The Death of Reading
Kara Kennedy has an article on The Telegraph, dated 21 August with the subtitle, “Britain is sprinting toward idiocracy with eyes glued to a screen”. It makes pretty disturbing reading.
Kara Kennedy is a staff writer at The Spectator World and serves as the royal correspondent for The Spectator. She also co-writes the Mom Wars on Substack, where she discusses contemporary issues relating to parental issues and societal expectations.
Ms Kennedy writes: “If you’ve made it this far, congratulations: you’re doing something most of your countrymen can’t. You’re reading, not scrolling, not skimming, not letting TikTok spoon-feed you dopamine while your eyes glaze over. Actual reading. Consecutive sentences. Whole paragraphs.
It’s a vanishing practice, according to new data. The numbers are apocalyptic. Researchers at the University of Florida and University College London have found that, in America, reading for leisure has collapsed by 40 per cent in just two decades.
In Britain, according to the National Literacy Trust, the percentage of children who say they enjoy reading has plummeted by more than a third, while the number aged between eight and 18 who read daily has been cut in half. The verdict is in: books have lost to phones.
And when reading goes, so does everything else. Literacy isn’t ornamental. It is the bedrock of thought, imagination, politics, democracy itself. Strip it away, and what remains? A public incapable of parsing a story, let alone a policy. Already, 43 million American adults have what the government delicately calls “low literacy skills”.
The cheerier headlines insist that at least young women are still “reading”, thanks to something called “BookTok”. But what are they reading? According to reports, the hottest sellers are “the smuttiest, spiciest erotic novels” the publishing industry can churn out. This is not a literacy renaissance; it’s a paperback version of junk food, or, maybe more analogously, internet porn. If civilisation rests on werewolf fetishes, we may be in trouble.
Otherwise, no. Talk to teachers, and the picture turns bleak. Pupils twitch for their phones after three pages, as if suffering withdrawal. A professor told me his college students – legal adults – glaze over after a few paragraphs. He finally banned phones in his classroom. Miraculously, they began to read again.
And the official response to this collapse of attention? More screens. More apps. More “gamified learning”. The same poison repackaged as medicine.
Suggest banning phones and you’ll be accused of authoritarianism. Just this week, one prominent tech reporter, Taylor Lorenz, lamented that phone bans in schools “harm the most marginalised kids” since “for many underprivileged kids their phones are their only word processor”. God forbid children be forced to look at words on a paper page.
Meanwhile, the adults are just as guilty. Parents outsource parenting to iPads. Schools treat literacy as a boutique concern rather than the foundation of civilisation.
Politicians prattle on about “innovation” and “equity” while shrugging at the fact that an entire generation can no longer follow a story longer than a tweet. And Silicon Valley? They’re delighted. An illiterate, screen-addicted population is their dream market: easy to manipulate, impossible to resist. At home, of course, the tech elite send their children to phone-free Waldorf schools. “I don’t generally want my kids to be sitting in front of a TV or a computer for a long period of time,” Mark Zuckerberg once said. Quite.
Every year, fewer children read. Every year, more adults sink into functional illiteracy. The cultural muscles of focus, imagination, and memory wither further. We are not drifting into dystopia. We are sprinting toward idiocracy, eyes glued to a screen. We’re seeing the start of it now. History becomes gossip. Politics becomes memes. Culture becomes noise. The end won’t be televised. It will be reduced to bullet points for an audience that can no longer follow a sentence.”
