This post is not medical/health/doctor-related. It comes from a recent article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, which I found rather alarming and worth sharing. It appears that young people increasingly view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge.
Here are some of the salient points, gleaned from a variety
of studies:
- A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.
- Average IQ scores are declining by about three points a decade.
- Scores on ACT’s reading and English sections are at their lowest level in more than 3 years.
- Nearly 30 percent of adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text.
- In 1984, 8 percent of 13-year-olds said they rarely or never read for fun. In 2025 that number rose to 29 percent. High schoolers in focus groups think of reading for pleasure as an “alien practice.”
- By eighth grade, the average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media, often watching at 2x speed.
- In 2004 the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. By 2025 it had dropped to about 47 seconds.
People do read in “textual fragments,” but even those
textual fragments are losing ground: Social
media, once mainly text-based, has been overrun with short-form videos, such as TikTok,
YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. Experts tell us that filling time with short-form
videos instead of books degrades the complex cognitive skills that reading
fosters, including concentration, extended focus, logical deduction, and
analytical thought. Video does contain more information than text (language,
sounds, moving images) but does not stimulate deeper thinking.
In The New York Times, David Foster Wallace offers a rebuttal to Horowitch's arguments, noting that you can slice data in different ways. He cites some studies showing that young Americans are reading more than they did a couple of decades ago, and that the decline in reading is driven by older Americans--those 65 and up. At the same time, he notes, book sales are near record highs, with more books sold these days than a decade ago.
He does admit, however, that “reading comprehension is indeed falling.”
Over past decades, screen time of one form or another has been five to ten times as common as reading. In the 1980s, for example, the TV in the average American household was on for more than nine hours a day, a figure that’s been dropping—probably because of the smart phone.
Who knows what the future might bring? As Horowitch suggests, "maybe the generations growing up with their
brains hooked to endless video feeds are developing some kind of novel,
as-yet-undefinable cognitive brilliance." Perhaps we
are entering a phase of "secondary orality" in which a once-literate society
reverts back to some of the conventions of preliterate cultures. Perhaps our literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the
oral and digital ages.
For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
