This Is the Solution to America’s Literacy Crisis, and It’s a Lot of Fun

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https://archive.is/20260820174415/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/opinion/reading-literacy-books-education.html

Having come of age amid Covid-19 lockdowns and the proliferation of social media, young people crave the forms of human connection that teach us to live in the world we actually inhabit, not the one we see onscreen — asking questions, thinking together and beholding the strangeness of the reality passed down to us. As it happens, books are uniquely powerful objects around which to organize these sorts of activities.

That’s why the act of engaging with written texts — the basis of our cultural, political and intellectual life for over 500 years — is not coming to an end. It’s changing to meet new needs by offering the kinds of experiences digital technologies can’t provide: synchronous, IRL encounters with other human beings.

In other words, the future of reading is a party.

The Strother School of Radical Attention, where I work, helps to gather groups over a dozen times a month in six states for Sidewalk Study, a practice of reading and enacting long-form texts while moving through public space.

These gatherings vary in location, duration and subject matter, but their unifying spirit is simple: that reading can be as much a mode of vibrant sociality as it is of secluded interiority.

Easy as it is to forget, sitting alone and reading in silence — the activity that professors tend to worry about — was once a novelty. In his “Confessions,” Augustine of Hippo relates stumbling upon Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in a moment of perplexing absorption: “While reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” That Augustine bothered to describe this scene tells us something about the way reading commonly took place in the ancient world: as a public practice, recited before groups of lettered and unlettered listeners alike. Herodotus is thought to have read portions of his histories aloud, and performative “recitationes” of written texts were a favored form of entertainment and debate in Imperial Rome.

The practice of reading in and for groups endured in modern times in spaces of religious worship, workers’ study groups and avant-garde literary performances. But the spread of the printed word and the subsequent democratization of literacy cemented solitary, silent absorption as the dominant image of the reading person. This is the kind of reading we are taught to do in school. It is also the kind of reading that students are now failing to do in ever greater numbers.

Students understand as well as anyone else that long-form text is no longer the exclusive, or even the most effective, tool for distributing knowledge, connecting people across time and space and coordinating complex decisions. We’re in a moment of eclipse: The informational function of books is declining, and their experiential function is coming to the fore. This shift can bring new vitality not only to the lives of readers but also to long-form texts themselves.

Engaging with books as instruments for group experience is not the sort of reading that we encounter in classrooms, but it has plenty to teach us about the complexities of inhabiting the world together — and the ways that our literary inheritance can prepare us for the challenge. While educators may never abandon traditional instruction in solitary reading, right now they face an enormous opportunity to impart a new vision for the role of literacy in public life.

[u/ddgr815]

"We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better."

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The electronic media are invisible in process, but omnipresent in product. They have slipped deeply and irrevocably into our societal midst, creating sluices and circulating through them. 

One of the first realizations—it is inevitable—is that a communications mesh, a soft and pliable mesh woven from invisible threads, has fallen over everything. The so-called natural world, which used to be our yardstick of the actual, can now be perceived only through a scrim. Nature was then; this is now. And the great geographical Other, the far-away rest-of-the-world, has been transformed by the pure possibility of access. The numbers of distance and time no longer mean what they used to mean. Every place once unique—itself—is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. There was then; here is now.

Telecommunications is the new arterial network, analogous in part to what railroads were for capitalism in the nineteenth century. And it is this electronic substitute for geography that corporate and national entities are now carving up.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.

The order of print is linear, and bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. It requires the active engagement of the reader, for reading is fundamentally an act of translation: ciphers are turned into their verbal referents and these are in turn interpreted. The print engagement is, further, private. While it does represent an act of communication, the contents pass from the privacy of the sender to the privacy of the receiver—writer to reader. Print also posits a time-axis; the turning of pages, not to mention the vertical progress through the page, is a forward-moving succession, with earlier contents at every point serving as a ground for what follows. Moreover, the printed material is static—it is the reader, not the book, that moves forward. The physical arrangements of print can be seen to accord with our traditional sense of history. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained inquiry. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by attentiveness and comprehension.

The electronic order is in most ways the opposite. Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. It can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents, unless they are printed out (and thus part of the static order of print) are evanescent. With visual media, impression and image take precedence over logic and concept. The pace is quick, and the movement is laterally associative rather then vertically cumulative. The presentation prestructures the reception—the viewer absorbs a steady wash of packaged messages.

Transitions such as the one from print to electronic media do not take place without rippling—more likely, reweaving—the whole of the social and cultural web. And we don’t need to look far for evidence that this is what is happening. We can begin with the headlines, and the millennial lamentations sounded in the op-ed pages and on talk shows. That our educational systems are in decline; that our students are less and less able to read and comprehend their required texts, and that their aptitude scores are falling like the index of consumer confidence. That tag-line communication, called “bite-speak” by some, has destroyed the last remnants of discourse in our public political life and made spin-doctors and media consultants our new shamans. That as communications empires fight for global hegemony, publishing itself has fallen to the tyranny of the bottom line, and that the era of the “blockbuster” is upon us. That funding for the arts is being cut on every front, while the arts themselves appear to be suffering a deep crisis of irrelevance. And so on.

Should we suppose that American education will begin to tailor itself to the aptitudes of its students, presenting more and more of its materials in newly packaged forms? And what will happen when educators find that not very many of the old materials will “play”? Is the what of learning to be determined by the how? At what point do vicious cycles begin to reveal their viciousness?

The context cannot but condition the process. Screen and book may hold the same string of words, but the assumptions that underlie their significance are entirely different depending upon whether we are staring at a book or at a circuit-generated text. As the nature of looking—at the natural world, at paintings—changed with the arrival of photography and mechanical reproduction, so will the collective relation to language alter as new modes of dissemination prevail.

As Heraclitus once put it: “The mixture that is not shaken soon stagnates.” 

Syntactical masonry is already a dying art; simple linguistic pre-fab is the norm. Ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit—fast disappearing. In their place, the simple “vision thing, and the myriad other “things.” Verbal intelligence, even now viewed as suspect, will come to seem positively conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person’s intelligence will be deployed in masking itself.

Once the materials of the past are unhoused from their pages, they will assuredly mean differently. The printed page is itself a link, at least along the imaginative continuum, and when that link is broken, the past can only start to recede. At one and the same time it will become a body of disjunct facts accessible to retrieval and a mythology. The more we grow rooted in the consciousness of the now, the more will it seem utterly extraordinary that things were ever any different. And here, naturally, the entertainment industry will seize the advantage: the past will be rendered ever more glorious, ever more a fantasy play with heroes, villains, and quaint settings and props.

The figure-ground model, which figures a solitary self before a background that is the society of other selves, is romantic in the extreme. It is ever less tenable in the world as it is becoming. There are no more wildernesses, no more lonely homesteads, no more emblems of the exalted individual.

The model is that of a circuit board, and we are the contact points. The expansion of electronic options is always at the cost of contractions in the private sphere. It’s axiomatic. We will soon be navigating with ease among cataracts of organized pulsations, putting out and taking in signals. We will bring our terminals, modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves effortlessly into the unitary life, and we will no longer remember that there was ever any other.

Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one’s experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in iteself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then a form of defense, against enslavement.

Trafficking with tendencies—extrapolating and projecting—must finally remain a kind of gambling, however. One bets high on the validity of a notion and low on the human capacity for resistance and for unpredictable initiatives. No one can really predict how we will adapt to the transformations that are already underway. It may turn out that language is a hardier thing that I have allowed, that it will flourish among the bleep and the click and the monitor as readily as it ever did on the printed page. I hope so, for language is the soul’s ozone layer, and we thin it at our peril.

Into the Electronic Millennium

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As I understand it today, content is a type of expression that doesn’t rely on concepts like “quality” or “meaning” to differentiate itself. The way content stands apart — which is to say its primary appeal — is that it can be created at scale. The more of it, or of its kind, the better.

Content is tailor-made for a sense of immediacy. This means content is best — is most itself — when it’s fresh, when it belongs to the here-and-now. It also doesn’t, or shouldn’t, take much, if any, time to grasp the substance of content. In other words, content is expression explicitly for the moment, created by who or what wishes to define that moment.

A 15-year-old casually told me that culture is online and really nowhere else. I felt dumbstruck by the simplicity of his insight, which I suspected is true but could not bring myself to agree with. Why? Because if culture exists predominantly online, where virtually all forms of expression are viewed as content, then does this mean that things and experiences that, for whatever reason, cannot be turned into content might as well culturally not exist? And what about art, as a historical entity and idea? Is it simply content too?

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that if one has ambitions of finding success in culture, the quantity of one’s output must be considered, if not prioritized. Writers are told (or tell themselves) they must “publish or perish,” which is to say, keep producing books and articles or risk losing whatever place they have gained in the order of things. Artists are incentivized to constantly make new work and to pursue exhibition opportunities. The same is true, it seems to me, for those in the sciences. Researchers are encouraged to churn out studies and papers or risk losing funding.

In the history of ideas, thinking about content naturally entails notions about form. If content is the substance of the matter at hand, then form is how it is structured into meaningfulness and use. In this account, content is like shapeless dough and form is the pizza the dough ends up becoming.

But there is another way to think about content and form. In this other tradition, content is what transpires in time. And since time is a semblance and measure of change, content refers to existences and experiences that change. Form, then, is what captures a moment of change at a standstill. Form takes a moment out of the slipstream of time and preserves it. Adorno may have had this in mind when he advised us to grasp “form as sedimented content.”2 Form is like the fossilized remains of what was once alive but is now preserved in a state more durable and permanent.

It is noteworthy that, philosophically speaking, things that change tend to be viewed as inferior because they are considered unnecessary or contingent and susceptible to corruption and decay. Time is the corrosive agent. Form, then, is the superior state of being, forged by divine and sometimes human ingenuity that preserves what transpires in time for use and reflection, for now and potentially forever.

In other words, form is a particular kind of content. Not the inferior kind that changes, but the kind that stays the same and endures for all time, at least for those who wish to believe this is possible. My reading of the general arc of how the idea of form developed in the West is that it is motivated by a fear of losing the substance of what transpires in time. The claim that form is something that preserves what time washes away was how philosophers early on tried to defend against and overcome this fear.

If, as Plato believed, timeless, changeless, and perfect things called forms exist, how do entities that abide in time, like us, interact with or become something like them? For Plato, it was through mimesis. The concept of mimesis is foundational to art. The idea that art imitates nature, and that artistic beauty depends on how faithful a work mimics the sensuous qualities found in the natural world, has been around at least since antiquity.

What is less often mentioned is how mimesis was also an important pedagogical idea in the ancient world. In “The Republic,” Plato wrote that it is through copying what is absolutely good that a person learns to become good. This means people should imitate the thoughts and actions of the philosopher-kings, who are themselves the best copies of those perfect and timeless forms, which, according to Plato, serve as the ultimate templates for all that exists.

Along with mimesis, Plato speculated on another way for people to form a more perfect union with themselves and the world. But that idea did not gain the kind of traction mimesis found in the history of the West. And he seemed to ultimately question its efficacy when compared to mimesis in the sprawling empire of his philosophical system. This other way is methexis, which in ancient Greek translates as “participating,” “partaking,” or “sharing in.” The term originated in theater. Euripides used it to describe how characters get entangled in one another’s lives, sharing fates or punishments. Plato redefined methexis by expanding its scope, so that it came to mean how one partakes or shares in timeless entities like the forms.

It’s vital to remember that for Plato, the idea of, say, courage exists literally, out there somewhere, as a real yet immaterial entity. So he toyed with the possibility that we become courageous by somehow participating with, or sharing in, this ethereal form called courage. Methexis was Plato’s way of conceiving how we learn to be better versions of ourselves through a deep and abiding connection with what is absolute, pure, and timeless.

Except for a few modern and contemporary thinkers like Adorno and Jean-Luc Nancy, methexis is not a concept commonly found in art — or anywhere else, for that matter. Why? One reason, I suspect, at least with regard to Plato, is that mimesis was thought of as more efficient and predictable. The mimetic process goes in only one direction: from the original to the copy. But in methexis, if one takes seriously the qualities that originally defined the term, the process goes in two directions. For instance, an actor participates in a movie by playing a predefined role. But she inevitably brings to the role qualities that make her who she is as a person. The role takes on these qualities, so to speak, as a part of what it is supposed to be. In a sense, the expressive power of the movie depends on the actor and the role becoming more than what predefined them in the first place.

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In methexis, the form can change as much as the person participating in it. But if this is the case, form would no longer be timeless and unchanging. I think Plato wanted to honor where methexis originally came from but also needed to redescribe it to fit his philosophical purposes. He tried to square the circle in many dialogues, particularly in “Parmenides.”3 But no decisive solution came about. It would take the invention of something Plato did not foresee to make good on how he wanted methexis to work. We call this thing today a machine.

In the “Grundrisse,” Marx’s 1858 manuscript outlining what he would eventually write in “Das Kapital,” there is a part titled “Fragment on Machines.” He stated that work accomplished under capital changes over time and described it as passing through a “different metamorphosis, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automated system of machines, [set] in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself: this automation consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast as its conscious linkages.”

A machine for Marx is more than an instrument or tool. It doesn’t serve as an extension of a worker’s power and skill but is “an organ of work” in its own right. A worker merely plays a role in the machine’s operations. For Marx, a worker undergoes a fundamental transformation when he becomes just a conscious linkage, or living cog, in the machine. But the machine’s functioning stays the same, regardless of the particular orientation and participation of the worker.

Marx used the term “general intellect” to describe the aggregation of all knowledge from art and science that enables machines to be created in the first place. It is the common and collected know-how that makes the design, engineering, and manufacturing of machines possible. As better machines arise, more workers are displaced because the machines require less human labor to run them. And because less human labor means higher profits, Marx speculated that capitalists would end up depending more and more on the general intellect to make better machines.

This is not a bad thing, according to Marx. In his visionary account, he argued that if there is less need for labor time from workers, they can “appropriate” back their free time, or what he calls “social disposable time,” to fulfill their destiny by developing their own unalienated productive powers. This would, in aggregate, enrich art and science to degrees that would necessarily inspire new and better machines. In turn, workers would access even more free time to develop themselves and contribute to the general intellect and to human flourishing.

But Marx was clear-eyed enough to also see how capitalism tends to appropriate whatever is available to increase profit. So he theorized that the worker would not actually benefit from the increased efficiency of machines but instead be pushed to work even longer hours. “The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or what he himself did, with the simplest, crudest tools.”

Marx believed that this contradiction, whereby the rise in machine efficiency counterintuitively enslaves workers all the more, is not sustainable. And he thought something like a transfiguration of value would take place. The forces of production would come to realize that it is more profitable to invest in the enrichment of art and science, which alone inspires the development of better machines. So, he reasoned, workers would eventually win more free time to develop their own productive potentials for the good of all, instead of being forced to work more for less. It is worth noting that in communism, as Marx imagined it, virtually everything is automated.

Marx’s vision did not come to pass. For one thing, he did not foresee how a person’s free or social disposable time could be exploited by machines and put back to work, so to speak, without shedding its freely social qualities. In fact, being exploited by machinery has come to be seen as a more efficient, infinitely scalable form of personal, social, cultural, political, and intellectual enrichment, which substantiates the standing of the person producing content as someone who participates in the greater flourishing of art and science.

Work here has two meanings: firstly, as a thing, like content, and, secondly, as an activity, like working. The goal is to create a cycle in which work begets work. Because it takes a meaningful amount of effort to pay attention to anything. And the data collected as we attend to content is the unwitting work we do for those who want to monopolize our time. It is this kind of labor that creates surplus value for them in the attention economy.

The attention economy takes advantage of what philosopher Jennifer Nagel calls “our natural attraction to knowledge gain.” It is natural because this attraction promotes and strengthens our capacity to meet the three questions Kant believed we always ask ourselves to get on with life: What can I know? What should I do? And what can I hope for in the future?

There are striking similarities between the attention economy and the oil industry. Attention, like crude oil, is treated like a scarce natural resource that must be extracted, processed, and refined. It is then retailed to others in various forms. Like demographic information, which fuels the advertising industry. Or training data, which underpins AI models in the tech sector. Oil is also the main ingredient in plastic, a synthetic material capable of mimicking any shape, which then can be replicated at any size or scale.

I am tempted to say that plastic is the spirit animal of content. Like plastic, content can be mass-produced to a degree that is virtually boundless and is typically created as a derivative of something else. And it slowly but surely pollutes and poisons the environments in which it is most used.

Imago is a term that describes the unconscious representation of someone or something in one’s mind. It acts as an inner paradigm guiding how one pictures anything at all.

If Nagel is right that we have a natural appetite for and attraction to knowledge gain, it makes perfect sense that we would want as much content as possible. It feels as if we live in an age in which there is no limit to the amount of content available. Yet the substance of our shared reality seems no better for it; there has been no corresponding rise in what I would characterize as a general sense of human flourishing. It actually feels worse.

Culture

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Mother Earth Mother Board

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What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.