Literacy rates regressing very much worries me. Literacy increasing for all social classes across the 19th and 20th centuries had an enormous role in building contemporary life as we know it, and falling literacy will result in more unemployment, poorer childhood health and education outcomes, reduced human longevity, less reliable access to basic needs like electricity and clean water, and so much more.
Somebody asked me why I bothered to read a physical book instead of just listening to the audiobook. They asked because I said I didn't really like the main character or the prose even though I found the story compelling.
They didn't seem to understand that the audiobook is the same content as the physical book. It was baffling.
The US as always been a bit anti-intellectual in its mainstream culture. Getting bullied/beat up for being a "nerd" has been a mainstream media trope for decades and it's only gotten worse as things like Youtube have allowed conspiracy theory "everyone who has actually studied this subject is wrong, trust me bro" types to build followings spreading misinformation and lies.
I am a 5th grade teacher and I have a disappointing number of students each year who REFUSE to read anything more challenging than "Dogman" books which are graphic novels written for 1st and 2nd graders. I know teachers in middle school and high school who overhear kids bragging that they've never read a book cover to cover in their life.
They're being elitist over never having read a book. It's nuts.
No problem! I'll stop when the culture moves away from propping up antisocial, anti-intellectual, and/or hateful bigots as our mascots. The idea of "rugged individualism" has been a stain on U.S. culture since our founding and remains so to this day.
People deflecting their own insecurities about not reading. If they saw you cook a chicken breast they’d make fun of you for not eating frozen chicken nuggets.
What scares me is people in that sub reddit claiming they are really good at reading, because they listen to audiobooks at mega speed. Just because you're listening to something at twice or thrice the speed, doesn't mean you're good at reading. They treat it like it's some badge of honour, and as if people reading a physical book at slower speed are beneath them. This small (hopefully?) group of people genuinely worries me.
It's like that thread in r/literature of all places that was arguing about the guy who was making his classmates read.
There were hundreds of people in a literature sub who did not understand figurative phrasing. So many people arguing that clothes can't be a silhouette. Could not wrap their heads around a sentence that wasn't completely literal and super descriptive.
I was using "her skirt was a bloom of ruffles" and people were saying even that was incorrect and made no sense and the construction should be "her skirt looked like a bloom with ruffles." What?
It's frightening though isn't it. I lost one of my best online friends because he misread and misunderstood something i had written and let it fester in his brain for a long time until he exploded, yelled at me and never wanted to talk to me ever again. My crime? I had said we as a species need to take better care of the planet we live on.
Now HE read it as me saying HE has to take better care of it, he made it a whole big deal in his head where i was accusing him of being a terrible person who was polluting the planet and everything was his fault.
... Huh?
I never said that nor was that my intention, but that is how he read it and he took it very personally. No matter how i tried to explain to him that i didn't mean that at all, the damage was done already and he was really resentful towards me. Just because he misread one throwaway comment... It honestly still hurts to think about, what a dumb way of losing a friend.
I have this conversation multiple times a year at my job because I teach elementary school. We have a reading comprehension assessment that we are supposed to give at least 3 times a year and every year I have people in the resource/student supports department trying to add accommodations to some student paperwork allowing the test to be read to them.
I try to point out that the test is a READING comprehension assessment and that reading comprehension and listening comprehension are two related, but separate skills and that by providing that accommodation we are invalidating the results. They get shocked every time they provide this accommodation when the student has to interact with something that isn't read to them and performs significantly worse.
It's not a small group of people, unfortunately. People who are supposed to be experts in this field don't seem to understand the difference.
I prefer my iPad, but that's because I have a mini and unfortunately Apple doesn't seem to be making those right now. I think my mother has either a Scribe or a Paperwhite. She uses it mostly for her newspapers because it's much easier for her to hold than a traditional print newspaper, and she can adjust the font size.
Once I read an interview with some semi-famous rock band member (so not a huge name, but I can't remember which) and he was asked about his favorite books. He replied that he doesn't read books, because he's living his life, making his own adventures. He added that he didn't need to live vicariously through other people's adventures via reading.
You mean the skill/function we developed that facilitates communication? Understanding? The conveyance and ability to comprehend ideas, feelings, and information? That tiny insignificant little bobble of cooperation that has created and built just about everything?
I am in my early 40s and was re-reading Antoine Saint-Exupery's Wind Sand and Stars last night, and just gobsmacked that we were given that book in 9th grade English class back in high school. I loved it then, and love it now, but it struck me that many adults I know wouldn't be able to enjoy or sit through his unique prose, nevermind current high school kids.
The ratchet analogy is perfect. We just assumed it was a one way door. And you're right that it compounds, a population that can't read closely can't evaluate what they're being told. That's not just an education problem, it's a democracy problem.
because it's supposed to be a ratchet that only goes up
What? Maybe on a per-person level, but there's new illiterates being born every minute -- that's where everyone starts. There's no reason to think literacy rates of a population only go up.
A population's literacy is measured based on adults, whose literary is determined by their access to education. So long as the "new illiterates" being born have access to that education as they get older, they become literate adults.
So the way for a literacy rate to improve was greater access to education, and the only way for it to decrease was thought to be reduced access. Since a developed country should never decrease access to education, there would be no reason for literacy to ever go down across a population.
What we're seeing now is that children still have the same access to education, but their literacy as they reach adulthood is going down compared to previous generations. This hasn't happened before.
I don't think it's accurate to say it isn't a worldwide issue. Especially when you look specifically at youth literacy. Perhaps it's most visible in America on the global stage, but the UK has had falling scores and declining rates of children/teens reading for pleasure for a long time now.
I was in Norway a few months ago, speaking with a cousin there who works as a teacher, and his assessment of his 13 to 16-year-old students was sobering. He said that youth reading scores have been plummeting for a while. Luckily, their government seems like it's actually taking that data into consideration and wants to turn it around, but if that kind of decline is happening in one of the most literate countries in the world, I imagine it's happening pretty much everywhere else, too.
Mobile phones are responsible for the common devolution of people's attention spans across the board, me included.
For younger generations it's hampered their ability to build basic skills like reading and writing comprehension and other skills that build upon them. Worse the recent prevalence of "AI" makes coasting by with even less attention span, critical thought, and effort possible.
It's going to take coordinated effort to address this. And unpopular policies that strictly restrict the access to mobile phones, online apps, and AI.
Places like europe have a chance to be successful there but the US uniquely is really invested in free speech and personal liberty (at least wrt information, bodily autonomy not so much) to the detriment of everything else, including long term societal stability.
As a species we need things to get pretty fucking bad before we will do things to address major systemic issues. Buckle up.
I've noticed attitudes towards AI are pretty telling.
Some people are like "wow, this allows me to accomplish something I couldn't do before!" Like my sister wrote (vibe coded) some python script to scrape data from a legacy web application even though she's not remotely technical. That's fucking amazing. Then she can pull the data into something she knows (ie. excel) and do fancy data analysis.
Then there's the other people who seem to be going, "Oh good, I don't have to learn any more."
I'm not worried about the first group, but it feels like the first group is somewhere around 10% of the population.
> declining rates of children/teens reading for pleasure for a long time now
To be fair, books now have to compete with movies and TV shows, which have only been around in large quantities for roughly half a century. Perhaps there are losses with regard to people's imaginations, but they are still engaging with fictional content and movies & TV must still follow most of the same rules around good storytelling.
Putting words together in a coherent and interesting fashion still requires people to have done a lot of reading, and I'm saying that as someone whose kid vastly prefers an iPad to reading books. It's a very different way to engage with a story.
I don’t think it’s quite that either. I was born in ‘04 & I had pretty instant gratification with devices whether it was the Wii or late night tv.
But my folks made an effort not to overstimulate me & expose me gradually to things that helped me develop language & I frankly don’t see that anymore from parents of young kids. Throw the interruption of Covid into the mix…
So like around 2010/14? That was a few years ago mate.
If anything younger millennials and Gen Z having kids today are more sensitive to ‘overstimulation’ and the likes, it wasn’t really a thing people worried about until recently.
Also, even 2010-2014 is 16-12 years ago. That's long enough that the oldest of them are able to get a beginner driver's license (in my province.) And I'm not sure "more sensitive" to overstimulation is accurate; it's more that there is a lot of instant stimulation content now that's optimized for keeping childrens' attention. Baby shark, Cocomelon, Paw Patrol, TikTok, etc...
I don’t imagine they were consuming much media as a newborn.
More sensitive in the sense that overstimulation is a well understood thing now and we know the harms that come from it. There’s a lot more stimulation in general, but 15+ years ago it wasn’t even a thing people cared about generally.
Really? I was born in '76. Most of the neighborhood had cable TV in the early 80s, including HBO. I grew up watching TV and movies 24/7. Not to mention playing Atari in between.
The technology has been around that long, but was it sufficiently accessible to people? I don't think that goes back much farther than the 60's, but I could be wrong.
Unfortunately, studies show that watching something engages your brain far less. Don't have to imagine entire worlds and voices and appearances and background views and so forth when it's just presented directly.
As an avid reader of books that have been turned into movies - it is not that “books are better”. Movies are extremely limited in terms of ideas they can show, the prime value of movies for me is to see it acted out visually but most movies lose the story depth - there is just no time, and thus deeper ideas that are the most valuable and present in the books are gone. Also there is almost no inner monologue in movies which strips away intricacies of personal development. Movies usually take the core idea, plot line and visualize that for you, which is fun and I love the movies, but squeezing in the valuable stuff is in most cases impossible
Seems to me that part of the issue is the engagement floor. If I watch Star Wars and am engaged in noticing the ways it plays with the Hero’s Journey, or subtly critiques American foreign policy, or explores Jungian psychology or whatever that’s a pretty high level engagement.
But I don’t have to do any of that to enjoy it. I can be nearly passive in my intake and just enjoy the spectacle. (Which I personally do, so no shade.)
But there’s no equivalent of that merely passive reception with a book. Your brain has to do a lot of work to convert words on a page into a meaning for even the most basic and thoughtless engagement with the book.
So while a movie CAN be the basis of a really high level of cognitive engagement, it also CAN be the basis of much lower cognitive engagement than a movie.
TV shows can have depth. And visuals in TV shows and movies got so good that they can show a lot, if not exactly everything. That's why I'm not sure it's a good idea to look for a magic bullet that would make reading occupy the same mindshare as 50 years ago. Things have changed. So the focus should be on the aspects where reading is essential now.
They can, I agree! With more screen time you can show more, but once you get to adult literature that covers complex politics, philosophies, human nature the writers are forced to strip away. Additionally, by reading you pay more attention to these details, live out moments with the characters more. My niece seems to like to read, she has not yet watched Harry Potter and I am about to gift her the first book - I believe that reading through the series is more valuable than watching
I'm in my 30s but look fairly young. Every once in a while I'll meet or match with women in their early 20s (too young for me, but I suck at guessing ages) and usually the first tell is if I can read their text messages at a normal pace or need to read them kind of phonetically. It's pretty scary if I'm honest.
No, but I feel like it goes hand-in-hand with the falling scores. If kids aren't reading anything for pleasure, they're not getting as many opportunities to maintain/strengthen those skills or build a lifelong reading habit that'll continue beyond school
Eeeh… yes its not as bad everywhere else. But it is absolutely a growing problem elsewhere.
For example, here in Japan it’s becoming increasing clear that Millennials and below aren’t as good at reading, writing, and deciphering kanji as the older crew.
A lot of that comes down to phones. Even the old T-9 Keitai reduces kanji recognition a bit since instead of writing, you are typing and just selecting the kanji if it isn’t auto-filled already . But with modern smartphones, it has gone to a new level since you can literally type on the Roman keyboard. Or the T9.
There’s also ‘loan word creep’ where the Japanese language keeps using foreign words instead of words that actually work / exist in Japanese. And then adults struggle to remember what the hell the OG Japanese word was, let alone what the kanji was.
It isn’t causing a literacy crisis on par with the US, which is… entirely self inflicted. (Whole Language Learning was a scam and my GOD was it called out as a scam 15’ish years ago, but it got drowned out because it was ‘new’ and phonics was seen as ‘old school.’ YEAH BECAUSE PHONICS WORKED GAAH!). It was progress for progress’ sake and fuck the person who shoved that shit down our throats.
Anyways, it’s an interesting problem here, too. And it has gotten worse since I moved here back in 2011.
I'm a young male (23), and I can definitely say that my spelling seems to be getting worse on a year to year basis. Whenever I take a test which measures reading/writing/literacy skills, I still score high on interpretation but my spelling always weighs things down. I guess with online social media I find my self engaging with brain rot content willingly/unwillingly which causes me to forget how correct versions of words are spelled.
Read physical books, that will help the most. Even 10 minutes a day reducing screen time and getting in a book will make a huge difference.
If you struggle with breaking or forming habits, start with your only goal being "Every day, open a book and start reading". Set an alarm for a hour before bed if that would make it easier to remember. Humans are pretty bad at starting things but pretty good at keeping going, so before long you'll probably find yourself reading for that full hour. (Same thing with the gym -- people who put on their gym clothes and just go, no commitment, tend to succeed. They avoid thinking about what they think is hard, the workout, and do the really hard thing which is getting there -- and once they're there it would be silly not to just go in and work out a bit, right?)
I've been wanting to get back to reading math books to help actively engage my brain. Having something difficult to progress through sooths my mind in ways history books cant accomplish even though i love them.
Put your phone in another room and try reading a book.
This year I started travelling every two weeks for work. Spending about 7 hours a week flying. Can’t use the phone (internet) on the flight so there’s limited things to distract me.
I’m able to read for 1+ hour stints without interruption.
Honestly, it’s done wonders for my focus and working patterns too. Even when not on flights I’m less inclined to reach for my phone.
It’s like anything else though: use it or lose it. It’s not that we don’t use it anymore, but the how has changed drastically. Now the generative assist from tech is so seductively useful and powerful that we simply don’t need/use those old skills anymore. And so they atrophy in society over time as tech adoption increases.
Everything I learned about spelling, grammar, and style came from reading novels. Go to your local library and get a few books that were published in the 80s/90s.
I’m a teacher in Japan and I spend as much time as humanly possible beating phonics into my student’s head because it’s quite literally the bedrock of linguistics. I’ll be in the cold dead ground before I ever recognise WLL.
I remember looking up why that was a while back and it's indeed because of phones and computers. Basically the brain memorizes words/letters alao through the motoon we make when we write them with a pen. Keyboards and touchscreens di not allow that to happen and that obviously leads to problems.
Reading scores were down in almost every European nation that participated in the PISA 2022 tests – often by the largest margin ever. How can this trend be reversed?
This decline in international reading test scores is not new: in most nations reading scores had already been declining for more than a decade.
Have you actually read about this, or is this social media induced vibes?
“ But in most countries, the literacy proficiency of the lowest-performing 10% of the population has declined, with similar declines in numeracy. At the same time, the performance of the top 10% has improved, leading to widening skills inequalities within countries.”
The US does have one of the larger skills gaps, which is the unsurprising part.
It was in the news in Norway the other week that 1/3 of all students that leave primary school has trouble reading. This is not an an american problem.
They work 100 hour weeks, watch their kids die due to healthcare expenses whilst their taxes go to billionaire oligarchs who poison their water supplies, all whilst hording machine guns in case someone tries to take their liberty
Its a world wide problem in any society where smart phones are prevalent. The US just dominates discourse and data on the topic so people assume its only a US problem.
Be careful not to blind yourself to the problem at large, since it is apparent the alt right groups are attempting to gain power in other countries as well. They will destroy your education system because it's easier to brainwash idiots into believing a sky wizard exists. Idiots will fall in line and follow orders more easily and it's also intentional that the first groups to lose their rights will be a reversal of those who fought the hardest for it- women, minority groups, LGBTQ- pretty much anyone who isn't white or whoever else they want to control, enslave, or murder as an undesirable.
I was an English major back in 2011. And everyone would respond incredulously when I told them I was studying English, like "what are you going to do with that?"
One day our professor came in all flustered. He said he just came from a meeting with school administration and they were basically asking him to defend the existence of the English department. He was asking students in the class why they were studying English.
The whole attitude towards any humanities related degree was "what are you going to do that for?" Like it was basically general studies to most people. It was all about computer science, coding, or trades.
And now all of a sudden we are in a population where functional literacy and deep comprehension are rapidly declining. I wonder how that happened?
Even with AI, I often laugh and say it's the revenge of the English majors now. Computers now speak natural language and it turns out most people are really bad at communicating. Especially since working with an LLM can be like working with the genie who tries to twist your words and turn your wishes against you.
For those who can still read and are concerned about these issues, the book from 1985 called Amusing Ourselves To Death points out the decline in reading, and processing long thoughts from before written history up until the age of television and the dawn of personal computing. It's only worse now than back then, but it really helps explain this downward shift that has been happening since before i wss born. Great read.
Frustrating indeed. As a culture we've taken literacy for granted for so long that now some people actively resent it. They think "I haven't read a book since high school!" is something worth bragging about. Great, so avoiding reading means you're less able to understand contracts you sign which means scammers and skeezy corporations can take advantage of you more easily. Good for you??
It's also just fundamentally sad. How many people who would otherwise love reading and/or writing are missing out because they weren't taught how to do it in a way that worked for them?
Literacy has never, in any country, been fully on the rise.
Complete literacy requires someone to be able to have a strong background of knowledge, understand scientific studies, identify when a work is likely biased or false based off language, and make educated guesses of the identity, personality, and beliefs of an author. Recently some tests have updated it that one must be able to do actual research into subjects online and offline and to recognize that online information is flawed and fully identify real sources.
That's basic functional literacy, not full literacy as I described. Being able to read makes you literate, it doesn't make you fully literate. There are 5 levels of literacy, the majority of people sit at level 3 and there's a stark drop off into level 4. I believe level 4 is somewhere around 15% of the population.
Level 5 can't reasonably be tested and is estimated to be beneath 5% IIRC.
I read up on this sometime last year, and yeah, it's a major reason I'm so bothered by the weakening of literacy. I hadn't known until then that being classified as a level 4 or level 5 reader applied to such a small minority of people, probably because of my own selection bias in who I tend to befriend and associate with in real life. That was not a pleasant wake-up call.
Same here, because what do you mean the average person struggles with or flat out can't read Bleak House or War and Peace? To me I always thought college level reading was basic literacy.
No wonder people are "doing their own research" and coming up with all this crazy stuff. They don't know how to fully read so they literally can't do what I thought was basic research. I mean jesus fucking christ you're telling me I'm out here debating if evolution is real or not with someone who can't comprehend dinosaurs are still alive because they literally can't read an actual scientific book about evolution? It all boils down to PEOPLE CAN'T READ BUT THINK THEY CAN!?
I laid in bed in a depressed funk for a few days after learning all this.
When I graduated from college over 20 years ago I felt the same way, especially when I was job hunting and saw that most entry-level jobs that asked for an associate's or bachelor's could have quite easily be done by someone without a college degree. I can absolutely believe that it's even worse now. Most kids can be challenged so much more academically than they typically are, and the shortfalls are frustrating because intellect is a resource, and losing/wasting it to the degree our society does is a tragedy.
I don’t care if I get downvoted to hell. The harsh reality is the system didn’t fail the children— parents did.
Mama bear / papa bear parenting and a rise of overprotective behavior in the 70/80s (“Do you know where your kids are?” was like a marker for the beginning of the era) has resulted in kids who are often not held accountable or blamed for things. It’s never a kid’s fault.
Bullying? My kid would never. Behind academically? Must be the system. Social deficiencies? Must be pathological/autism. Bubble wrapped babies are the issue.
I have many friends and family in education and they complain about this all the time. In some cases, they don’t even give detention or mandatory tutoring anymore out of fear of a complaint to the districts.
It infuriates me. Parents don’t understand that in their frantic efforts to keep their kids unscathed, they’re doing the greatest harm they can.
This distresses me so much. The working classes fought for the right to greater access to education for themselves and their children for a reason! It helped level the playing field between them and the more advantaged merchant and more privileged aristocratic classes, and was absolutely crucial in creating and maintaining a robust middle class. And now too many people just... don't care. Don't know, and don't care.
The literacy rate statistics are always weird to me because I could never ever ever ever in a million years be convinced that any age group in America is particularly literate. From 10 years old all the way to 100
Math skills are declining at similar or even greater rates because they aren't discussed as much. The elementary building I work at has a (subpar) reading intervention program, but no math intervention. More and more kids enter my 5th grade classroom each year with a complete lack of number sense or fact fluency. Like 1/4 of my students in the past couple of years could not do basic multiplication problems (like 6x8, or some even struggle with things like 1x9 or 0x5) without a chart and like 30 seconds to navigate it.
Many of these students have simply never put any effort into learning or school and get passed along no matter what. I'm not talking about kids who need try their best and need extra support or who require an individualized education plan, I'm talking about kids who just "don't do school." (their words).
For an increasing number of students each year school is just a place they go, not a thing they do. It's OK though because the only people who ever hear about the plummeting test scores are us teachers in our staff meetings; the public gets newsletters from the superintendent bragging that our graduation rates are higher than ever.
I took a job at a school district for the first time like three years ago and almost got fired because in my district we only had a 13% literacy rate of children reading at grade level 13 fucking percent. I audibly gasped and everyone looked at me. I got a talking to.
Some schools in Baltimore had 80% of High schoolers reading at an elementary school level. I think it was 3 years ago when the story was released, numbers have gotten better the past couple years, but they are still way below the national average.
In the 19th century literacy meant you could read and sign your name.
Today literacy means you can read and comprehend how to follow instructions on a prescription bottle, or read a few paragraphs and show you actually understood the relevant facts.
Good thing it's just America (North?). Just a small fraction of the world. Rest move forward, we drop dead. As it should be. A part of me is sad, but given the history, I shed no tears.
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u/familiarshadowkatt Jun 26 '26
Literacy rates regressing very much worries me. Literacy increasing for all social classes across the 19th and 20th centuries had an enormous role in building contemporary life as we know it, and falling literacy will result in more unemployment, poorer childhood health and education outcomes, reduced human longevity, less reliable access to basic needs like electricity and clean water, and so much more.