Why Can't We Read Anymore?
In October 2024, The Atlantic published an article by Rose Horowitch provocatively titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The article discusses the alleged phenomenon of students’ declining reading stamina and ability. Professors are quoted saying that the current generation of college students cannot keep up with traditional reading curricula. Horowitch attributes much of this failure to misguided reforms like Common Core and No Child Left Behind implemented in middle and high school.
These education reforms primarily use standardized tests as a metric of success, which critics claim encourages Goodharting, or the practice of optimizing one’s behavior to a given measure at the cost of other standards of achievement. If students’ performance on a test that only includes short passages determines teachers’ efficacy, there are plenty of incentives to “teach to the test” and prioritize excerpts over long-form content. Many teachers feel this oversimplification of the problem unduly blames them and lacks acknowledgment and appreciation for their and their students' work. Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, pointed out that if the issue is that students are not being told to read books, the natural solution would be to assign them books to read.
Notably, there is a correlation between students who read for pleasure and higher performances in all subjects. However, teachers frequently find that getting students to read assigned books is a whole different beast than assigning them. Furthermore, many students find they can do well enough in their classes without reading by looking up summaries or borrowing a friend’s notes. Therefore, the solution to diminishing reading stamina is likely more complex than increasing the number of full-length books in the curriculum, and the cause of a decline on this scale is probably not caused by one factor alone. Nevertheless, Horowitch’s claim that college students’ reading ability is worsening is only based on 33 professor testimonies, and there is no comprehensive data outlining a downward trend in college students’ level of engagement with classical texts. Are students struggling more than previous generations?
In 1979, literacy scholar Martha J. Maxwell said, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Horowitch’s article shows that, at least for this generation, there are more than a few professors for whom this statement rings true. However, with the rise of social media algorithms designed to hold people’s attention hostage and short-form video content causing a decrease in attention span, many people are worried that this time, students’ alleged inability to read is a more concrete issue than in the past.
Censuses from the National Association of Education Procurement (NAEP) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show declines in high school reading scores over the past few decades in the U.S. and Australia, respectively. While Horowitch’s article garnered criticism for her hypothesized cause, people did not generally try to refute the claim that students are struggling more with classical literature than in years previous. In fact, most dissidents brought up a slew of other possible reasons for decreasing reading comprehension, including the fact that, with access to the internet and large-language models like ChatGPT, cheating is now easier and more common.
The decline in reading stamina has also provided fodder for those participating in “The Reading Wars,” an ongoing discussion in the educational sphere devoted to finding the “best” method of teaching children how to read. In the 1970s and ‘80s, “whole language learning” dominated elementary schools. This strategy is based on the romantic idea that written language comes naturally to children in the same way speech does. Proponents of the whole language approach believe that linguistic skills are naturally developed as students begin to assign meaning to words. This idea of natural development, however, leaves little explicit instruction for how teachers implement the method and has led to criticisms that whole language was only a teaching philosophy rather than a fully-fledged instructional approach.
In the 1970s, New Zealand researcher Marie Clay developed a Reading Recovery program to teach students. This whole language strategy involved teaching students to use context clues such as the word’s spelling, sentence structure and grammar, and the passage’s meaning to interpret unknown words. After implementation in New Zealand, whole language methods spread to the United States, Australia, and Great Britain from the 1980s until the late 2010s, when it was removed due to reports of its lack of effectiveness. This was a sharp departure from the previous method—phonics—which explicitly teaches students letter-sound relationships to help them “decode” new words.
Learning phonics is considered essential to becoming a fluent reader and skilled writer. Furthermore, phonics has far more research in the U.S. and Australia backing its effectiveness for early readers. Learning to read and write is significantly more difficult than learning to speak, and especially for English language learners, spelling and other literacy skills are hard to master due to the complex letter-sound relationships. However, despite being considered a crucial aspect of English language learning, the systematic and explicit methods of phonic work make it difficult for teachers to spark interest in their students.
One of the reasons why whole language learning took off was because, frankly, phonics was boring. People thought that if children were more enthused about reading, they would naturally develop the necessary skills through their motivation to read more. Unfortunately, reports on the initiative deemed it largely ineffective, leading to a decline in popularity. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing until now, the whole language method was traded out for “balanced literacy.” Currently, 72% of American teachers report using balanced literacy to teach their students, but this method still shares some similarities with whole language despite the research arguing against it. Balanced literacy keeps whole language learning at the forefront of instruction but supplements it with phonic strategies.
One of balanced literacy’s most distinctive features is the “leveled text” system, where books are assigned reading difficulty levels, and students are matched with slightly more challenging books based on their scores in various assessments. The other is the “cueing system,” where students are meant to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from the semantics, syntax, and graphophonic cues in the text. As it turns out, however, research continues to back the phonic elements of teaching and argues that teaching children to guess and skip over unfamiliar words does not develop proficient reading skills.
Gaining traction in the 2020s, the science of reading is filling in the gaps in the balanced literacy approach. While whole language, phonics, and balanced literacy are primarily instructional, the science of reading instead refers to the body of research on specific cognitive processes involved in reading. Stanislas Dehaene, author of Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, is strongly in favor of phonics instruction, and most of the research concludes that phonemic awareness and an understanding of phonics is an essential first step when learning to read. So far, the Australian state of Victoria has started requiring schools to teach phonics in their curriculum. As of 2023, most UK schools also reinstated phonics learning in their curricula.
In several non-English speaking countries, phonics also seems to be the dominant method. For example, Chinese children are initially taught to read using Pinyin, a phonetic transcription of Mandarin Chinese. Pinyin helps them in learning to recognize characters then is gradually removed, only being used to help with new or difficult words in advanced texts. However, one could argue that the logographic writing system of Mandarin Chinese would never be considered intuitive the way whole language philosophy claims English is. Similarly, South Korea has a syllabic alphabet, hangul, which is widely considered to be one of the easiest alphabets to learn. Nevertheless, Korean students are often taught literacy through repetition and memorization of different phonemes and common syllable blocks—all phonic techniques.
The tides are shifting back towards a more heavily phonics-based approach in early literacy, but what does this mean for people who have already grown up with the whole language approach? For the highly dedicated, it could mean delving into linguistics study and the international phonetic alphabet to build a systematic, phonological awareness of English. However, the average person likely does not have the time or energy for this approach. Not to mention, the payoff is simply not there.
As a society, we claim to highly value literacy skills and encourage people to read more. At the same time, books are banned at a rate of 100 books a month, and budget cuts for public libraries are proposed year after year, often leading to fewer available services and reduced hours. As a member of the TikTok generation, I believe that if we want to start reading more, we should try to make reading more enjoyable. The quick dopamine hit from scrolling through social media leaves a lot of academic reading in the dust, but reading at any level, including for entertainment, should be encouraged.