One of the most puzzling attacks on education has been that students aren’t learning anything, their performance on competency tests keeps getting worse, and their critical thinking and communication skills continue to falter. The burden is put on educators to fix these problems, even as teachers and faculty pay doesn’t keep up with inflation and cost of living, and as schools and universities get fewer resources every year.

Concurrently, regardless of where critics fall along the political spectrum, one thing that there seems to be some agreement on are the existential problems brought on by the omnipresence of smartphones, social media, and screen proliferation. These concerns have been more than credibly linked to mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, and while the biggest worries are saved for the kids (understandably so), they apply to adults, too.

In light of this, there has been no concerted national effort to intervene, Big Tech gets bigger and more integrated into every facet of our society, and the wellbeing of Americans get evermore unstable. There is a parallel problem tracking with our screen- and social media-induced mental and social health problems, and that is the rapidly declining pastime of reading, as recently and astutely documented in an essay by James Marriott on his Substack titled, “The dawn of the post-literate society.”

Marriott states that, “The reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, [and now] the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.” His concerns are that as individuals read less and less, we lose our critical thinking and reasoning abilities, as well as our capability to process complex ideas and sort through diverse arrays of information to determine what’s true and what’s not.

The only light most people see is that which comes from their screen. (Image retrieved from here and comes courtesy of Dayan Rodio.)

He ties the importance of reading to writing for establishing clear lines of communication and conveying well-supported positions that are intended to sway people to support important positions. Citing Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Marriott said that, “Certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech – you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.” These types of exchanges and debates used to be embraced in American society, but since 2010 with the rapid explosion of smartphones, apps, and social media, and then turbocharged with Trump’s entry into the political sphere in 2015, these forums and the tolerance for reasoned debates have dissipated in taste for the citizenry, instead replaced with the ephemeral indulgence of the media life cycle, an embrace of the polarizing and shocking, and a continued loss of attention spans and a collective lack of willingness to consider the alternative when it runs in the face of one’s beliefs. Marriott says we’ve entered a post-literate society.

He goes on, stating that, “If the literate world was characterized by complexity and innovation, the post-literate world is characterized by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural ‘nostalgia’; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.” Instead, “our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.”

Peppered with graphs and tables from numerous large datasets, Marriott maps the declining arcs of reading, intellectual curiosity and engagement, and the loss of civil society in the United States. Putting the onus for this problem primarily on the big tech companies, he suggests that they, “Like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact, in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.” This is not an especially groundbreaking assessment, but his tying it to another very real problem that has managed to escape our collective awareness – the decline in reading and the problems it has created – because of all of the other problems that capture our attention these days.

Marriott claims that, “These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age,” a statement that seems hyperbolic on its surface but not unrealistic when one surveys the state of things in this country these days.

As an educator, I have to admit I’m part of the problem. Every year the amount of reading I “require” my students to do gets less and less – and the amount I actually expect that they’ll read declines precipitously, too. In the last decade I haven’t required a paper longer than 5 pages in a class, and those papers are becoming harder for me to read.

But the reality is, as much as formal education and educators bear some responsibility, we’re up against a seemingly insurmountable force – a society that doesn’t believe reading is important anymore but simultaneously berates educators for the state of kids’ intelligence and abilities. Marriott said that, “The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.”

When people lose the ability – or worse, the curiosity and desire – to understand problems through the act of reading, to learn about our world, to challenge our beliefs, to really think about the complexities of that which surrounds us, then Marriott is right, we’ve lost a major aspect of what it means to be human. In its place populists, technocrats, and authoritarians rush in to fill the void, and they don’t want us to think. “Thinking is where certainty goes to die.”

Marco Esquandoles
Bookworm