Literacy Lost?

Friday, July 10, 2026

Back when I lived a few miles from Hollywood I noticed an interesting thing every spring for the last several years I was there.  Students were out “filming” school projects.  I asked around a bit and apparently they were permitted to submit a short movie as an alternative the traditional term paper.  No research, no footnotes, no development of an argument – just a bunch of friends clowning around for the camera.  I did a video project in high school, crude though it was given the tech of the day, but it was not a substitute for my term paper.  Everywhere I turn, teachers are complaining about students that simply refuse to read any more.  One blogger has proclaimed it a “post-literate society.“

The blogger in question cites a number of troubling stats:

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.

“Americans are probably reading more words than ever before,” she writes, but it comes in the form of brief “emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions.”

Here is the anecdote that I could not quite wrap my head around:

Some Harvard students see reading as unnecessarily burdensome, Margaret Rennix, assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told Horowitch. A student told her he used Chat GPT to “translate” Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange from “Old English” to easier language.

That is deeply ironic.  If you do not understand why, I suggest your read A Clockwork Orange.

I have been writing a lot this week about our failure to recognize our own faults and limitations.  I wonder if this decline in functional literacy is related?  If we cannot bring sufficient attention to bear to read a book, how can be be expected to give sufficient attention to our own character?

On the flip side, I recall similar arguments being made about my generation with the pervasive advent of television.  And the same blogger reports, “About 20 percent of Americans read books, she writes.”   I wonder if it has ever really been much more than that?

Since the advent of the printing press, the ability to read has become nearly universal in the western world.  But the ability to read and real literacy are very different things.  “…analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument” are about more than simply reading.  Reading is fundamental to developing those skills, but they are a skill well advanced beyond the ability to see symbols on a page and utter the words associated.  For example, I learned far more about how to form an argument learning how to do mathematical proofs than I did using words.  It was only later in life that I combined the skills.

Society is changing radically. I think it is too early to tell if it is for the better or the worse.  It certainly seems like it is for the worse, but this could all be some sort of painful spasm just before a beautiful metamorphosis.  Secondly, literacy is not a prerequisite to goodness.  Often the most well read among us are the biggest jerks.  Some of the best people I have ever known haven’t picked up a book since they left school.

But developing goodness does require attention.  If there is a genuine problem in the modern smartphone-filled age it is attention span, not literacy.  Even if the latter proves the existence of the former.  If this is indeed a post-literate age, the challenge before us may not be how to preserve and restore literacy.  The challenge may be how to teach goodness through other forms of communication –

– Like maybe by setting an example?