Three Theses on the Literacy Crisis
trevoraleo.substack.com
trevoraleo.substack.com
Between Steam, Netflix, and your pick of social media there are no end of ways to keep yourself busy in more immediately gratifying ways. Getting in the hours and stretching that mental muscle a bit in book form no longer happens naturally. To be as literate as the generation before you you almost have to consciously choose to put in an equal effort since boredom is not as plentiful as it once was.
That said there are is no lack of other contributing factors as well, but reduced experience as the reason in my opinion seems to best explain why the average dips without the the whole curve dipping.
An 11-year-old debugging a Python script is doing intense, sustained reading. Parsing error messages, reading documentation, tracing logic through nested conditionals. A kid building in Roblox Studio is reading and writing Lua. These are literacy acts — just not the kind that show up on NAEP scores or novel-reading surveys.
The real gap isn't hours logged. It's transfer. The kid who can read 200 lines of GDScript to debug why their character won't jump doesn't automatically transfer that stamina to reading a history textbook. The cognitive muscles are being built, but they're specialized.
From what I've seen, when you meet kids where they are — letting them read and write code to solve problems they care about — they'll happily put in hours of focused textual work. The appetite is there. We're measuring the wrong meal.
Also, I fundamentally disagree that reading code and error messages stretches the same muscle as long form prose, and I believe that sustained attention on long pieces of writing is how a lot of sustained cultural values are transmitted, where reading 3,000 lines of python does none of that.
I have had students ask me how to improve thier english, how to sound smart. I tell them to stop watching american TV. Watch blackadder or upstart crow. Listen to people who are masters of the spoken word. Want to improve your writing? Stick to the classics. Dont touch JK Rowling until you are done with plato and shakespeare.
(Ive been watching a zew zealand series lately, learning all sorts of slang i didnt know.)
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1414/
Re: American TV, Deadwood is widely considered some of the best Shakespearean writing of the modern age.
You don't have to jump between extremes, plenty of interesting and still brain engaging books
For the record, I liked reading (some) classics. But, recommending Shakespeare dramas or Plato when the student want to learn English composition and style is over absurd.
In any case, as far as the crisis of Modernist literary studies is concerned, to be as adept at it as literature profs demand, students would have to get really into famous works of the nineteenth century, which was not that unreasonable to expect ca. 1950 but maybe a bit of a tough sell now. So the crisis will likely continue unabated until it is replaced by the crisis of post-modernist literary studies instead. (I guess it was preceded by the crisis of Classical literary studies, as the ability to read Latin and Greek did in fact decline.)
I wish things were different but the logistics of it are not in my favor. If I were to sit down after work and watch the baseball game, I would know that millions of other people are doing the exact same thing and I will be able to discuss it at work tomorrow. You can't do that with books, not even with current best sellers, which do offer better odds but even with those you are not sharing the moment with millions of people who are also just as alone as you are.
I was 17 before I met someone with who there was a real bond through literature, and they went on to family and work and all that. But that is fine even if that relationship has never been replaced because my interest in literature has never been about socializing, it has been about literature.
I’d bet that people, on average, read more words per day in 2026 than at any other point in history (unless it peaked slightly pre-TikTok and other video content becoming more primary).
This is a different type of reading, as you say. Its reward pattern is different.
I do think that, relative to how much ‘reading less longform prose’ is bemoaned, there is not enough attention being paid to:
1. How can we post in a more valuable way? The mediums are necessarily different, but have we been too defeatist thus far about the difference in potential value?
It’s difficult to innovate on a new form of writing - is that a question we’re avoiding? What would the Modernists do?
I don’t have an answer, but at least this is an area where each individual might have an impact on other humans’ feeds.
2. Relatedly, when bemoaning ‘reading less longform prose’, are we fundamentally misunderstanding a new and valuable mode of information transfer? Are we living in the old world? How meaningfully relevant is a dead or dying form?
3. Can books themselves take on any qualities of ‘the feed’ that meaningfully improve the way they convey information, either in writing or presentation?
When you have people (maybe) reading more, these feel like potentially more pragmatic and perhaps more optimistic framings, or questions to ask - without denigrating the value of the traditional medium.
I think this comment says more about you than actual students who care. I did all the readings, even the extra ones. So did all the people in my study group for the class. Maybe select for more studious friends.
But then there still is a lever, I suppose, including for reading.
If there's a revolution in work due to AI the first jobs to fall are going to be the ones that don't require any originality or critical thinking. Any number of paper-pushing middleman jobs.
These have already been tightly squeezed by automation - see the rise of the bachelors-having-barista trope who can't find a job despite their degree.
Question is, how long would it take for the idea that if you don't train yourself to put some creative effort in, the machine is gonna replace you to propagate through the world enough to change how high-schoolers and college students behave? Whether that means pushing them into tangible hands-on fields, or into more original-creation as the robots replace manual labor too...
Or if we get some sort of UBI first instead? Or Skynet?
My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.
Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.
When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.
I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.
It is written like a play where characters with real personalities have fierce and witty debates. It is rather fun!
It’s amazing what a good professor can get you to do and love.
I also quickly discovered that English papers are surprisingly easy to write if I actually read the material and write random thoughts down along the way. I'd spend an evening making each bullet point a paragraph of analytical fluff buttressed by a few quotes (typically with the aid of a searchable PDF copy), edit the next day for flow and structure, divine some sort of rhetorical through-line to the whole thing, then turn it in. This seemed like less of a headache than trying to fabricate something passable out of secondhand internet summaries or Cliff's Notes.
Better to encourage more people to solidify & advocate for their own ideas, opinions, beliefs rather than regurgitating someone else’s.
I'd say that's survivor bias. Take any 15 year time period and 98% of what has been published in any form will be crap.
We just remember only the 2%.
I might agree that the shift from art and entertainment to content creation has reduced that 2% to 1-1.5% though.
"Consider the nested and divergent forms of literacy required for a 19-year-old trying to participate in the democratic process as an informed citizen today ... they cross-reference short-form video analysis, parse hyperlinked primary sources, evaluate the credibility and rhetorical posture of algorithmic feeds, and weigh the consensus within a comment section"
which seems like a huge stretch. This may be "literacy" in the sense of being "computer literate" but I see very little connection here to actual literacy as in being able to read. First of all short form video is not reading, full stop. "Parsing hyperlinked primary sources" COULD be, but is that really happening? Most of these feeds are just full of talking heads reacting to other talking heads. The only reading going on is the last point about comment sections, and I think the comparison of that to reading a book only makes the impression more depressing, not less.
In particular, trying to repurpose words like "literacy" from their typical usage into some kind of broad and encompassing notion is a classic and classically frustrating maneuver of a certain kind of academic. It leads us to a world where we have a bunch of words that are all supposed to mean "a complex interplay between the individual, society, technology, and whatever else I feel like tossing in", and then we can argue about the differences between them. I'd rather skip that.
Saying that "literacy" includes everything people need to do to navigate in society is like saying that "music" includes making armpit noises. Yes, maybe you can stretch it to include that, but that's not what people use it to mean and it's not what people are talking about when they say literacy is declining. No one is going go "Oh gosh, you're right, people are now learning about 'navigating a social media platform' and 'producing a video essay' so I guess there's no literacy crisis at all!" People know that's happening, they just don't consider it literacy, and trying to redefine literacy to include it is just sophistry.
Or an angle toward one's doctoral dissertation in some "social science" or other.
Perhaps, soon, it will be necessary to phrase it "Zoolander" style. Maybe something like "Top 3 Shocking Reasons Why You Can't Read Good No More!"
The answer might (genuinely) surprise you, judging by your joke.
Then culture changed [1]. Now we have different role models with mumble rap and songs about "muh pu*y". Is it a surprise kids don't read anymore?
All the issues with schools, infrastructure and technology are secondary. The spark is gone.
[1] Well, it didn't change all by itself and people that changed it have names and addresses, but that's not a HN post.
I really like how the schism between basic literacy, literary culture and the study of literature is examined, though. I was always under the impression, as an engineer, that being able to retrieve needed information from a printed text was tremendously important, until I trained myself in this skill to the point where I have trouble reading linear pieces of fiction (Not to mention nonlinear ones. I am trying to chug through Tropic of Cancer with English being my second language. I'm failing at a consistent and periodic pace). I imagine that now, grammar-school me would be consistently able to out-read me in an "English literature class" kind of way, while I would beat him at engineering-focused knowledge retrieval even without ChatGPT.
> When commentators lament that students “can’t read,” what they often mean (though never specify) is that students are not engaging in texts in ways that resemble the interpretive practices valued within literary studies. That’s why we should ask whether they are literate in a particular discourse instead of asking if they are literate full stop.
This why I find the article insightful. I appreciate how this severance between studying literature and being literate appears to contain the issue to a specific sub-field of The Artist Formerly Know As The Literacy Crisis, but I really am not sure how this is useful to anyone looking to improve the state of things. Even the author himself says that while "[even if he thinks] histrionic op-ed writers in The Atlantic misdiagnose an erosion of literary culture as mass illiteracy doesn’t mean I’m okay with it." I find this somewhat hollow still, because redirecting overarching societal shifts into the context of a very specific sub-field of a science usually just works to sweep it under the carpet.
I have experienced a bunch of well-trained and passionate teachers, which resulted in me obtaining a decent grasp at literature in secondary school. Conversely, a lot of my peers did not and most of the graduates after them did not as well. They all exhibit signs of declining basic literacy (to the point of not being able to read washing machine instructions without LLM assistance). I think that bad grades in literary studies are a decent predictor of bad basic literacy, especially 5 years down the line. And, we have seen a lot of old teachers retiring where I live, with their replacements being just plain dumber, if not stupid outright. I suppose the reason is that undergrads enrolling in paedagogic courses here are mostly people that couldn't get in literally anywhere else (and immigrants seeking fraudulent student visas to work as delivery drivers).
Fixing the infrastructure as the conclusion suggests would do well to maintain the already-reading and curious-to-read students, but would do little to get them interested in it. We desperately need teachers that imprint a sense of nobility or worthiness to the practice of literary culture/study and only then the infrastructure will prove itself useful once the coming generations realize there must be some wealth in making use of it, get them influenced, so to speak.