Around the world, the literacy crisis looms ahead. Forget assigned reading; no one even reads as a pastime anymore. But why on Earth is this crisis affecting everyone I know—including myself?
In 2024, my reading log was a vast library. In exactly one year, the vibrancy of the reading log became dormant. My TBR list dried up. My mini book reviews, which used star emojis to rate books one to five, were an afterthought. Suddenly, the entire concept of ‘reading for fun’ became purely fiction.
It wasn’t just me; almost nobody around me read at all. Students started lying about completing assigned reading. I stopped hearing book recommendations. And when we were reading, it always seemed to be class-related. If you asked me, I wouldn’t be able to explain how everyone suddenly got the memo to stop reading, from idling over the Guinness World Records or Weird but True books in elementary school to reaching for SparkNotes instead.
It turns out that this shift was less inexplicable than I initially thought. In fact, it represented a broader, sharp societal decline in reading for fun among all youth. What I thought was a product of growing up was impacting children who weren’t even grown to begin with. What was happening?
In the age of a so-called ‘literacy crisis’, students’ reading comprehension skills are struggling to meet national benchmarks. As students turn away from reading even at universities like Harvard, it’s becoming more obvious that our education has failed us. What happened to the childlike whimsy that came with reading books?
It may seem like a stupidly basic answer, but the digital age has completely reshaped the way we’ve been taught to read. Online assistants or broader institutional AI mandates have forced many teachers, including many of my own, to adapt once-personalized lesson plans into documents with emojis on every heading. Our book chapters and large texts have become more palatable—think articles, video transcripts, and web pages. And while we may not necessarily constitute this reading as any more ‘fun’ than before (sorry English teachers!), the repetitive practice does condition us to formulaically collect test answers rather than actually immersing ourselves creatively. We look for an ‘X’ to mark the spot rather than a study of the map and its inner workings.
In a sense, the very system designed to maintain that sense of elementary school curiosity around reading has done the exact opposite. When we turn to our trusty SparkNotes, this formula becomes perfected. We can memorize information presented to us in the form of some condensed sentences or short paragraphs, but give us a larger text and we freeze. When reading gets hard, we turn to more digestible media: movie adaptations, Reddit comments, and Instagram Reels. Any attempts to read for fun or intentionally challenge our reading capabilities are crushed under our shortening attention spans. The excessive use of social media and short-form content certainly doesn’t help.
There’s an important caveat to all of this. The various benefits provided by reading are sidelined by the mere fact that no one is giving themselves an opportunity to discover them. So, allow me to do the honors. Beyond any improvement in just attention spans (or, at least, the maintenance of them), reading purely for pleasure has been shown to improve well-being and cognitive function, and lead to greater academic achievement and healthier lifestyle choices like improved sleep schedules (another fictional concept in the high school).
To this day, my father still asks me why school hasn’t yet asked me to read Tolstoy or the Brontë sisters. In response, I merely shrug and go back to analyzing short excerpts on my computer, endlessly typing away or highlighting quotes I can use in my analysis. Hopefully, my efforts will land me an A+ on a future reading quiz, or score me some analysis points for my AP Lang exam. Meanwhile, my reading log collects pixelated dust just as the world forgets about paperbacks.
TLDR: school requirements and our own choices have made reading super tedious. And unnecessary. And did I mention boring? It sucks. I’ve noticed it. You’ve noticed it too—that’s why you scrolled down to read this instead. Look at you, saving time! Keep up the good work.
