at universities all around the country professors are reporting a problem students can't read books this is true even at Elite colleges and universities in one required class at Colombia students are often expected to read about a book a week but in the past couple of years students have started telling their professors that they can't do it one student told her professor that she had never been required to read an entire book this is part of a larger Trend people aren't reading anymore this is true for men and women people who went to college and people
who didn't so what's going on it turns out that there are many pieces to this puzzle but it all begins with how we teach kids to read for a very long time we taught kids to read in a very particular way we called it phonics with phonics you start with individual sounds you work your way up from those sounds into more complex sounds and then you see how those sounds build words if you come across an unfamiliar word you're told to sound it out but starting around the 1960s a new approach to language education emerged
and we called this whole language learning in whole language learning and some successor ideas like balanced literacy the idea was that you should learn to read at the level of a word using a method called three queing students were taught to infer the meaning of words from Context this whole approach was Pitch as a very natural almost kind of organic way to teach kids how to read the idea was that actually that kids had a natural propensity to read and that all you need to do was put them in the right context and maybe give
them a few small techniques or nudges and they would basically teach themselves how to read you wouldn't have to go through a kind of boring process like learning phonics it's actually kind of a romantic idea right it'd be lovely if kids just had this natural ability to read as long as we just put them in the right environment and it makes reading feel more like an art than a science the only problem is that whole language learning didn't work literacy rates fell and in the countries which had adopted whole language learning that would be parts
of the United States Canada the UK New Zealand Australia more and more kids weren't able to read at grade level it was a systemic failure of Education systems across multiple countries and if we're trying to explain why people don't read anymore well this has to be part of the story if you weren't taught how to read properly reading is never going to be something that you do for fun it's never going to be pleasurable it's going to feel really difficult and like a lot of work and so if more and more people find reading difficult
then they're just going to stop reading now whole language learning and balance literacy these were never uncontested ideas despite the fact that they were adopted in so many countries they were always people who were pushing back and this was something that became known as the reading Wars in some states it was described as the most vicious debate in politics journalists and scientists have been reporting on the damaging effects of whole language learning and actually we might be able to say that covid-19 is going to lead to a change in how kids learn to read Because
during the pandemic when more kids were learning at home their parents got to see how ineffective whole language learning really was and that added a lot of political will to solving the problem more and more States and even countries are bringing back phonics into their reading programs and while some of the insights from Whole language learning might stay in the classroom at least kids are going to be learning those basic building blocks which the data do seem to indicate actually would help them so maybe we'll see a turn in the future where more people want
to read for pleasure again for the students who were never taught phonics though much of the damage is already done and I don't know how to fix that problem now this is speculation but I would be willing to bet that kids who make it into a school like Colombia or other Elite universities are probably able to read at grade level but they were still telling their professors that they didn't feel capable of reading a book in even a week and these are kids remember who are mostly full-time students they have a lot of free time
and actually their studies should be their main focus so just pointing out sort of the disastrous effects of whole language learning isn't going to adequately explain why fewer people are reading but part of the explanation does still seem to come from the way that these kids were taught in school and it has to do with education reforms most infamously things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core those are at least are the names for Education reforms in the United States other countries have different systems I'm not talking about those here the push to reform
education in the United States emphasized two things informational text and standardized testing when students were being taught how to engage with the text they were learning how to extract information from it you would even see people say that books were outdated and that we needed to to teach kids about the text that they would actually encounter in real life like articles or web pages so as an exercise a student might be presented with an excerpt from a longer text they would be asked to analyze the argument or talk about what evidence was presented in the
text or even what the thesis statement was and a lot of this would happen in English classes where traditionally you would be first exposed to reading longer and more difficult books so instead of learning things like analyzing symbolism or theme or being able to practice your close reading of text you were mostly focused on extracting information from those excerpts doing that traditional English stuff like close reading builds something that we could call your reading stamina and when a student who is fully capable of reading says that they can't read a whole book in a week
it's likely because they haven't had a chance to develop their reading stamina in fact some professors and teachers even in high schools or middle schools say that kids reading stamina has been declining steadily over the years as well if you're trying to build your reading stamina one of the things you can do is just read books just sit down and try to see how many pages you can get through before you have to go and do something else but students increasingly aren't actually being given those opportunities in the classroom or even in assignments in one
survey only 177% of Educators said that they were teaching primarily with whole text so when it comes to those students at Elite colleges and universities or even just colleges and universities in general who say that they can't read a whole book I think it has more to do with this than it does with problems with whole language learning I think this is the better explanation for why students at columia or other great universities aren't able to read whole books these students were able to get into some of the best colleges and universities in the world
but they were never taught how to be great readers they were taught how to be great test takers so when these students get to college and they're asked to read whole books they can't do it because this is a completely different skill than they've been told that they need to develop in high school so much of their education has been about optimizing themselves for standardized tests and then eventually to take something like the SAT or the act and if you're just trying to do really well on a standardized test you need to focus on reading
excerpts and being able to answer multiple choice questions or maybe write a five paragraph essay about what you just read you don't have to focus on analyzing themes in Tolstoy dfki Dickens you don't have to worry about reading great books so then if you have a required freshman class that's about great novels in the western tradition well this might be your first time being exposed to many of those great novels in the western tradition and it's going to be hard because you're not used to it so when we look at the big picture we have
some students who were never taught how to read properly because of things like whole language learning and then we have students who were never taught how to read books because of an emphasis on standardized testing but when we want to talk about why other people have stopped reading for fun or just stopped reading in general there's one more thing we have to talk about and it's the phones so something that gets overlooked in a lot of these discussions is that many people actually do spend their days reading it's just that they're not reading books if
you're scrolling on YouTube or Twitter then you are actually encountering an endless stream of text more text than many people throughout history would have encountered in a week or a month Tik Tok is maybe the most addictive of these platforms and practically every video has burned in captions so people are constantly reading something when they are online and if you're driving you're seeing road signs you're seeing Billboards you're seeing advertisements the world wants you to read it just doesn't really want to give you the time that it takes to read a good book so this
is my backyard and occasionally I'll come and I'll bring a book and I'll try to get some reading done it's peaceful and it's quiet and it's one of the places that I really love so maybe I start reading the book and I'll feel really good and then within just a few seconds this thing wants my attention so if I want to get any reading done I have to be disciplined and I have to decide that my phone needs to stay inside some place where it can't distract me now imagine that you're a college student and
you've never read a full book in a week or really ever been asked to read a hard or long book for your education and your professor says Hey I want you to read Homer's Iliad in a week let's say you're a good sport too and so you go to your dorm room you get your book and you say you know what I'm going to do it but now think about all the things that are there ready to distract you other people or your phone or your laptop anything with the screen really is there and it's
ready to just make you feel more stimulated because let's face it even if we're people who really like to read compared to doing other things the act of reading is really boring it is the antithesis of our sort of constant need to be over stimulated a lot of schools high schools middle schools things like that have decided to start Banning smartphones from the classroom and my reaction of course is like what took you so long of course students aren't going to be able to read or learn properly if they're constantly distracted by their phone so
not only have we systematically failed students as we've taught them to read or not taught them to read in some cases we've also just designed a world that is there to constantly demand our attention and that takes us away from those deeper reflective sort of focus heavy practices like reading good books so when adults try to say why they don't read anymore they usually site three things they don't have time they can't pay attention long enough or they blame social media and I suspect that all of these are related the fact that we don't have
time or that we can't focus is in part because of things like social media other forms of Easy Entertainment are there to take up all of our time I often like to read before bed and occasionally I'll tell myself that I need to check my phone before I start reading and I'll find that I end up scrolling for an hour without even realizing it time seems to flow differently when I'm on my phone compared to when I'm trying to do something more demanding like reading it's easier it's more instantly pleasurable even though at the end
of the day I feel terrible about it so I expect that a lot of the things that I found are true for me could be true for you or for many other people and are part of this broader explanation of why nobody reads anymore so the result of all this is that fewer and fewer people read books you have your super readers who read tons of books and they keep the average numbers up but you have more and more people who decide that reading just isn't for them I don't know exactly what we're supposed to
do about that but that's where we are
