“The End of Reading Is Here”

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Rose Horowitch about the decline of reading and university students’ changing relationship to text.

Derek Thompson: Rose, your story begins with this absolutely devastating cavalcade of statistics about the decline of reading in America. I want you to just start with two numbers. What are the two figures that you consider most consequential and most disturbing?

Rose Horowitch: So I think the first comes from the American Time Use Survey, which asks 236,000 Americans how they spent the prior day and how they spent their time. And that found that the share of people who read a book or an article on any given day declined by 40 percent over the past 20 years. And then similarly, I think the National Endowment for the Arts, they conduct a survey where they ask Americans, “Did you read a book in the past year?” And in 2022, which is the last year that they’ve released that data for, fewer than half of all Americans had read a book in the prior year, and that was a book of any kind. And only 38 percent had read a novel or short story. And in my piece, I juxtaposed that against the share that had gambled in the past year. Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. And so gambling is now a more common and popular leisure activity than reading.

Thompson: And I want to be clear, the story is not just dry statistics. There’s some quite morbidly funny anecdotes and examples of the decline of literacy. In one study, students were asked to explain what’s happening at the beginning of the Charles Dickens book Bleak House, which opens with this description of London roads that are so muddy that Dickens can imagine a dinosaur walking down the roads. I’m just going to read the opening sentences of Bleak House to you, and then I’d love you to tell me what students’ reaction to the opening of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House was and what this tells us about the state of reading. Here’s how Bleak House begins: “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the water had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.”

Basically, it seems like students had no freaking idea what’s going on in these sentences. And I wonder if maybe just give us a little more texture on this study, and what is it telling us about the state of reading in high school and college that students basically can’t read Dickens anymore?

Horowitch: Yeah. So this study was of students at some regional universities in Kansas. They were English and English education majors. And yeah, the researchers asked them to read the first seven paragraphs and to talk about what happened in it. And one thing that was really interesting was that the students really struggled to differentiate between literal and figurative language. In that passage that you cited, a lot of them thought, or some of them thought, that there actually was a dinosaur in 19th-century London. And similarly, they later describe this man addressed by an advocate with large whiskers, and one student thought that that was a cat. And so only 5 percent of the students who were studied had a sort of detailed, literal understanding of what they read. And what’s so interesting about that is that they were given access to the entire internet during this process. So they either didn’t know or didn’t understand or didn’t put the effort in to figure out what was happening because they could have looked up any of these unfamiliar references.

And this really relates back to a story that I had written a couple of years ago about students arriving at universities, even the top universities in the country, just unprepared to read books. And I spoke with so many professors for that piece and again for this one. And they described students arriving with a lot less experience kind of persisting through texts and also a changed relationship to text. I spoke with a staff member who works at Harvard who was talking about how students come to her and they don’t understand why they’re being asked to read. They think that professors are kind of presenting information in this arbitrarily difficult medium when they’re giving it to them in text instead of giving them a ChatGPT or Claude summary. And so it’s just a really different attitude as well as different skill and experience.

Thompson: And just a quote from the most recent cover story, this is Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social sciences support. You spoke to her, and she said that some students at Harvard University now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way to acquire knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “Professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.” Am I wrong, or are these professors, including at Harvard University, essentially saying that some students at some of the best institutions in the country now view assigned books as something like the equivalent of forcing a person to learn about sociology by reading it in Latin or ancient Greek or something? It’s as if they consider full bodies of text, full books to be this foreign object with which they’re not particularly familiar.

Horowitch: Yes. And she was talking as well about how students were finding books. They would say it was written in Old English or it just seems so unfamiliar and so kind of old-fashioned to them to read the texts that people had written even a half century ago. And so it is a real changed relationship to text and to reading.

Thompson: Some of this has to do, clearly, with technology, television, the smartphone, this enormous set of entertainment devices that compete for our attention and are sometimes, let’s be honest, a little bit more tasty in the short term than working your way through the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. But some of this is also policy. You’ve spoken with people who talk about the fact that standardized tests now ask people to essentially do reading comprehension by book excerpts. And so if you are a teacher directly teaching to that test, why would you assign the whole book? What you’d want to assign is book excerpts so that students become proficient at only reading samples of texts that are as long as they appear in standardized tests.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Rose Horowitch
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman