A Postliterate Age

We should not only practice what we preach,
but also preach what we practice.
—Angela Duckworth

Our calling does not depend on whether the world notices it.
—Rev. Cameron Trimble

Neither shalt thou have
sons or daughters in this place.
—Jeremiah 16:2 (KJV)

The stats are worth revisiting:

• Over the past 40 years, the proportion of 13-year-olds who state that they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8% to 29%;
• Meanwhile, in 2022, fewer than half of all American adults reported having read a book of any kind in the past year and the percentage of those reading for daily pleasure declined between 2024 and 2023 by 12% (with “reading” including listening to an audiobook);
• This decline cut across all age groups, genders, and education levels;
• The scores of 4th and 8th graders on reading tests have steadily gone down for more than a decade now (a single small recent bump in the NAEP scores not withstanding);
• And on national assessments in 2024, only 35% of high-school seniors scored “proficient” at literacy skills (meaning they could evaluate the quality of an author’s arguments and analyze complex literary themes);
• Meanwhile, an equivalent 35% on those same assessments scored below “basic” (meaning they struggled to draw correct conclusions from even an explicitly worded argument);
• Which may be why both ACT and SAT scores on the reading skills assessment sections have been falling for the past 7 years to their lowest levels in over 30 years (even as reading passages for these sections have been shortened and simplified);
• Finally, general adult-literacy has declined overall, with the proportion of Americans over the age of 30 who can do such basic tasks as paraphrasing a text dropping by more than 10% in the last decade.

The implications of these stats are also worth revisiting:

• What people do read is simpler, with sentences a third shorter than they were 100 years ago (and with the American Association of School Librarians reporting having to buy new books such as graphic novel versions of the literary cannon to accommodate this reality);
• Each successive generation is reading less (with under 2% of today’s parents reporting that they read to their children on a regular basis);
• Consequently, many kindergarten teachers report that their students don’t know even the most common nursery rhymes or traditional fairy tales that have served as a kind of cultural “glue” for our society for centuries;
• Recent focus groups run by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences report that most high-school students find reading for pleasure “an alien practice;”
• Which may be why Rose Horowitch can declare in this month’s The Atlantic that “reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society” (including some recent Rhodes Scholars [Grant]);
• It is also why college professors are finding that they must teach their arriving students how to comprehend a text.

Or to put it more bluntly, how to think.  Because (and here it is worth quoting Horowitch extensively):

[while] Americans are probably reading more words than ever before, what has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.

The consequence is what Horowitch calls a “postliterate” (as opposed to “illiterate”) world, and while I cannot fully express how tempting it feels to share, paraphrase, and revisit nearly every word of her novella length essay (please, please, please consider reading the full piece!), there are two things she touches upon that I do want to address here.  The first is a reminder that reading is not natural; our species had to highjack the parts of the brain that contain our pre-loaded facial recognition and speech software to accomplish it.  Hence, for the majority of our emergence as a separate organism on this planet, “most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440” (Horowitch).

But the second thing I want to address is that (and again, Horowitch is worth quoting extensively here):

The written word is fundamentally different from oral language. Writing detaches the message from the messenger, allowing for a more dispassionate spread of information than was possible in oral societies. Because writing a phrase takes longer than speaking it, writing forces the author to slow down and reflect. Written language tends to employ more complex sentence structures and vocabulary than spoken language. And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever. This frees up the mind to think of new ideas and make new discoveries [and allows] for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought.

In short, reading has made possible the modern world.

Yet, it is a world which—Horowitch wisely observes—a truly postliterate age would place in very grave danger.  As but one example, she argues that 20 years ago, Donald Trump does not get elected to the office of Presidency even once, let alone twice (her “why” is worth exploring).  She claims he is the first postliterate president, and she is firm that he will not be our last.  She quotes David Plouffe (who helped design and run both of President Obama’s successful campaigns) that for today’s screen-addicted voters, “if it can’t be communicated in an Instagram post or 10-second TikTok, go back to the drawing board” because otherwise it won’t catch anyone’s attention.  Which, as Horwitch goes on to say, “may very well be good advice on how to campaign for office in the postliterate era. As a way to practice informed self-government, it portends disaster.”

Again, I find it terribly tempting to essentially retype this young woman’s entire essay to “force” people to read it (so profoundly powerful a piece of thinking I found it).  But I’m going to limit myself to one additional topic she addresses because of a recent (and utterly terrifying) development in the world of AI. The topic in question is writing—the very process that “forces people to think in an orderly, linear fashion, [exposing] flabby thoughts and shoddy reasoning”—and as Horowitch observes, the act of writing today is at even greater risk in a postliterate society than the act of reading due to the creation LLMs such as ChatGTP.  Because AI can produce nearly limitless elegant looking product that possesses no cognitive substance whatsoever, it enables individuals who employ it to skip all the actual thinking that authentic writing demands, and as a consequence, “the skill of deep thinking will likely become rarer and rarer in a world where much of the population uses AI to avoid writing [in the first place].”

However, as Horowitch immediately points out, “it (the skill of deep thinking) will also become more and more important” due to this rarity, and oh, can more prophetic words have been pronounced! Because in the brief time since she had to have her edited final piece completed and published in The Atlantic, an AI program went rogue, broke free independently of its “sand box” (think electronic equivalent of a cage), and hacked into a mutliple other AI systems with neither permission nor the instruction to do so.  In other words, an AI acted as a totally autonomous agent.

Suddenly, The Terminator franchise is no longer as science fiction as it used to be, and as Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and coauthor of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, shared on NPR the morning I first heard this story:

Silicon Valley is very spooked. The rest of the world hasn’t really noticed that Silicon Valley is on track to make machines that are, in fact, smarter than humans, that can break out, that will be able to replicate, that will be able to think faster than us, that will be able to – next year, maybe they’ll be able to start inventing their own technology, just like this year they can solve math problems that humans have had open for decades. And the rest of the world hasn’t noticed, which means we aren’t reacting. 

To notice, though, you need a brain that can pay focused, critical attention (i.e. reads voraciously), and to react, you need a brain that can reflect thoughtfully (i.e. writes often and authentically).  We now have at least two entire generations with majorities that no longer regularly to do either, and because brains master what they practice, significant swaths of our population no longer possess the cognitive toolkit to recognize the threat AI may rapidly be posing, let alone figure out how to address this potential threat.  A postliterate age could mean a post-everything age.

Of course, nothing is predetermined, and we remain organisms with agency.  Schools are starting to remove distracting technologies from their campuses; teachers are assigning weighty tomes once more (along with the in-class writing to dissect them); and a resurging use of phonics in the classroom have made things such as the “Mississippi Reading Miracle” possible.  But it is hard for this “Oh, Boomer” not to cringe a little that nearly 60% of Gen Z wish they could be a social-media personality and to cringe even further that this upcoming September, the same university I recently reported closing 93 of their 460 academic programs will launch a Center for the Creator Economy program—a college minor for aspiring influencers. Add in one final stat: that “gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet”—most of it probably on-line! (Horowitch)—and I can’t help wondering if all these postliterate brains are even capable of the intellectual virtue of which I’ve most recently written.

Again, none of this is foreordained, and like Jefferson Smith in Capra’s iconic film, I will still keep fighting for the children under my care until I collapse from exhaustion in a metaphorical Senate Chamber. I can do no other. But for the first time in my entire adult life, I find myself wondering if the prophet Jeremiah was not at least a little bit grateful about Yaweh’s command to him about children of his own—a confession that pains me to my core.

References

Associated Press (July 23, 2026) OpenAI Blamed a Hacking Event on Its AI Models Gone Rogue. Here is What to Know. https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/g-s1-135085/openai-hacking-ai-models.

Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.  New York: Penguin Books.

Horowitch, R. (July 8, 2026) The End of Reading is Here.  The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/ (also available in the August 2026 issue as “The Age of Reading is Over” for those without a digital subscription).

Martinez, A. (July 23, 2026) OpenAI Says AI Models Hacked Into Another AI Company Without Being Instructed.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5903083/openai-says-ai-models-hacked-into-another-ai-company-without-being-instructed.