Is America transitioning to a “postliterate” society? The question has occasioned a flurry of commentary of late. In “The End of Reading Is Here,” Rose Horowitch cites the National Endowment for the Arts data that less than half of adults in 2022 read a book of any kind and only 16 percent of the population engage in daily pleasure reading. James Marriott reaches a similar conclusion, noting that “the average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen.” The result is, as David Wallace-Wells concludes, that traditional reading habits are increasingly cannibalized by smartphones and algorithmic feeds.
In “My Students Can’t Read,” Tyler Jagt speaks for frustrated college professors, lamenting that students are not able to finish reading a 20-page article because it was too long for them to comprehend. Beth McMurtie shows that expectations about what constitutes a reasonable amount of college reading have declined across all disciplines. And the decline in reading is not only in college but also in high school, where the 2024 NAEP results revealed that 12th-grade reading scores were the lowest ever recorded.
While these writers correctly diagnose the ailment—students read more words but comprehend less—there is a set of questions that have been overlooked. What is reading, in fact? Is it relevant to human flourishing? And if so, how can we cultivate it in our classrooms?
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