Does reading matter anymore?
In Ohio, my home state, reading is a big deal…until it isn’t. Every student is expected to read at grade level by the time they complete third grade. If they don’t, there are consequences for the student, their teachers and the school. There has been a contentious political debate in the state legislature, urged on by our outgoing governor, about the science of reading, specifically that students should be taught phonics rather than non-scientific methods. Would that we were all like Mississippi, a state that has done an amazing job of improving student reading scores.
But what happens to reading after the elementary grades? There are no AP reading classes or College Credit Plus courses on reading in Ohio. The political gaze intruding into higher education does not seem to include reading. No reactionary politician is growling at college student reading ability. (He’s actually more interested in what students are reading rather than the quality of their reading ability.) If he were paying attention, that politician might be alarmed at the reading skills of college students.
In 2024, writing teacher Adam Kotsko lamented a significant decline in his students’ reading stamina and comprehension. “For most of my career,” Kotsko begins,
I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.
Kotsko blames smartphones, of course, for this decline in reading skills, but also suggests that this generation of students lived through the COVID lockdowns, which disrupted their schooling, to say nothing of the effects of the high-stakes testing regimes these students labor under. All of these forces have left students without the cognitive endurance to wrestle with complex texts.
In July 2026, Rose Horowitch announced in an Atlantic article that “the end of reading is here,” that the United States is entering “a post-literate age.” Americans do not lack for reading skills; instead, they choose not to read. Digital consumption, TikTok shorts and other fragmented media have displaced sustained reading, the kind that builds knowledge and cognitive endurance. She notes, and I’m not certain this is a fair comparison, that college students invest more time in gambling sites than in reading. She feels that the reading muscle has atrophied and as a result Americans simply ignore long-form texts, like the article she has written. Horowitch is especially concerned about the cultural effects of this post-literate society. The Founders, Jefferson in particular, felt that a representative republic required a literate citizenry. Horowitch fears that the erosion of deep reading skills threatens our democracy, since complex ideas, historical context and nuanced arguments are now harder to grasp.
I could cite further statistics. The George and Barbara Bush Foundation documents that half of American adults (54%) read at only a sixth-grade level. The NEA surveys the reading habits of Americans and notes a dwindling number who read for pleasure; the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms that only 16.1% of Americans do so, down from 27% two decades ago. I find that an unfortunate framing. If reading is defined as a leisure activity—as opposed to a complex cognitive skill–then its decline does not sound particularly urgent. If reading is now defined as just a hobby, then it is merely being displaced by other leisure activities.
I see three consequences of this enveloping post-literate society. First, even if the American public can’t or won’t read complex texts, our society is still functioning. Democracy might prove unable to survive in a post-literate culture, but society won’t collapse either. Perhaps the decline of reading does not matter and that other issues–climate change, for example–deserve more of our attention. Second, it is possible that reading and literacy will revert back to levels before mass education and before the printing press. Historically, reading and writing were skills practiced by a small elite, and that literate elite might have also wielded political power and authority. (Think of the Chinese scholar/bureaucrat.) Perhaps we are living through the end of mass literacy. In the future, an elite will demonstrate advanced literacy skills and those skills will be highly valued, indeed a source of power.
Third, I think we’ve been in a post-literate society for a while now. The linguist Walter Ong, in a 1982 book, observed that Western culture was entering into a condition he called “secondary orality.” The chief electronic communications technologies of the time–radio and television in particular—looked very much like an oral culture, in that they were sound-based and communal. But unlike primary oral societies—Homer’s society, for example– which were memory-driven and had not developed the tools of literacy, the architecture of secondary orality is built on a literate foundation.
The critic Neil Postman in the 1980s described the cognitive effects of television on our culture, using the term “aliteracy” to define our condition. Aliteracy sounds very much like what Rose Horowitz is describing: it means having the ability to read and write but choosing not to. Television trains people to expect information to be fast and amusing and visually stimulating and immediate. Reading Postman, one might conclude that television was creating the conditions for a post-literate society decades before TikTok and the smartphone.
If Kotsko and Horowitz alert us to anything, it is that post-literacy or aliteracy has arrived at the University. Perhaps the society at large has been aliterate for decades, but not yet college students and certainly not students majoring in the humanities. The director of humanities, arts and culture programs at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Rob Townsend, who keeps track of humanities metrics, notes the sharp decline in humanities majors, owing both to uncertain job prospects and heavy reading loads.
Between 2012 and 2025, the humanities fields with the biggest drops in degrees awarded included religious studies (down 56.3 percent), area studies (down 53.2 percent), languages and literatures other than English (50.8 percent), English (43.8 percent), and history (40.6 percent). Those declines also mirror enrollment trends captured by National Student Clearinghouse data. Traditionally, the coursework for those majors requires students to read high volumes of material. “Many students just don’t feel comfortable with long-form reading that they’d do in an English or history class,” said Townsend, who attributed those attitudes in part to the constant stream of short-form social media distractions many students are challenged to overcome. “That seems one of the bigger headwinds that the field is facing right now. If students don’t feel comfortable with text, they’re more likely to be attracted by something that doesn’t require them to do that reading.”
In 2018, Stanford University student Nick Burns wrote an opinion piece for the school newspaper. He was comparing the reputation for rigor that accompanies the STEM disciplines, and the reputation of the humanities disciplines as being soft and irrigorous. If the humanities want more respect at a competitive place like Stanford, Burns argued, then they will have to become more challenging. He recounted his study abroad experience at Oxford.
In my tutorial on nineteenth-century political philosophy, I had to read over three hundred pages and write an eight-page paper each week. For the first (and thus far the only) time, I worked as hard as I see my STEM peers working, spending the bulk of every day in the library or in one of Oxford’s coffee shops, poring over Hegel or Tocqueville. The demands there were much higher than all but the most rigorous humanities classes here, and as I worked to meet them, I achieved a deeper understanding of the material than I did in most of my Stanford classes. This is common sense: demand more of your students and they will perform better.
But the rigor of engaging with long and complex texts would seem to have little appeal for today’s students.
What does a post-literate university look like? It probably means the end of the seminar, that space we gather in to read together. Born in the German university, the seminar was a specialized workshop that demanded that students read primary source texts and write and present original papers. The seminar came to the United States in the form of Herbert Baxter Adams’ “seminary method” at Johns Hopkins. If we are now aliterate, if students choose not to read, then it would seem to mean the end of the seminar.
Unless that method were to change or evolve into some other form. Perhaps the seminar becomes the space we all gather in to listen to texts and to speak together about them. Instead of reading, in the seminar students listen to texts. “The importance of listening, as an aspect of communicating with others has long been downplayed in Western culture,” notes Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Listening, like reading, is a complex cognitive skill. Citing the communications scholar Lisbeth Lipari, Fitzpatrick says that:
“Etymologically, ‘listening’ comes from a root that emphasizes attention and giving to others, while ‘hearing’ comes from a root that emphasizes perception and receiving from others. Listening then is not just an act of taking in, but a practice of generously giving one’s focus to another.”
Fitzpatrick was not anticipating the decline of reading in the university, but instead was imagining a strategy for saving the University, placing “generous thinking” at the heart of such a revival. “Listening is at the heart of the generosity I hope to inspire in relationship to the university and the broader publics with which it interacts and on which it relies,” she concludes. “Generous listening is the necessary ground for generous thinking.” In a post-literate University, listening will displace reading. Horowitch and others lament the fate of our democracy in such a post-literate age. I wonder if our democracy will, in fact, be strengthened and edified when listening becomes so highly valued.
The seminar would become the pedagogical place to hone students’ “oracy,” meaning the ability to express oneself clearly and persuasively through the spoken word, as well as sharpen their listening skills. Rather than asking students to write essays, we will ask them to perform an oration for the rest of the seminar. The oral disputation was the chief form of evaluation in the university of the 17th century. In the post-literate university, disputation will be the final examination in all classes.
There is a debate among readers today asking, somewhat sheepishly, if listening to an audio book counts as reading. I suspect that in a post-literate university, that distinction probably won’t matter. Or rather, that action will be described as “listening to a book,” listening having supplanted reading as the chief activity of a seminar. Likewise, the writer will be supplanted by the orator. Instead of writing a book, a professor will declaim and perform their arguments. I wonder whether you are reading this current essay or listening to me recite it on the Ingenious podcast, and if those different encounters with my text matter to you.
This semester, I assigned my first podcast to a graduate class. In addition to reading a book on the topic, I’ve asked them to listen to a discussion of the topic with as much critical judgment as I would expect from reading a book. Will nonfiction similarly become oral? Will we ask students to listen to history, to listen to a sociology textbook? Will we still call it a textbook? Is it a book if I only listen to it?
I am the host of a podcast where I interview artists and scientists and philosophers and scholars. I think of the three hundred or so interviews I’ve conducted as an “edited collection,” though I’m not certain the academy as yet considers oral interviews a form of scholarship. In the post-literate university, however, the oral dialogue would be the highest form of scholarship.
We will have returned to Socrates, it would seem.
David J. Staley is a higher education philosopher, strategist, futurist, theorist and designer, and is an Honorary Faculty Fellow in Innovation at CHELIP. He is the author of The AI Symposium; Anticipatory Biographies: Personal Histories of the Future;Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education and the co-author of Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets.