On Not Reading
Old faculty, yelling at clouds
One of my all-time favorite parenting moments came when SteelyKid was just a toddler, in April of 2010. Kate and I were working on our computers on opposite ends of our shared office/library, with SteelyKid playing quietly on the floor in between us. After a while, we both simultaneously had the “It’s too quiet…” feeling (parents, you know what I mean…), and turned around to find… no kid on the floor of the library.
We left the room in opposite directions (our first floor is topologically indistinguishable from a donut or a coffee cup), and met up in the kitchen, neither of us having encountered a child along the way. At the time SteelyKid couldn’t really handle stairs quietly, so we were baffled, but headed back toward the library through the door by the stairs up to the bedrooms… and spotted SteelyKid sitting quietly in our big recliner, “reading” a book.
This was not, I hasten to add, anything but pure imitation— SteelyKid wasn’t really reading. For one thing, it was a mass-market paperback with tiny type and no pictures, and furthermore, it was upside-down. But SteelyKid knew that reading books was a thing that Mommy and Daddy did, and thus settled down in a perfect imitation of us. A few years later, when The Pip was about the same age, he did a similar thing— I have a photo of him sitting on a pillow on the library floor “reading” How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog.
Fast-forward to this year, when SteelyKid is a high-school junior and The Pip an eighth-grader. We were discussing the need for The Pip to choose an “outside reading” book for school. I offered a Scott Westerfeld YA novel that I had on the shelf as an option, and he got about two sentences into the cover copy before putting it down, saying “Dude, I’m not reading all this.”
I bring this up because there was a whole lot of chatter on academic ex-Twitter yesterday about this article from The Atlantic about college students not being prepared to read whole books. It’s not exactly a new topic— academics have been on this for years— but it’s a high-profile outlet, so got a bunch of attention.
One common response to this was to note that this is one of those eternal complaints— academics have been complaining about how Kids These Days can’t read as well as the students of some imagined past golden age for about as long as there has been written language. That’s certainly true, but this brought out a lot of faculty saying “No, really, it’s dramatically worse now than in the past.” They talk about drastically cut-down reading lists, replacing long novels with shorter works or even just excerpts, saying that students come into college with at best limited experience of reading long works, and on and on.
As a parent, I do see a bit of this. SteelyKid is, as I said, an eleventh-grader this year, and when we were heading to the Globe theater in London back in August, we asked what Shakespeare they had covered in English classes. The answer was “Romeo and Juliet” in 8th grade, and “most of ‘Macbeth’” in 10th. Apparently they never finished the Scottish play, and only talked about some of the key scenes? Possibly there was a movie? (That English teacher was not SteelyKid’s favorite, so there may be a little willful amnesia at work…)
The Pip is slated to read “Romeo and Juliet” this year— according to the note sent home from his “Back to School” night— but I have generally not been overwhelmed by the reading lists for his English classes to date. What I see of them, anyway— he’s pretty independent and just does his school work without needing to be prodded through it, so I don’t always have a clear idea of what they’re studying. It doesn’t seem like there’s a ton of novel-reading involved, though.
And it’s absolutely true that neither of them read for fun, any more. SteelyKid went on a Rick Riordan kick a few years back, then read most of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series independently, but that’s it. The Pip does just enough reading to meet the requirements for class, and no more. Both of them much prefer to spend their free time watching YouTube shorts on a dizzying array of topics, most of them borderline incomprehensible to people my age.
They are, it should be noted, both strong students in one of the best school districts in our region. They’re perfectly capable of reading. They’re just not asked to do all that much of it, and they certainly don’t choose to do it in their free time.
From a “learning stuff about the world” standpoint, I’m probably more bothered by the latter than the former. I’m pretty sure I was asked to read more books for school back in the 80’s than my kids are now, but what I read for school was a small fraction of my total reading. Granted, the vast majority of that was genre fiction, and a good deal of it was pretty trashy even by genre standards— there used to be a lot of Piers Anthony paperbacks in my parents’ basement. That doesn’t matter so much, though, because it established the habit of reading, and engaging with the world through text. That habit of reading is a big reason why I was always better at processing text than others in my school cohort (I’m a rare scientist whose Verbal SAT score was higher than the Math score), and thus is a big part of what ultimately made me a writer. I got way more of that outside school than in.
That said, I developed those reading habits in a very different media environment. We did have cable tv when I was the age my kids are now, but that came to a total of about 15 channels (including HBO, which for years wasn’t properly scrambled on my parents’ feed, so we effectively got it for free), and a large fraction of those didn’t show anything interesting for a huge chunk of the day (I never got into soap operas, or reruns of classic shows). We did have MTV, but they only started doing non-music programming late in my high school career, so it mostly functioned as background noise while I read other things.
Were I growing up in the current media environment, with effectively thousands of channels of video content available instantaneously, on demand, I’m not sure I would have become the reader I was. That feeling is bolstered by the fact that I don’t read anywhere near as much as I used to. There were stretches of my life, even as an adult, when I would go through more than one genre novel a day; these days, I’m lucky to get through a novel a month. Some of that reading time has been lost to adult responsibilities, but a lot of it is just (doom)scrolling through social media feeds. When I do make the effort to read an actual book, it takes real effort to fight off the temptation to check in on ex-Twitter and the rest, and when I give in to that temptation, it takes real effort to get back to my book.
So, I definitely think there’s something real to the idea that Kids These Days aren’t developing the habits necessary to be really good at engaging with the world through text, and that this reflects changes in technology. I can feel my own capability for dealing with long-form text atrophying to a significant degree, and I’m no longer at a highly impressionable age, nor interacting with the most addictive forms of modern media.
I’m less convinced by a lot of the other Takes on this, which tend to be of the form “This is Yet Another Consequence of [Thing I Was Banging On About Long Before This].” I’ve seen blame for this crisis attributed to everything from the left-wingnut “capitalism run amok!” through the relatively bipartisan “teaching to high-stakes tests!” to the right-wingnut “wokism run amok!” All of those seem approximately equally plausible, which is to say “Not very,” and leave me thinking it’s mostly a matter of the changed media environment, rather than anything directly controlled by schools.
To the extent that there’s anything to be done, I think it’s of the unfortunately nebulous form “Making a case for the importance of literary culture.” It’s not so much a matter of demanding that kids read more in school as making them interested in reading beyond what’s required for school. Which wasn’t a case that was being made all that well back in the 1980’s, and has only gotten harder since with the growth of more attractive media options. I don’t think that this is a cause that’s been well served by the last few decades of trends in scholarship and education—back in the day there was nothing better for putting me off reading than literature classes— but at the same time, I don’t really have a clear idea of what would be better.
I’m also not confident I have any sense of the cost is— most attempts to blame lack of reading for the rise of Trump or whatever seem hyperbolic at best. I just know that I kind of miss the days when my kids couldn’t read, but still thought reading was a fun thing to (pretend to) do.
That’s a bit of a bummer, I know, but hey! Cute photo! If you want more of this kind of thing when I get around to writing it, here’s a button:
And if you have suggestions, the comments will be open:
I read more than ever, pretty much all day every day (I'm reading here right now) but many fewer books. And lots of my family members who would never have opened a book are active on social media both reading and writing.
I have always read a lot, from a very young age. My older son was an avid reader as a kid but I really don't know of any books he has read recently. (He is about to become a teacher.) My younger son, who never had to entertain himself as a kid, did not read nearly as much and "hates" reading, to the point that he doesn't even finish assigned summer reading (despite being a responsible straight-A student in all other ways).
I am sure phones and streaming media has a lot to do with the general trend. As a kid, I remember spending a lot of time in cars or waiting rooms or whatever where there wasn't much else to do.