The Age of Reading Is Over - The Atlantic

[applegrove]

16. From the link:

"Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?link_source=ta_bluesky_link&taid=6a502bbae96d9800016ea13a&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky