At secondary school open days, English teachers are always asked the same questions by anxious parents of year six students: How do I get my child to read more? Why has my child suddenly stopped reading? What books would you recommend to make reading less of a chore?
For too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream
This apprehension is not surprising. Reading enjoyment among children and young people has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the National Literacy Trust. The decline is particularly pronounced in teenage boys, of whom only a quarter said they enjoyed reading in their spare time. Adults are equally afflicted: 40 per cent of Britons have not read or listened to a book in the past year, and men account for only 20 per cent of fiction sales in the US, Canada and Britain.
Reading is a habit, and habits need to be practised. Yet parents are no longer even reading to their children: according to a recent survey by Harper Collins, fewer than half of Gen-Z parents think reading out loud to their children is ‘fun’, and a third believe reading is more of a ‘subject to be learnt’ than something to be enjoyed.
Screentime is the obvious culprit. Mornings previously spent reading in bed are now spent scrolling through social media. Commutes are about composing emails rather than devouring spy thrillers. Quiet evenings are for binge-watching limitless series while books lay untouched.
Even as an English teacher, I am in a nightly battle against my post-work tiredness, my internet-enfeebled attention span, and, of course, my phone. I regularly resort to strategies to restart the routine: listening to audiobooks, joining a bookclub to hold myself accountable, borrowing from a library to give myself a deadline, bingeing during the school holidays, taking myself on a shopping trip to Blackwell’s so that it feels like a ‘treat’. In our world of shiny new toys, it’s so easy to forget what a gift reading is.
What is even more depressing is we are not just losing the will to read, but the ability. Our overstimulated, dopamine-addled brains can no longer handle the sustained concentration of reading, which may explain why thirty per cent of Americans read at the level you would expect of a 10-year-old child. A recent piece in the Atlantic found that many university professors no longer assign long or complex texts because their students cannot cope with them; another study on the links between smartphones and cognitive decline suggests that we may have passed peak brain power.
This is only going to get worse. In the early days of the World Wide Web, the internet was more like print media: reading articles, forums, blogs. It was primarily text-based. Now the internet is more like television: its YouTube-fuelled evolution towards short-form video means it has become a visual medium: snippets, snapshots, screenshots, pop-ups. Online, we are no longer readers but viewers.
As scholar Mark Cuenco writes, the reading involved when staring at a screen is ‘fundamentally dynamic, ever-fleeting, disjointed… the character of the content delivers indigestible volumes of information all at once, without much sequence or structure.’ He argues that ‘the experience of reading a tweet or the caption on a TikTok is so radically different from that of reading a book (one locks us into an endless scroll, while the other has a definitive start and end point) that they are hardly comparable.’ Online, the medium becomes the message.
Who knows what the future of our post-literate society will look like: perhaps reading paperbacks will soon be seen as an esoteric hobby, the diversion of a special ‘reading class’, much like it was before the second half of the nineteenth century. What we do know is that reading fiction fosters imagination, empathy, concentration, critical thinking, language development, better memory, knowledge and understanding. It is both relaxing and stimulating, escapist and grounding.
It is not, however, something to force your way through. If students are going to resist the overwhelming pull to look at the blackhole of their iPhone screen, then we need to offer them an alternative that is genuinely enjoyable. There are some amazing young adult novels out there – The Girl With All The Gifts, After The First Death, Scythe – yet far too much is either really poorly written, or more preoccupied with social justice over a really good story.
As Maryanne Wolf writes, when reading goes well, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. Yet for too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream, trying to stay afloat amidst the riptides of instant information and gratification. The harder reading becomes, the less likely we are to exercise that part of our brain, or encourage the younger generation to do so – and we will all be poorer and weaker for it.
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