These days, just about everybody can read, at least a little.
Well, unless they went to an urban public school in, say, Chicago. Then all bets are off.
But what younger people can't do is READ, as in absorb even a short essay, no less a book. Attention spans used to be measured in hours, then in minutes, and now in seconds.
It has gotten to the point where the average high schooler isn't even assigned books to read, and by the time they get to college they are literally incapable of making it through an entire novel, no less a social science text or anything more complicated than a short excerpt.
Students are now complaining to professors when they are assigned reading: "Why can't you just explain it to us in short lectures, or better yet, a video?" And you may have noticed the videos are getting shorter, too. Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts are better suited to the modern attention span.
Over the past few years, I have read many essays about this, including the growing chorus of complaints by college and university professors who despair at the fact that this generation of students is becoming functionally illiterate, despite the fact that they likely read more words, on net, than many people did a hundred years ago.
Reading and thinking complicated thoughts are inextricably linked. It's no coincidence that shortly after adopting agriculture and settling in towns, writing was born. When we say "prehistoric," we literally mean pre-writing. Economic and political sophistication follow and are driven by the expansion of literacy, and the reason we call an era in Western Culture the "Dark Ages" isn't so much that everything sucked, but that literacy almost disappeared, and we know little about those times.
The Atlantic’s new cover story on the decline of reading features a Harvard student who complained that he had to read a book written in "Old English."
Now, you might be thinking that he was assigned Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales.
Nope.
This student was assigned A Clockwork Orange—and used ChatGPT to “translate” it.
A Clockwork Orange was written in 1962 (not 1692, which is still modern English, by the way). This student’s grandparents were alive in the 60s. Is he also using a translation bot to speak to them?
De-urbanization, economic stagnation, technological innovation, and even lifespans declined. Some technological advancements from the Roman era were lost altogether. It would take well over a millennium for technological achievements in the West to approach the levels of engineering the Romans achieved.
Every scientist will tell you that they achieve breakthroughs by "standing on the shoulders of giants," which of course means that their work is the product of centuries of thought, preserved and expanded through writing.
The situation is so much more desperate than you probably realize.
University professors are saying they're now unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. Their students are simply incapable of reading more than a few pages.
Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.
There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.
If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. This is civilizational.
Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:
Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.
Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history. We must continue to form new minds in this same model if we're going to keep it.
My friend Scott Rasmussen points out that American liberty itself was expanded when the early colonists established their own university, independent of the Crown. A mere eight years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was chartered by King Charles I, the colonists decided that they would need to ground the growth of a new civilization on independent thought.
To understand what made the United States an Innovation Nation, we need to head back to 1636. A group of colonists with lofty ambitions to create a “city on a hill” decided a college was needed to create this new world. There was, however, one not so little problem. Under English law, only the king had the authority to create a college or business.
The colonists didn’t want to ask the king for a charter because they feared he would want control over the college in exchange. In particular, they worried that the King would insist on teaching the very religious practices they had fled by crossing the Atlantic.
The colonists improvised, and created Harvard on their own. They got away with it partly because they were far away and partly because the English king had bigger problems to worry about. The English Civil War broke out just as the new school was getting started.
Once the colonists realized they could create things without first getting permission from government, innovation flourished. Other colleges, including Yale, were created in a manner the Crown considered illegal. Libraries, anti-poverty efforts, abolition societies, hospitals, museums, and businesses were all created without permission. When the time came, that also provided colonial leaders with the practical experience needed to create a Continental Congress and other governing institutions.
Literacy and American self-governance have been inextricably linked. Not only, as many people seem to think, because an "informed electorate" is necessary for democratic politics to work, but at least as importantly because an illiterate population is incapable of thinking far beyond the desires and emotions of the moment.
Rent control, for instance, sounds great, until you think through the implications. You need to connect separate ideas, project into the future, inhabit others' minds... All of these capabilities are fostered by long-form reading.
The explosion of information technology has given everybody access to almost all the accumulated knowledge human beings have amassed, while simultaneously training us in ways that make many people almost incapable of turning knowledge into wisdom. Knowledge that is disconnected, absorbed (and forgotten) in short snippets, isn't woven together into a coherent whole.
No doubt you have watched some younger people who are incapable of noticing that an answer they have come up with to a question or math problem is obviously wrong. Being able to detect obvious mistakes, either made by oneself or by a calculator with a mistaken input, is based on common sense developed over time—weaving together thoughts and experiences to develop a coherent sense of the whole.
That only happens in long-form thinking and reading. It doesn't happen in 47-second snippets that are functionally discrete.
40 out of 86 Brown students scored a perfect 100 on their midterm. Then the professor moved the final in person, and 22 of those perfect scorers never showed up again.
He'd suspected AI cheating from the start. The take-home midterm was deliberately harder than usual, yet the class averaged 96 when the historical range is 65 to 80. Some answers contained odd phrasing that matched what ChatGPT produced when he ran the questions through it himself.
Roberto Serrano has taught economics at Brown for 34 years. He filed no accusations. He announced the final would be in person, count for half the grade, and that if the two distributions didn't match, the final alone would determine grades.
Then the exodus. 27 students never showed up. 22 of them had perfect midterms. Of the 59 who did show, 19 failed. Several signed the exam and turned it in blank. The average fell from 96 to 48, the lowest in the course's history.
He never needed a plagiarism detector. The cheaters identified themselves by walking away. A grade distribution became a confession.
Here's the part nobody's sitting with. Serrano proved it. He sent the distributions to Brown's dean and provost. The provost never responded. The academic committee's reply amounted to calling it "a wake-up call." The students who bailed before the final walked away clean.
Every university in America is now grading two populations, students and students plus ChatGPT, on one curve. The honest kids in Serrano's class watched a 96 average get set by machines, then sat a real final against it. The cheaters lost nothing. That's the incentive structure now, and it grades itself.
AI has the potential to make this problem infinitely worse, by encouraging people to subcontract their thinking to models that even its creators don't understand. Garbage goes into them—or ideological disinformation or shading—and garbage is produced, consumed, and propagated.
There are obviously things we can do as a society to reduce, if not reverse, the momentum of this trend. Ban phones and other technology from schools, assign entire books to students as they progress through the grades, and demand more, not less, of students in higher education.
But ultimately it will be parents who will make or break the future, as it always is. Kids need a good grounding in reading before they are allowed to enter the "education" system, which once existed to celebrate and encourage literacy, but now often derides it as white supremacist.
The alternative is to return to a different version of the Dark Ages, where a priestly class can read, write, and think clearly, while the great unwashed masses are told what to think.
We will still have a technologically advanced society, but not a self-governing one. We will stagnate, as Europe has begun to do, while being led by technocrats who determine what we can do and think.
The new illiteracy will not be incompatible with technological sophistication, but it certainly will be with self-government.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/07/10/is-the-west-becoming-post-literate-n3816788
