No one reads anymore. This is something that teachers of literature like me are always saying. “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect,” wrote the scholar of literacy Martha Maxwell in 1979. But more and more, educators are finding that the last few years have been meaningfully different. Students are showing up at even high-end schools having never read a novel cover to cover. Columbia literature professor Nicholas Dames told The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch that his students “struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.” Last month, as students returned to school, a new study made headlines because it found that the number of Americans who read for pleasure has dropped an astonishing 40 percent since the start of the century.
As a college teacher, I’ve noticed this trend too. My students are perfectly earnest, interested in the world, and even willing to take it on faith when I tell them it’s important to do the assigned reading. They’ve heard throughout their lives that reading is an important component of their future success. But many of them have never gotten much personal enjoyment out of it or seen for themselves what a book can give them that a Wikipedia entry can’t deliver more quickly. Covid school closures probably accelerated the problem. AI chatbots threw it into hyperdrive by offering on-demand, made-to-order, correct-enough summaries of (and essays about) any book you can google. But all ChatGPT really did was intensify our growing need to ask the question: Why read? What is it about sitting with a book, a quintessential experience of civilized life until very recently, that can’t be automated or replaced?
The strange thing is that, once upon a time, professors worried that reading would dull the mind, in the same way we now worry that screens will. In the fourth century BCE—shortly after it became trendy for the chic philosophers of Athens to sell and distribute written copies of their lectures to the elite young strivers of their day—Plato wrote a dialogue, Phaedrus, in which Socrates grouses that gadgets like papyrus are making students lazy. He talks about written texts as if they were a kind of external hard drive for the mind, retaining information so that you don’t have to. He even dreams up a myth in which one of the gods frets that humans will rely on writing to augment their powers of recollection, and that “this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their own memory.”
You can almost picture the Library of Alexandria as the ancient version of a cloud server bank somewhere out by Palo Alto, housing the sum total of recorded knowledge so that humanity doesn’t have to trouble itself with remembering.
