alt.hn

7/25/2026 at 6:05:59 PM

Three Theses on the Literacy Crisis

 https://trevoraleo.substack.com/p/three-theses-on-the-literacy-crisis

by samclemens

7/28/2026 at 1:14:07 AM

My personal theory is main reason is that we don't practice reading as much in this era. Some claim it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at skill. Dumping that many hours alone doesn't get you there though. Just like a weight lifter you need to keep pushing your limit by adding a bit of weight to the bar from time to time to gain muscle rather the just retain what you currently have.

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.

by AhCoonu7

7/28/2026 at 6:35:03 AM

Alternatively, the real problem is that articles like this one don't come with a short summary like "There is no crisis in the ability to read, nor is there a crisis in the practice of reading books, but there is a crisis in the status of Modernist literary studies." so that you have to read all the way through to the end to find out what it's trying to say and also click a bunch of links to learn statistics like "75% of U.S. adults say they have read all or part of at least one book in the past 12 months" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/09/americans...

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.)

by yorwba

7/28/2026 at 8:05:00 AM

Except that moral panic around it has nothing to do with what actual profs in general say or think. Fairly often, it is panic about profs doing changes to courses non-professors find objectionable.

by watwut

7/28/2026 at 7:55:05 AM

Of coarse they are going to pick Steam and Netflix and social media just like 20 years ago they picked reading Harry Potter, majority of people want to use their time alone towards connecting with people and they put that time towards things which will help them connect with people. At least 99% of the books I have read I have not gotten to discuss with someone on a meaningful level, even if I met someone who has read the book I just read and loved there is a fair chance they read it years ago and can't say much about it, there are just too many books.

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.

by ofalkaed

7/28/2026 at 4:43:19 AM

This. And I blame schools. People like to rage about kids reading a lot more books in the past, but I don't think that's was the main contributor. I went to school in seventies and if I look at my pupils now, there is no huge difference. Most of my classmates didn't like to read books either, let the others summarize books they had to read etc. But there is a huge gap in everyday reading – none of my classmates couldn't get away without opening textbooks. Almost all learning no matter of course (history, geography etc) followed a recipe "read 2-4 pages from textbook, then we'll discuss it in classroom etc". There is no such thing nowadays – almost all learning is "slides, videos, interactive animations" and textbooks are almost extinct.

by obscurette

7/28/2026 at 6:32:03 AM

ChatGPT. Just saying. It’s truly a lot of reading. I must read about twice as much text as ever before.

by dr_dshiv

7/28/2026 at 8:31:57 AM

There is also very little societal norms promoting traditional culture (literature, music, theater, cinema, not to mention other arts). In school, children and teens are often being ostracized for not caring about sports, while not caring about culture is much less stigmatizing, if not outright encouraged.

by kristjank

7/28/2026 at 9:26:27 AM

The original study explicitly argued for deliberate practice. Musicians who didn't do that could not become experts.

by _glass

7/28/2026 at 8:22:53 AM

“In book form” is a really important part of what you’re saying.

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.

by gabriel666smith

7/28/2026 at 2:51:18 AM

Reading a book doesnt necessarily exercise the mind. The vast majority of books are total junk. And, unlike weights, it is possible to become dumber by reading the wrong books. Spend four hours a day reading vanity press tripe and you would be better off spending those hours with netflix.

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.)

by sandworm101

7/28/2026 at 7:12:15 AM

I'm all for reading the classics, but if you take all of the fun out of reading, nobody is going to do it. If someone had forced me to read Plato instead of Harry Potter as a kid, I wouldn't have done nearly as much reading as I did, which prepared me for tackling more difficult texts as I matured.

Re: American TV, Deadwood is widely considered some of the best Shakespearean writing of the modern age.

by fasterik

7/28/2026 at 7:20:49 AM

> I'm all for reading the classics, but if you take all of the fun out of reading, nobody is going to do it. If someone had forced me to read Plato instead of Harry Potter as a kid, I wouldn't have done nearly as much reading as I did, which prepared me for tackling more difficult texts as I matured.

You don't have to jump between extremes, plenty of interesting and still brain engaging books

by PunchyHamster

7/28/2026 at 1:35:41 PM

Shakspearian in plot. They still talk like uneducated cowboys operating from a limited vocabulary.

by sandworm101

7/28/2026 at 8:08:33 AM

Talking like a classic wont make you sound smart. It will make you sound outdated or even unable to express yourself clearly.

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.

by watwut

7/28/2026 at 4:52:46 AM

Setting aside the unnecessary digs at American TV, you’re kind of missing the point. While the informational content of many books is bad, reading any book is almost inherently an exercise in literacy. A flimsy, conspiracy-laden pop history book will have new vocabulary. A badly written book will challenge the reader to understand a poorly articulated argument or explanation and figure out what they meant to say. Reading Shakespeare is probably inherently a better exercise in literacy (assuming you can actually get through it; a good analogy might be trying to lift heavy with improper form, or pushing yourself too hard and too fast at the gym that you get injured) but it’s not completely necessary.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1414/

by derektank

7/28/2026 at 2:29:39 AM

This resonates but I think there's a framing issue. From building educational coding tools for kids, what I've observed is that the volume of textual engagement hasn't necessarily dropped — it's migrated to different forms.

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.

by songhonglei1985

7/28/2026 at 4:44:29 AM

Have you interacted with a typical class of 30 children lately? Maybe 1 or 2 of them are doing what you described, but 15 of them don't understand how to navigate a basic filesystem because they haven't used anything more advanced that a Chromebook in their lives and they have no desire to do anything more complicated with a computer.

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.

by annzabelle

7/28/2026 at 1:28:25 AM

When it comes to undergrads I doubt people (let's say from the 1980s onwards) were ever doing all the reading assigned in the syllabus anyway. Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof

by firasd

7/28/2026 at 1:45:13 AM

I found The Republic really quite entertaining! And it is surprisingly readable for such an old text.

It is written like a play where characters with real personalities have fierce and witty debates. It is rather fun!

by oersted

7/28/2026 at 2:17:08 AM

I don’t think they were arguing it was a bad or boring book — I think they were arguing that most students don’t have time/energy to do all that reading for all 5 or whatever classes they are taking every semester. I certainly didn’t.

by DrewADesign

7/28/2026 at 4:19:54 AM

I came to love all the books I read in uni philosophy and literature class, but I am incapable of enjoying them on my own without being shepherded through the context and meaning that make them interesting, sadly. Or rather it’s work I just can’t bring myself to do at my own leisure.

It’s amazing what a good professor can get you to do and love.

by hombre_fatal

7/28/2026 at 2:33:56 AM

I also read that one. Though certainly I also skipped some texts in college.

by JMKH42

7/28/2026 at 2:59:16 AM

I didn't read a good chunk of what we were assigned in high school because I was stuck there for almost 8 hours every day and had jobs and extracurriculars afterwards. In college I only had to go to five classes a few times a week so even with a part-time job I had more free time.

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.

by alexjplant

7/28/2026 at 1:30:57 AM

> Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof

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.

by gregdaniels421

7/28/2026 at 1:38:42 AM

It's not an isolated incident, he is describing an increasingly common attitude which is utilitarian/"realist" at best and a grotesque materialist corruption of the liberal arts education ideal at worst. Education is generally no longer seen as an end in and of itself, but as a means to more money; insofar as one accepts that view, learning the material is aside the point; getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

by popalchemist

7/28/2026 at 4:59:28 AM

> getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

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?

by majormajor

7/28/2026 at 1:43:14 AM

> getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

But then there still is a lever, I suppose, including for reading.

by jruohonen

7/28/2026 at 1:58:03 AM

I‘m not super versed in sociology of education but I was always under the impression that over assigning was a real problem in undergraduate and collage setting (even in high school to an extent I heard last).

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.

by runarberg

7/28/2026 at 2:17:10 AM

Lower socioeconomic status students are getting most of their stress from elsewhere. Compromising the syllabus doesn't work. All these debates have been tried before.

by sublinear

7/28/2026 at 2:55:08 AM

Classism has a way to go for the overkill. I don‘t think the post-modern interpretation is 100% correct... I think this is more complex and nuanced, but your rebuttal is not very good.

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.

by runarberg

7/28/2026 at 3:14:11 AM

Yes, but why does someone need to be of a different socioeconomic class to have prioritization skills? I'm just saying they have the extra burden of consequences for prioritizing school.

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.

by sublinear

7/28/2026 at 8:47:58 AM

I did, but I was probably not the modal student in the (required) intro to political philosophy course. Fair enough.

by maxweylandt

7/28/2026 at 3:36:08 AM

Maybe not "all" in the sense of every word, but I think a good number were at least taking a stab at each assignment, and even more were taking a stab at most of the assignments. It's hard to know for sure without some kind of hard data but my impression is there's been a shift from a situation where by default people "basically" did do the reading to now where by default they basically do not.

by BrenBarn

7/28/2026 at 11:03:40 PM

I read the first thesis and saw this section on modern civic engagement:

"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.

by littlekey

7/28/2026 at 2:35:17 AM

Even the headline is difficult to understand for the affected group.

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!"

by pcf

7/28/2026 at 3:21:05 AM

Who do you think the intended audience of the article is?

The answer might (genuinely) surprise you, judging by your joke.

by the_af

7/28/2026 at 4:19:41 AM

The audience of the article is people like the parent commenter.

by raincole

7/28/2026 at 2:58:44 AM

I’m more worried about the lack of writing . Far too much time is spent reading other people’s ideas. And very little of what has been published in the past 15 years has been worthwhile.

Better to encourage more people to solidify & advocate for their own ideas, opinions, beliefs rather than regurgitating someone else’s.

by tonymet

7/28/2026 at 7:20:27 AM

> And very little of what has been published in the past 15 years has been worthwhile.

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.

by nottorp

7/28/2026 at 12:22:02 PM

One major shift has been the death of newspapers. When that was the primary way to get information about the world around you, it wasn’t just readers who benefited - it created a steady stream of capable, workmanlike writers. They weren’t literary geniuses, but they were capable of stringing together a few paragraphs of readable prose on a deadline. And they got paid for it; how many people can make a living off their Substack?

by devilbunny

7/28/2026 at 3:04:55 PM

Even peasant Civil War soldiers penned more expressive letters than Ivy League graduated journalists do today, so the source was even more broadly experienced. But you’re right about this one aspect.

by tonymet

7/28/2026 at 3:01:12 PM

Possibly, but some eras are better than others. And given the volume we are producing, even at 2% it should eclipse all of the books you read in high school. Despite the volume, it’s nearly all garbage from what I can tell (at least what makes it through the marketing and awards pipelines)

by tonymet

7/28/2026 at 4:19:10 AM

So, you have "Thesis #3: The real threat is the war against the infrastructures and institutions that make all forms of literacy possible". So they're saying things are bad, deeply bad. But they toss darts at everyone with shallower takes along the way. OK but what some darts at those not worrying and some credit to those worrying in a less sophisticated way.

by joe_the_user

7/28/2026 at 5:16:59 AM

Literacy and reading used to be cool and kids read because successful people around them did. I remember that being the case as recently as the 80s and 90s in my small post-Communist country.

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.

by photios

7/28/2026 at 9:29:52 AM

Whether or not the decline of literacy is a pearl-clutching myth, I don't think anything is gained by laying on a bunch of academic mumbo-jumbo about "literacies" and "problematizing" things and contextualization and how everything is more complex and nuanced than we realize. That kind of theorizing takes us further from knowing about reality rather than closer.

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.

by BrenBarn

7/28/2026 at 2:01:06 PM

> trying to redefine literacy to include it is just sophistry.

Or an angle toward one's doctoral dissertation in some "social science" or other.

by everybodyknows

7/28/2026 at 8:23:29 AM

I really like the points this post makes about different categories of literacy, but I always let out an enormous sigh every single time I read an article or blog post that rewrites a well-referenced social phenomenon into a different one. I hate that we have to establish different categories to refer to "The Artist Formerly Know As The Literacy Crisis." It feels very scarcely useful.

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.

by kristjank

7/28/2026 at 1:27:00 AM

[flagged]

by Ozzie-D