Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
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 PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Links
“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”
“Testing Theories of Why: Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Achievement Trends”
Summary
In the following excerpt, Derek and Rose Horowitch explore the decline in book reading among middle and high school students and how it impacts them once they reach college.
Derek Thompson: Your essay in the Atlantic magazine was entitled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” And it begins with Nicholas Dames, who has taught the great books course at Columbia University for decades. Several years ago, he had an experience that he described to you as jaw-dropping. What happened?
Rose Horowitch: Yes. 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, it is hard. It asks students to read a book, sometimes a very long book, in just a week or two. But she told Dames that 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 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 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 attending to small details in a text while also keeping track of the larger architecture.
Thompson: 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 with our kid. I don’t understand it. They don’t read books anymore in middle, early high school.” And I go, “OK, 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 we call her child over, and I say, “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 parable. 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.
Horowitch: I went through the same experience where this was shockingly widespread. 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. 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.
Thompson: These are good anecdotes. You talked to a lot of professors at a lot of different universities. Do we have something here that is more systemic, either someone like Gallup or Pew serving thousands of students to see whether we have really clear data showing that high schoolers, college students are reading significantly fewer books?
Horowitch: 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. 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?
Thompson: If we’re looking for reasons here, then as clichéd as it might seem, I do think we have to start by looking at screens and social media. Let’s keep this out of our voices first and keep it with your reporting. How did the professors and the teachers that you spoke to describe the way that screened media seemed to be eclipsing books for their students?
Horowitch: They really spoke about it with two forms, phones having 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 when they can spend their time on TikTok or YouTube. And the best kind of evidence for that is that 50 years ago, about 40 percent of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the past year compared to about 12 percent who hadn’t read any. And now those percentages have flipped. And so that is one way: that phones are just really fun to spend time on, so people read less.
Then the other is that phones have gotten us 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 talking about how persisting through something challenging and when it’s not immediately interesting, that’s a skill and a muscle that needs to be worked out, and it’s just something that we’re not exercising.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Rose Horowitch and Nat Malkus
Producer: Devon Baroldi