If we paddle upstream, we'll find that many high schools are assigning fewer books, and college instructors report that many students can't or won't read entire texts. There are numerous causes for this dismal situation: technology, lack of reading at home, and the message book banning sends.
But if we paddle upstream a bit further, I believe we find that K12 schooling has largely remained unchanged for the last 150 years. There is simply no agreement on what we want for our kids when they walk across the stage to accept their diplomas. There is no agreement on what we want for society in a dramatically different world.
I believe a large part of the country doesn't want to produce independent critical thinkers. As the late Sir Ken Robinson eloquently pointed out years ago in a series of TED Talks, schools are largely about cultivating compliance. Toe the line. Compliance doesn't buck a system that is rigged for a few. This lack of critical thinking shows most startlingly in our last three presidential elections. Millions could not see or think past bluster or their own single-issue self-interest. Millions more stayed home because "neither candidate was good." Indeed, WTAF!
I agree with this. We also do not value education and it shows in what we expect of teachers and how they are compensated. And then covid made everything worse.
I wish I was less bothered by the illiteracy of this generation, I have a friend that owns a small restaurant in Los Angeles, pizza, sandwiches, and pasta. He is distressed by his patrons that cannot read a menu in order to order. He has had to redo his menu to include pictures of everything including possible substitutions or additions to menu items. He is not alone in this, his fellow restaurant owners are reporting the same issues with their customers. Is this a result of social media, grade inflation, or just parents not reading to their children? I wish I was more optimistic.
Wow. That's alarming. I don't know any kids who can't read. Some that don't love reading but that's different.
Were you in AJ's seminar where she said that the number of books in the childhood home was the biggest indicator of later success? I remember the number had to be more than 50 to make a difference.
I have never come across the misspelling of a/isle but I also have concerns about a post-literate society ushered in by screens and governed by emotion rather than reason but I am also heartened by the lawsuits winning against social media for developing addictive products and the increasing number of schools returning to paper and pencil and ditching the Chromebooks and the increasing numbers of states and countries seeking to ban social media for young people. So, in other words, I have hope.
The statistic that floors me is that more Americans are placing bets than reading books. While I do pride myself on having an abundance of words at the ready, my only response to this was WTAF?
I felt this article in my bones. I have been complaining about English courses in high schools since my son’s freshman year in 2019… even on AP courses they rarely read more than three or four books a year, and always TOGETHER in class. It boggles my mind. Luckily my son is a prolific reader and I “assigned” him books to read. My daughter however is glued to her phone and when she devoured a book this summer in two days I wanted to give her an award as it was so out of character. I am trying to remain hopeful, but it’s hard. I cannot imagine my life without a book by my side. During the darkest years of my drinking and depression I didn’t read nearly as much, most often because I couldn’t see the words on the page through my intoxication… having books back in my life has been one of the most surprising gifts of sobriety. (I even wrote a poem about it!) 🤣
The thing that has surprised me the most is when writers do not know the meaning of words that are integral to writing. For instance, I have seen new authors post something like, "I'm writing a non-fiction novel!" or "I'm writing my memoir. This will be my first novel." I have a friend who was a grammar school teacher all of her life. She told our women's group one time that she finally had time to read a novel. And it was a self-help or spiritual book someone had read. ???? When I did write a novel, after writing two non-fiction books, I had friends look at my cover options and one told me, that because the title was A Wolff in the Family, could I remove "A Novel" from the cover? I told her, uh, no, if I did, that would imply that it was non-fiction. This is a well-educated person with a college degree. I could go on but I'll spare you. It scares me for language, which is the mode we have for communication mostly, which makes us human... and allows us to actually connect with the other humans. Duh. Thanks for this.
Social media — and now the proliferation of large language models (which are artificial, but not intelligent in the slightest) — have merely accelerated a trend that Neil Postman first wrote about in 1983, in his book The Disappearance of Childhood. The real death knell for literacy was the rise of television, and two of Postman's subsequent books (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business [1985] and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology [1992]) expanded on his ideas and seem eerily prescient now.
One of the analyses that I think is missing from Horowitz's piece is an examination of the economic factors that are driving the increase in numbers of brick-and-mortar bookstores at a time when there's increasing consolidation of "big" publishing houses and the ongoing disappearance of both smaller publishers and the infrastructure on which they depend for getting their books out into the world. There are so many small presses that still have not recovered from the abrupt closure of Small Press Distribution two years ago, and the people I know who run small presses are up against increasingly difficult odds — if you can't get your books into people's hands, your readership is going to decline, and even the coolest indie bookstores aren't going to stock your books if you don't have a distributor.
I also don't think Horowitz really captured (and maybe doesn't fully understand) the downstream effects of technological change on our understanding of childhood as a prolonged state of innocence — this is one of Postman's big insights, and I haven't seen anyone else really address it quite the same way — and I think much of the discourse around the increased rates of depression and poor mental health in young people misses the larger underlying causes. It's not just the phones; it's the access to our culture's biggest taboos years before they're ready to understand or conceive of them.
Have you read Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story? Shteyngart is one of the few fiction writers who I think gets the whole picture.
I have Super Sad True Love Story but hadn't read it yet but I'm going to move it up on the stack. There are some great responses to Horowitz's essay but none that I've read have addressed what you mention here. And part of Atlas's assessment of online life being the biggest negative has to do with what kids are exposed to through it. Very interesting. Thanks so much for this.
True misspelling confessions… for forever I thought a sweater I wouldn’t dream of trying to knit was spelled fair aisle… not
Fair Isle. Oops. Refrigerator I thought refridgerator and defended that extra d… oh I know there are more. Apostrophes and capitalization I do only
To humor my peers. They waste my
Time. EE
CUMMINGS I blame you. That and I can’t find the apostrophe thing or how
To
Capitalize or type with any finesse. Dunce that I am…
If we paddle upstream, we'll find that many high schools are assigning fewer books, and college instructors report that many students can't or won't read entire texts. There are numerous causes for this dismal situation: technology, lack of reading at home, and the message book banning sends.
But if we paddle upstream a bit further, I believe we find that K12 schooling has largely remained unchanged for the last 150 years. There is simply no agreement on what we want for our kids when they walk across the stage to accept their diplomas. There is no agreement on what we want for society in a dramatically different world.
I believe a large part of the country doesn't want to produce independent critical thinkers. As the late Sir Ken Robinson eloquently pointed out years ago in a series of TED Talks, schools are largely about cultivating compliance. Toe the line. Compliance doesn't buck a system that is rigged for a few. This lack of critical thinking shows most startlingly in our last three presidential elections. Millions could not see or think past bluster or their own single-issue self-interest. Millions more stayed home because "neither candidate was good." Indeed, WTAF!
I need to escape to an aisle, er, I mean isle.
I agree with this. We also do not value education and it shows in what we expect of teachers and how they are compensated. And then covid made everything worse.
I wish I was less bothered by the illiteracy of this generation, I have a friend that owns a small restaurant in Los Angeles, pizza, sandwiches, and pasta. He is distressed by his patrons that cannot read a menu in order to order. He has had to redo his menu to include pictures of everything including possible substitutions or additions to menu items. He is not alone in this, his fellow restaurant owners are reporting the same issues with their customers. Is this a result of social media, grade inflation, or just parents not reading to their children? I wish I was more optimistic.
Wow. That's alarming. I don't know any kids who can't read. Some that don't love reading but that's different.
Were you in AJ's seminar where she said that the number of books in the childhood home was the biggest indicator of later success? I remember the number had to be more than 50 to make a difference.
I have never come across the misspelling of a/isle but I also have concerns about a post-literate society ushered in by screens and governed by emotion rather than reason but I am also heartened by the lawsuits winning against social media for developing addictive products and the increasing number of schools returning to paper and pencil and ditching the Chromebooks and the increasing numbers of states and countries seeking to ban social media for young people. So, in other words, I have hope.
Thank you for this. It gives me hope, too.
The statistic that floors me is that more Americans are placing bets than reading books. While I do pride myself on having an abundance of words at the ready, my only response to this was WTAF?
I am WTAFing with you.
I felt this article in my bones. I have been complaining about English courses in high schools since my son’s freshman year in 2019… even on AP courses they rarely read more than three or four books a year, and always TOGETHER in class. It boggles my mind. Luckily my son is a prolific reader and I “assigned” him books to read. My daughter however is glued to her phone and when she devoured a book this summer in two days I wanted to give her an award as it was so out of character. I am trying to remain hopeful, but it’s hard. I cannot imagine my life without a book by my side. During the darkest years of my drinking and depression I didn’t read nearly as much, most often because I couldn’t see the words on the page through my intoxication… having books back in my life has been one of the most surprising gifts of sobriety. (I even wrote a poem about it!) 🤣
Thank you again for an eye-opening read
Thank you for sharing that. I had the same experience in sobriety.
The thing that has surprised me the most is when writers do not know the meaning of words that are integral to writing. For instance, I have seen new authors post something like, "I'm writing a non-fiction novel!" or "I'm writing my memoir. This will be my first novel." I have a friend who was a grammar school teacher all of her life. She told our women's group one time that she finally had time to read a novel. And it was a self-help or spiritual book someone had read. ???? When I did write a novel, after writing two non-fiction books, I had friends look at my cover options and one told me, that because the title was A Wolff in the Family, could I remove "A Novel" from the cover? I told her, uh, no, if I did, that would imply that it was non-fiction. This is a well-educated person with a college degree. I could go on but I'll spare you. It scares me for language, which is the mode we have for communication mostly, which makes us human... and allows us to actually connect with the other humans. Duh. Thanks for this.
I've run into this, too. And I'm always so perplexed. And scared.
Social media — and now the proliferation of large language models (which are artificial, but not intelligent in the slightest) — have merely accelerated a trend that Neil Postman first wrote about in 1983, in his book The Disappearance of Childhood. The real death knell for literacy was the rise of television, and two of Postman's subsequent books (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business [1985] and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology [1992]) expanded on his ideas and seem eerily prescient now.
One of the analyses that I think is missing from Horowitz's piece is an examination of the economic factors that are driving the increase in numbers of brick-and-mortar bookstores at a time when there's increasing consolidation of "big" publishing houses and the ongoing disappearance of both smaller publishers and the infrastructure on which they depend for getting their books out into the world. There are so many small presses that still have not recovered from the abrupt closure of Small Press Distribution two years ago, and the people I know who run small presses are up against increasingly difficult odds — if you can't get your books into people's hands, your readership is going to decline, and even the coolest indie bookstores aren't going to stock your books if you don't have a distributor.
I also don't think Horowitz really captured (and maybe doesn't fully understand) the downstream effects of technological change on our understanding of childhood as a prolonged state of innocence — this is one of Postman's big insights, and I haven't seen anyone else really address it quite the same way — and I think much of the discourse around the increased rates of depression and poor mental health in young people misses the larger underlying causes. It's not just the phones; it's the access to our culture's biggest taboos years before they're ready to understand or conceive of them.
Have you read Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story? Shteyngart is one of the few fiction writers who I think gets the whole picture.
I have Super Sad True Love Story but hadn't read it yet but I'm going to move it up on the stack. There are some great responses to Horowitz's essay but none that I've read have addressed what you mention here. And part of Atlas's assessment of online life being the biggest negative has to do with what kids are exposed to through it. Very interesting. Thanks so much for this.
Atlas gets it. I’d love to chat about Super Sad when you do read it.