The Reading Crisis

Some Thoughts and Suggestions

Photo by Darwin Vegher on Unsplash

By now you’ve probably heard about or read the article from The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” There’s been various amounts of handwringing and smug responses to this as well as those who just don’t see it as that big of a problem. Sadly, I don’t trust myself to remember to cancel a free subscription, so I can’t read the whole article, but as someone who, in some ways, reads for a living, and teaches books, I feel like I may have some insights here.

First, what I could read of the article said that the students themselves were admitting that in high school they hadn’t been required to read full books. My own high school experience ended nearly twenty years ago, but occasionally, even in my AP, 5.0, English classes this would happen. I particularly remember my English class from Junior year, AP American Literature. In that class we rarely read the entirety of books. The only two I can recall we were asked to read in full (likely there were a few others) were The Scarlet Letter (which I found boring and have not returned to since) and The Things They Carried (students whose parents wouldn’t let them had to read The Red Badge of Courage instead). Otherwise, I remember reading selections of Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans but then watching film versions rather than reading the rest of the book. But that was just one year. In my other classes we were constantly reading whole books: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Beowulf, Once and Future King, A Tale of Two Cities, Night, and more. So yes, if high schools today are focusing on selections rather than whole books, I can understand why once students hit college they might struggle to read whole books.

Another possibility, that was brought up by the YouTuber, Jared Henderson, is how students were being taught to read. Actually, just the other day I watched a video about the Three Cue or Cueing system. You can watch Jared’s video (or this one) to learn more about the history of this system. But essentially, it was based on the philosophy that learning to read was just like learning to talk or walk. Children will learn it naturally given another exposure to books, and certain cues to get them started. So if you learned to encounter new words by picking up context clues, this was the method you learned to read under. This method replaced the older, phonics, method where students were taught to sound out words, understanding their constituent parts, and connecting the sound of the word to the idea it signified. Modern research has largely vindicated phonics, but modern education hasn’t fully transitioned back to it. This too, I can see as being a possible culprit. After all, my family emphasized phonics when I was a child, making me watch Hooked on Phonics at home. Others I know, however, were clearly taught under the cueing method. I still read quite a lot, they have struggled to get back into it.

And then of course, as Jared also notes, there is the plague of modern technology and social media. While on the one hand, more people are literate now than ever before and more people are reading more often than at any other time in history, sustained reading is harder and harder for students. Why? Because most of the reading they do, in fact most media they encounter, is short form content. Tweets (for whatever strange Zoomers and Gen Alphas are on Twitter/X), the descriptions of TikTok videos, even the filmed content they few is shorter, less than a minute usually because if it were any longer they would scroll away.

All of these issues and more may be causing this problem of university students being in capable of reading whole books, or reading them quickly as well as closely. So what do we do? How do we solve this problem? I have a few suggestions.

First, is the need to have students reading whole books in their elementary, middle, and high school careers. This shift that has come recently to emphasize technical reading is only doing our students a disservice. They need good, quality fiction to read. Why? Because it makes them better people. It allows them to see the world through eyes that are not their own. And they need to read the whole book as often as they can. My own children are in fifth grade now and had to read The Swiss Family Robinson (a book I don’t care for, admittedly) and are currently reading Where the Red Fern Grows. They are expected to read the whole book and be able to talk about it with their peers. I teach at a classical high school. My students read whole books. In fact, my Juniors will read the entirety of The Divine Comedy before this semester is out (we’ve already finished the Inferno). Next semester they’ll read Much Ado about Nothing, the first volume of Don Quixote, A Man for All Seasons, and at least one more Shakespeare play. My sophomores are reading 4 dialogues of Plato, most of the Republic, most of the Nicomachean Ethics, and all of The Consolation of Philosophy. Is it hard for them? Yes. Do we read some of it together? Also, yes. Do they get all of it? No. But I’m at least making sure they know how to approach these books and get the most out of them.

But I think another part of this is needing to have good reading habits modeled for them. Children’s parents need to be reading. Not hundreds of books a year, not even, necessarily, a book a week. But a book a month? Maybe. And not just easy things to read, but books with depth, difficult but rewarding books. And finally, we need to remember that reading alone is a relatively new thing. Up until about a 150 years ago or so, most people encountered books by hearing them read by a member of their family. So, parents need to read to their kids. My children are 10 and I still try to make time to read to them at night. I’m not perfect at it. We sometimes miss week’s at a time. But I do read to them, and I read whole books, and we talk about them.

Obviously there are other issues at play here. I’ve not said anything about screen time or phones. I’ve not addressed, much, the kinds of things students are being asked to read. Truthfully, this is too big of an issue for one essay, at least one that needs to stay under 1500 words. But what I really want to say is this: we may have a crisis of reading on our hands where literacy rates are high, but comprehension rates are incredibly low. We combat this by making sure we value not just reading for the sake of reading but good reading to help us become better people. Not because other kinds of reading are bad, but because if they’re all we have we’ll be missing out on some of the greatest works the world has ever known.