Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

But just as the reported decline of empathy in our young people requires our collective scrutiny and understanding, so also does the more and more frequent observation that students are shying away from longer, more difficult texts and writing less well than in the immediate past. The central issue is not their intelligence, nor, more than likely, even their lack of familiarity with different styles of writing. Rather, it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire the cognitive persistence, what the psychologist Angela Duckworth famously called “grit,”54 nurtured by the very genres being avoided. Just as earlier I described how a lack of background knowledge and critical analytical skills can render any reader susceptible to unadjudicated or even false information, the insufficient formation and lack of use of these complex intellectual skills can render our young people less able to read and write well and therefore less prepared for their own futures.