Headlines like The Death of the Novel, The Death of Reading or Why Johnny Can’t Read are effective in selling magazines. They usually reflect some concerning shifts in the cultural or educational landscape, but at the cost of shrinking the complexity of the problem they are attempting to alert us to.
That’s the mindset I brought to the recent featured story in The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch. According to the author, the fact that I was reading her article automatically places me in a shrinking minority of the population, 20% by her estimation, who continue to turn to books, newspapers and magazines for their information and pleasure. The rest of the population, particularly those in the younger generations, have turned to online sources which offer much briefer and less complex fare.
There’s an abundance of data in the article to support her assertions, but I was most taken by Horowitch’s reflections on the social and political implications of these trends. The decline in the public’s attention span calls for simplification of messaging and the resulting loss of complexity, which in turn creates an ignorant and ill-informed citizenry. Trump was quick to seize on the advantages of this dumbing down. “I love my low-information voters,” he proclaimed.
I’ve been following these disturbing trends through my familiar teacher lens. The teachers I speak to regularly and those I follow online report the move away from reading books with their classes. Instead, their syllabi are built around excerpts from novels and information books which resemble the passages students will find on the tests they’re subjected to. Before we get too panicked about this disturbing movement, we need to remember that textbook publishers have been doing this for ages. I was often infuriated flipping through the Table of Contents of the latest Language Arts textbooks when I found a few pages of a favorite novel, stripped of context and character development.
So it’s clear that we’re not dealing with changes that are entirely new, nor did they begin with Covid, as some have contended. There’s no question that our brave new digital world has been an important driver in the decline of attention needed for sustained reading, but is its trajectory inevitable? We’re seeing pushback from parents, teachers and administrators around accessibility to cell phones and other devices in the classroom. Still, the educators I most admire continue to expect more of their students as readers, even in the face of discouraging odds
Now, help has arrived from a surprising direction. Recently, Texas has released its plans for a mandated K-12 reading curriculum, with a heavy emphasis on, can you believe it, reading whole books. The plans are problematic in ways I’ll describe, but let’s give credit where credit is due. They read like a systemic attempt to put a finger in the dike of the reading decline. There are mandated books to be assigned at every grade level, and teachers are encouraged to expand on those mandates.
The attacks on the Texas curriculum have centered on the syllabus’s inclusion of readings from the Bible at every grade level – Old and New Testaments. Depending on how this material is taught, it could be a major infringement of the quickly eroding separation of church and state. However, let’s remember that many academic institutions offer courses in the Bible as literature. If instruction can focus on the richness of narrative and the beauty of language in the King James Bible, their inclusion can be an asset. If you share my amazement at the style of the letters from Civil War soldiers that Ken Burns exposed us to, you’ll raise a glass to introducing kids to the rhetoric of classical sources, which I’m sensing is one of the unstated goals of the Texas enterprise.
So, what’s wrong with the syllabus? Just looking at the titles of the novels in the grades I’m most familiar with, they look exactly like the ones I assigned as far back as 40 years ago – Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, Animal Farm, Number the Stars. These are all books I love. I’m glad to see that they pass muster with the powers that be in Texas, but a huge body of important literature for young readers has grown up in the last three or four decades. There’s censorship by omission taking place here, systematically avoiding books that tackle complex issues of race, class and sexual identity. Educators today tend to rely on the windows and mirrors metaphor in selecting reading for their students. Do the readings offer both a window to the outside world and a mirror in which the reader can recognize himself and his world? For Black and Brown readers, these readings offer few mirrors and for all readers of high school age, there is not a single work that has been written in the last fifty years. That’s no way to create life-long, self-motivated readers.
In the final section of Horowitch’s Atlantic article, she addresses an issue that has drawn less attention than the reading crisis, namely parallel problems in student writing. The advent of AI has distanced students from the hard work of doing their own writing. I once worked for an organization devoted to student writing that adopted as its motto, “I don’t know what I think until I see what I say,” whose attribution is contested. Recently, NY Times columnist Bret Stephens, with whom I rarely agree, published an admirable op-ed piece warning of the potential damage to human thinking of farming out the process of writing to chatbots.
Reading and writing, in tandem, have nourished me through these 87 years. They have helped me think and feel in ways that are at the heart of my identity. The ability of my granddaughter, her agemates and all the generations that follow to experience these gifts of language is endangered by these troubling losses. Their preservation is something worth fighting for.
