Kids can’t read. I’m not kidding, the latest viral story from The New York Times proves this. The possible cause of the national literacy decline: Is it No Child Left Behind? How about increased classroom screen time? Maybe pandemic-era school closures? Ultimately, the article declined to say that there is a “single reason for the declines.”
So if it’s not the screens (since the introduction of one-to-one devices is a relatively new phenomena). And it’s not school closures or simply policy coming from our elected officials. What has caused a majority of America’s children to remain fixed in a state of arrested literacy?
What I argue is not one issue, but all of them. This noise — the constantly changing, algorithmically saturated, technologically mediated environment — is what young people are surrendering to. This great flattening of America’s children is a result of a noisy culture that has led them away from the very conditions reading requires.
Although, to no surprise of those who follow literacy policy, Mississippi’s “miracle” (mandated third-grade retention for struggling readers, requiring teachers to use the phonics-based instruction, and literacy coaching networks) is only one of the two states to show improvements over the past decade.
Still warnings now abound that declining literacy rates will “haunt us,” but this is not a new crisis. Nationally, fourth-grade reading scores have shown no meaningful improvement since 1992. By the measure of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, there is a nationwide crisis of stagnation.
Andy Smarick writes in National Review that students are now outsourcing the difficulty of learning to AI “chatbots” which, in combination with how 31 percent of students say they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, the trouble of AI attention in literacy is a symptom of a larger problem.
There are worries that remain about how to “unburden kids’ tech-addled minds during school” or “we’re living through an education depression” due to an increasingly complex learning environment.
Noise, as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer explains, is “a torture to intellectual people.” For the average school-age kid, everyday life unfolds through a labyrinth of competing pressures.
Yes, there is the normal uncertainty, impulse, embarrassment, comparison, nervousness, and imitation of early life of course. And yes there are screens. But it’s how the entire environment around the child is now mediated by technologically influenced social forces that amplify confusion before the child has even developed the inner capacity to understand it.
To be a kid is to already live inside disorder. The child is trying to discover who he is, who others are, what the world expects and how to even survive daily life in the classroom, hallway, lunch table, locker room, and group chat.
The distortion of noise has moved beyond the merely audible. For a child trying to learn to read an inward quietness is required. How is that possible in a world saturated with technologically assisted confusion?
“There are people, it is true — nay, a great many people — who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise;” Schopenhauer contends, “but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence.”
The argument, then, is not to allow for children to become less intelligent but to recognize that noise makes the habits of intelligence harder to form.
Reading is one of those habits. Teaching patience and memory while providing the necessary guardrails when a child is falling behind produces literacy success. Take a look at one of the few successful states, Mississippi. Their “miracle” can become a model for the rest of the country.
The crisis of illiteracy produces weak citizens. Weak citizens beget a weak country. And a weak country eventually becomes a crisis of regime. “The end of literacy is the end of public reason,” writer Sam Kriss warns. “A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.”
The problem, therefore, is the entirety of the noise in a child’s environment. Yes, it is a policy failure. Yes, it is the device. Yes, it was the pandemic disruption. Yes, it’s pedagogical malpractice. The literacy crisis is all of it. But these forces do not operate in isolation.
Until we truly confront the noise competing for children’s attention, they will continue to be raised inside a world that makes the interior conditions of literacy unnatural. Reading should be a way to cultivate an inner world but, for the modern child, that place has been supplanted by algorithmic rewards and dopaminergic stimulation.