In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 science-fiction novel Childhood’s End, a race of benevolent aliens arrives to take control of Earth and its peoples. They have been sent here, it transpires, to oversee the transformation of the human race from Homo Sapiens – individual, unique, quarrelsome – into a hive mind. The change happens in a single generation to everyone under the age of ten – and parents no longer know what their children are. “All the hopes and dreams of your race are ended now,” the alien supervisor says. “You have given birth to your successors, and it is your tragedy that you will never understand them – will never even be able to communicate with their minds… you will not think them human and you will be right.”
Can we be living through a period of similar massive disruption between generations? For centuries, minds have been forged by the individual engaging with the book. We have learned to think, to analyze, to understand, to exercise the imagination through picking up a bound volume and investing in the printed sentence. We have taken it for granted that the life of the child of illiterate parents will be enhanced once they gain the habit of reading. We have also taken it for granted that the children of that child, in turn, will almost certainly develop the same habit of reading, a home with a bookshelf producing a child with a library ticket. But that doesn’t seem to be true any more.
We learned to think, to analyze,to exercise the imagination by investing in the printed sentence
I was struck by how many similar stories I was hearing from friends and acquaintances – literate, congenial, curious readers themselves – about the aversion their children had to reading. “My 16-year-old son does not willingly read for pleasure,” one told me. “When I oblige him to read something other than a set text and when I choose well, as he will play no interested part, he admits to enjoying it.” Another said that when they had been to see their son’s kindergarten class teacher, there had been a wall bearing lists about what children liked and didn’t: on the “what I don’t like” list was “books.” And another said: “My son, now 27, has only read a handful of books in his lifetime, although our home was always full of books.”
These cases might be anecdotal, but the evidence suggests that they reflect a general tendency. This is most marked among young people. In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 14 percent of children aged 13 read every day for fun. A third say they never read, or only rarely. This may be in contrast to their parents’ habits, or it may be exacerbated by them. According to a study by the University of Florida, the number of US adults reading for more than 20 minutes a day fell from a quarter in 2004 to 15 percent in 2023. This is not just a question of pleasure: in the US, 40 percent of fourth-graders have reading abilities described as “below basic,” which means functionally illiterate.
Even among those who have actually learned to read, the practice of reading appears challenging in the extreme. In one well-known study, a group of undergraduates at Kansas University were asked to read and comment on the opening paragraphs of Bleak House. These were English majors and education majors. They were seeing the first paragraph of what used to be one of the most popular English novels. A generation ago, it might even have been expected that anyone studying English literature at university would recognize the famous opening, having read the novel off their own bat.
The undergraduates were baffled by it. They were unable to account for figurative language; they could only talk about things within their experience, comically suggesting that Dickens’s reference to the Lord Chancellor’s “whiskers” must be to a cat called Lord Chancellor; they did not know how to look up words they did not know. Shockingly, the authors of the study found that the most incompetent readers, the ones who could not understand the first three sentences, still felt “very confident” about their ability to read the entire novel.
What has happened? This is not a small shift of taste between generations. The reading of books has, for centuries, been the means by which we understand the world through analogy, speculation, empathy, investigation and dissent. Books can convey information, but that is only part of it: readers of books are much more than passive recipients of facts.
One popular explanation is the huge rise in screen time. This may have started before smartphones. In a forthcoming polemic on the decline of literacy, The New Dark Ages, the London Times journalist James Marriott refers to a study of the relationship between the slow rollout of cable TV in Norway in the 1980s and a small but consistent fall in IQ scores. Conversely, the writer Sam Kriss has drawn our attention to a Soviet study in the 1930s of the arrival of literacy in a remote community. The generation who had learned to read experienced “massive cognitive effects.” They could engage with things outside their own experience; those who did not could not, and grew angry. They were asked a simple reasoning question. “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?” One man simply responded: “I’ve never seen one and I can’t say. That’s my last word.” Are we prepared, Kriss asks, for a moment, in which “every advance in communications technology creates a new generation of people progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing”?
If we allow literacy to be taken away, we’ll end up living in a world even worse than the current one
First we must consider whether the appeal of screen time is the only factor. The friends who were parents of non-readers tried to remember what had turned them into passionate readers when they were young – and what had changed for their children. The great swathes of boredom of a 1970s childhood, one suggested; beautiful and richly stocked local libraries; a challenging but thrilling encounter in the classroom with a great novel; or, more often, a thrilling encounter in the playground with a saucy or outrageous novel, Judith Krantz or James Herbert, passed around with glee.
All those have gone, or are going. A bored child must be found occupation; those local libraries have had their stock weeded down to nothing; many literature curricula are stripped of whole books, and the books that remain are tales of victimhood, not excitement or agency. And neither the bonkbuster nor the lurid horror is what it once was.
The early school education of those Kansas University students had supplied them with strong belief in themselves, but had not attempted to teach them how to understand the unfamiliar. Of course they were confident they could read the rest of Bleak House!
But the decline of reading and literacy will not be total. Those who read passionately, and for pleasure, still exist in large numbers. There is no doubt that ventures such as BookTok or the advocacy of reading by glamorous figures such as Dua Lipa have had an effect on young female readers, at least. (The celebrity who can persuade young men that reading is sexy has not quite arrived yet.) My local bookshop assured me that they see very many young readers as overwhelmed by their discovery of Vanity Fair as anyone in the past 175 years has been. If a generational shift like that in Childhood’s End is taking place, it will not be total.
A bored child must be found occupation; local libraries have had their stock weeded down to nothing
But my local bookshop is in one of the most affluent places in the world, where a home costs, on average, $2.7 million. And reading must not become solely the occupation of the affluent. It is possible to see a disastrous retrograde step in the near future. Our institutions and our values will not change as quickly as our technology. They will still value and reward the kind of intelligence that has been formed by the love of reading books. Not so long ago, a survey found that 71 percent of Americans reported reading a book “yesterday,” and another in Britain observed that “the skilled worker has been buying more books since World War Two than he ever saw in all his life before.” That habit may be confined to the children of the wealthy, who may be inclined to reclaim some of the territory they have been obliged to cede.
I live in a mixed but very safe part of London, where the excellent bus routes are used pretty equally by everyone. I often see mothers – some evidently struggling, others well-dressed professionals – with children in tow. The eyes of the small children are alive with interest, and a bus ride that includes strangers, dogs and a change of scenery is fascinating to a tiny mind. The child attracts the mother’s interest, and the response differs sharply and indisputably. Some mothers talk to their children, or (still quite often) hoik them on to their laps to look through a favorite book, brought along for the purpose of distraction. Most, however, show their child their phone, or just hand it over. The child’s eyes dull; they grow quiet; and when their bus stop approaches, they become angry and querulous. If we are going to allow literacy to be taken away from the majority of people, we are going to have to get used to a world which is worse even than the one we currently live in. You will not want to ride on the same bus as the adults those children become.
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