"The Age of Reading is Over" — that's the title of a recent magazine article. It was the magazine’s cover story, in large, bold type.
That's a scary title for me. After all, I depend on people to READ my columns. And over the years I have urged students in my college English classes to read. They had to read well to succeed in my classes.
And I have likewise encouraged my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren to read, with sayings like “in order to succeed you have to read" and “readers are leaders.”
The author of the magazine article, Rose Horowitch, makes many compelling points to support her thesis that we are in a post-reading era. She believes we are, in fact, returning to an early point in human history when most information was communicated orally.
Horowitch includes statistics showing the decline in reading in America, which she details with attributions. Among those stats are these:
— Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story.
— Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade.
— In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were ‘proficient’ at skills such as evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.
— Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text.
If those statistics aren’t depressing enough, here are some more from Horowitch, about younger people.
“Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids.
“From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read.
“In recent focus groups, high-school students, when asked how they felt about reading for pleasure, said they thought of it as an alien practice.
“Havard University professor Margaret Rennix reported that some Harvard students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. ‘By asking them to read,’ she said students tell her, ‘professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.’”
All of that information is discouraging, I’m sure, to all of us who read for information or pleasure, including, dear reader, you.
What occupies people these days more than reading? For one thing, gambling. Horowitch notes that “in a recent year 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.” Compare that to her statistic that only 38 per cent read a short story during that time.
So how do people, especially young people, get their information?
Some would say they get it by “reading” social media. But that reading is cursory and not in any way complex or in depth. Moreover, with social media, more and more young people are getting their information without reading; they get it orally, by way of videos and podcasts, often from people who call themselves “influencers.”
We as a society may be in the process of becoming an “oral,” no longer a “literate,” society. We may be moving back to the era before reading and writing, when history was passed down orally by elders with good memories or by rhythmic storytellers like Homer.
Today, it may be up to those of us who have benefited from reading to carry the torch for that skill (as well as for writing) into the future. But why should we go through all that effort?
For one thing, the founding fathers thought reading was important to the idea of a democracy. “America’s Founders used a print document to construct their new nation,” Horowitch noted, “and believed that the (democratic) system they had devised would work precisely because citizens would be informed readers.”
Reading today has to be more than glancing at words while scrolling.
“Studies have shown that people comprehend less when reading on a digital device than on paper,” Horowitch wrote, perhaps because of all the distractions that a cell phone, or even a tablet or personal computer, trigger.
It will take significant effort to get more people, especially young people, to read more. Recently, school districts across the country started banning cell phones during school hours. That might help. For example, according to Horowitch, after a Texas ban on cell phones in schools went into effect last year, “a Dallas school district saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase.”
We especially need to encourage small children to enjoy reading, which among other things means reading to kids when they are very young. Again, that will take some doing these days, because in a recent study of 236,000 American adults, only two per cent read to a child on a given day.
We also need to encourage older children and teenagers to read, not only for information (out of civic responsibility), but also for emotional support.
Author James Baldwin understood the need for the emotional support which reading fiction provides. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” Baldwin wrote (as quoted by Horowitch), “but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
If you ask adults who read novels as high school or college students, most would agree with Baldwin’s statement.
As discouraging as Horowitch’s article is, it is not without hope. But it’s going to take a lot of effort by us readers, she writes, to stem the tide of reading irrelevance and apathy.
Whatever success we have, even with a few people, by encouraging them to read will help them become more civic, more self-reliant and more emotionally well-balanced.
And the more civic, self-reliant and well-balanced citizens there are in America, the more hope we will have for our country.
John Spevak’s email is john.spevak@gmail.com.
