goes to one of the best schools in the Chapel Hill, Durham area. I'm going to leave the name of the school anonymous because I want to keep these folks anonymous. They certainly weren't on the record with me. But, you know, we call her child over and I say, you know, what do you mean you don't read books?
And they go, well, we just studied Animal Farm in our class and we read excerpts of Animal Farm and watched some YouTube videos about it. And I basically lose my mind. I'm like, Animal Farm is a children's It's like 90 pages long. So that was my anecdotal experience confirming your reporting.
You did much better than just go to someone else's house and happen to fall into a conversation about their children. You spoke to 30 professors and teachers for this story. Tell us how widespread this phenomenon is.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What role does achievement culture play in reading habits?
That last example is so great because a part of me wants to be very fair to that teacher. Maybe her approach is just better than reading Homer's Odyssey alone. It's more multimedia. It meets students where they're at. It teaches them about a life skill using the media they're already engaged with, YouTube, music videos, music. It approaches the Odyssey as a practical text about life.
And in many ways, the Odyssey was probably first communicated between storytellers as a kind of civics education, right? A practical guide to the values of ancient Greece.
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,
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.
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.
This clicks into the final thing that I want to talk to you about, which is that I feel like you and I are circling this idea that education has become more instrumental and fixated on accountability and pre-professional in the last few decades. And this is a shift that has happened both at the level of education policy and at the level of parent and student psychology.
Maybe young people are reading less, not because they're less intelligent, but because they are funneling their intelligence toward explicit resume building. And all things equal, if you're a 16, 17-year-old who has two hours free on a Wednesday, you can read for fun or you can practice violin.
And that violin practice is going to directly increase your odds of getting into a good college much more than reading 100 pages of your favorite novel, right? In a way, reading is a very inefficient means of burnishing a resume. It's also... comparatively an inefficient means of getting that next unit of enjoyment compared to, say, watching television or watching some movie on Netflix.
So how much do you think this shift away from reading full books has to do with the intense pressures of achievement culture, which are squeezing book reading out of a lot of kids' lives?
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Chapter 6: What are the benefits of deep 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.
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.
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
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.
I agree with much of that. I think at a personal level, I feel smarter when I'm in a phase of my life where I'm reading books consistently and where the practice of reading is knit into the fabric of my day-to-day habits. And the truth is, when I think about the people I know who I consider very successful and There are very few of them who are like, yeah, I don't read.
I don't have enough concentration to focus on a book or long essay. I'm just incredibly successful, and yet I have no faculty of reading concentration. Those things don't hang together, in my experience. And maybe this is an older millennial thing, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha will develop an entirely different and more multimedia suite of skills
the same way that literacy replaced the skills of orality that you described. But I really do have a hard time thinking of people in my life who are successful who don't read as a habit. And one level deeper here, I think that the most important ideas require a concentration and a focus that benefits from hanging with an idea, staying inside of it for more than a minute or two.
And that level of concentration is very different than the kind of attention required to, say, watch a video for an hour, watch TV for an hour. There's a lean back aspect to watching video. But nothing against TV and film. There's something about reading that feels to me like the necessary co-creation of an idea.
It's like the author had an idea, and they put their idea, their little brain movie, into letters. And now my eyes are scanning the letters and I have to build in my own inner brain movie an idea drawn from those letters. It's up to me to bring that film of the inner mind to life. And in that way, reading really is a different kind of co-creation, I think.
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Chapter 7: How are educators responding to the decline in reading?
And who's leading this decline in reading achievement? Are we talking about a decline among elite college students, high achieving students? Are we talking about the decline being concentrated somewhere else?
Yeah, the elite college students are definitely at the top of the scoring distribution by and large, which you would expect. What we've seen is from 2013 to the most recent test scores, and again, there's variation across tests, but generally the highest performing students, they've been pretty much flat. They took a little bit of a hit during the pandemic and are largely sort of doing okay.
They're treading water. The kids on the low end, the kids at the 25th percentile and the 10th percentile, they've taken a huge nosedive. It's been large. It's been consistent. If anything, it looks like it's getting faster. And in this latest round, the bigger hits were in reading, not in math.
So when we talk about student reading scores declining, the biggest story is that the worst readers are getting worse. Who are we talking about here, like demographically speaking?
Yeah, I mean, we've known for some time, right, we have a black-white achievement gap. And we think about the achievement gap as black and white because white students on average score higher than African-American students. There's a Hispanic white gap. There's a poor, non-poor gap. And so, yeah, there's some disadvantages.
Disadvantaged students typically don't score as high as more advantaged students on a number of things. But that's not what's driving what we've seen lately.
In preliminary work where we've been looking at these NAEP scores, it looks like the gap between the 90th and the 10th percentile in this period has been growing faster than achievement gaps divided by black and white students or poor and non-poor students. So achievement gaps aren't what they used to be.
And how significant is America's achievement gap compared to other countries for which we have good data?
The data on this is a little thinner, but if you look, for instance, at TIMSS, which I did in a recent paper, that's math and science scores. You have a bunch of countries that have the scores during the same period, the 2013-15 zone until now. America's achievement gap during that time, again, between the top scores and the bottom scores, grew more than any other country.
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