The Age of Reading Is Over…But Was There Really an Age of Reading in the First Place?

I recently read Rose Horowitch’s The Atlantic essay, “The Age of Reading Is Over,” and found myself agreeing with much of it. As a teacher, a parent, and someone who genuinely loves reading, I found this article to be of great personal interest. And yet, I came away less worried than she seems to be.

I am a history teacher, and I tend to look at questions like this over a much longer timescale. From a historical perspective, the remarkable thing may not be that we are entering some kind of “postliterate” world. The remarkable thing may be the question of if we ever became a mass-reading society in the first place.

Horowitch writes that reading is becoming “a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.” I agree. She notes that a relatively small proportion of adults now accounts for the overwhelming majority of books being read, making committed readers increasingly resemble a subculture. I think she is right. I see this on subways, at train stations, and on flights, where I rarely see someone reading a book. And when I do, I feel like going over to congratulate them.

Reading was never normal

Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years. Writing appeared only around 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. For almost all of human existence, therefore, nobody read anything because there was nothing to read.

We were an oral species. Stories, knowledge, traditions, beliefs and history were transmitted through speech, memory, ritual and performance. Even after writing emerged, literacy was not something most people possessed. Reading and writing were generally concentrated among relatively small groups: scribes, religious figures, administrators, merchants, scholars and elites.

Horowitch herself points this out. Reading, she writes, has never been “natural.” It depends upon repurposing parts of the brain originally used for other functions, and for millennia after writing emerged, most people remained illiterate. Mass literacy arrived very recently in historical terms.

Technologies such as paper and, much later, the printing press gradually expanded access to the written word. Modern schooling expanded it further. Eventually, particularly in the twentieth century, some societies reached an extraordinary point at which being able to read—and regularly encountering long-form written material—became normal.

We tend to assume that this is the natural state of human civilization. It isn’t.

Perhaps a useful way of looking at our history is: oral society → literate society → digital society

Seen that way, the literate age might itself be the anomaly: a relatively brief period between the far longer oral past and whatever digital culture is now becoming. Horowitch actually arrives at this point when she suggests that the literate era may prove to have been “a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.”

That does not mean reading is unimportant. Quite the opposite.

It means we should think carefully about what this historically unusual practice gave us before deciding how worried we ought to be about its decline.

The difficulty of reading is part of its value

One of the strongest parts of Horowitch’s essay is her discussion of what reading and writing actually do to the mind.

Writing differs fundamentally from speech. It slows communication down. It allows thoughts to be separated from the person speaking them. It preserves ideas so that we can return to them, reconsider them and examine them closely. Written language also tends to allow more complicated structures than everyday speech.

Literacy helped cultivate sustained concentration, logical deduction and a more analytical form of thought.

That matters to me as a teacher.

Last year, some of my students told me that some of the readings I assigned were simply too difficult. One example was an article by Jared Diamond about the Neolithic Revolution that I used with a high school history class.

I understood the feedback. But I did not entirely agree with it.

I have been teaching for some time, and I am now in my fourth year at the same school. I know my students reasonably well. When choosing material, I try to think about what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development: learning should sit somewhere between what students can already do comfortably and what is completely beyond them.

A text should not be so difficult that a student simply gives up. But neither should everything be easy.

In fact, sometimes I choose a reading because it is difficult.

I have started telling students this explicitly. Yes, this may take you longer. Yes, you may need to reread a paragraph. Yes, there will probably be vocabulary you do not immediately understand. That does not necessarily mean the reading is inappropriate. It may mean the reading is pushing you.

I experienced something similar while I was learning Spanish. Finding texts at the right level was difficult. If they were too easy, I learned little. If they were impossibly difficult, reading became frustrating. The useful material sat somewhere in between, and engaging with it required patience, effort and a willingness not to understand everything immediately.

Reading stamina develops through reading, reading, and a bit more reading.

Horowitch makes almost exactly this point: the more we read, the easier sustained reading becomes; the less we do it, the harder it becomes.

The same applies to writing. I use many different forms of learning in my classroom. My students present, discuss, work on projects, analyze cases and collaborate with one another. I do not believe that learning should consist of sitting silently with books and writing essays all day. But writing offers something those activities do not always provide. Writing creates a pause.

When students have to turn an idea into a sentence, and one sentence into another, they are forced to ask themselves what they actually think. They have to organize ideas, make connections and notice where their reasoning does not quite work. Writing is not simply the transcription of thoughts that already exist. The process itself helps generate and refine thought.

This is one of the strongest defense of reading and writing in the digital age. They are not simply methods of obtaining and communicating information. They are technologies for thinking.

Screens do something different

This is also why screens concern me—not because screens are inherently bad, but because different media require different kinds of attention.

Horowitch describes research involving children aged three to five who encountered stories in different formats. When children watched an animated version, brain regions associated with imagination were less active than when they listened to a story while viewing static illustrations. The explanation is intuitive: when everything is already moving in front of you, the brain has less work to do constructing the scene itself.

Additional researchers in this field put forward similar ideas, including Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, which had a major impact on how I think about the internet and attention, and more recently Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation which made me think again about what screen-saturated childhood might be displacing.

But this question is also personal.

I have a four-year-old son, and I try to read to him as often as I can. He loves it. He wants to hear stories. He looks at the pictures, asks questions and wants books repeated. I hope that eventually becomes a love of reading.

I love reading myself. On most days, I probably spend at least an hour doing what I would call actual reading: quiet, sustained, focused reading. Why did I develop that habit? I am not entirely sure.

Some of it is probably personality and curiosity. But some of it must also be environment. My father has always read a great deal. Growing up, I constantly saw him reading. Our home had books. Good books. Every birthday, one of my father’s presents to me would be a book. Now that he is retired, he spends much of his time reading and writing. Perhaps one of the most important things he did for me as a reader was simply allow me to see him read.

Now I find myself trying to recreate that environment for my own children.

My twelve-year-old daughter needs a different aproach. I would like her to read more sustained prose, but she loves manga. So I buy her manga. I do not think manga and a long prose text ask exactly the same things of a reader. But I also do not want reading to become something defined entirely by parental pressure—something worthy that adults insist children ought to do.

There is a balance here, just as there is in the classroom. Challenge without overwhelming. Encourage without destroying enjoyment. Perhaps reading is partly a habit, but it is also an environment.

I tried to create a reading culture. Something else happened.

About a year ago, I started a book club for teachers at my school. I was excited about it. I assumed quite a few teachers would want to join. They didn’t. I was genuinely surprised by the turnout. I persisted, and the club has now been running for about a year. I cannot claim to have created a reading culture among the staff. I probably never will.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that this was not really the important goal.

We now have a small group of regular members. They enjoy coming. Sometimes what matters most is not even the reading itself. It is having a space where someone encounters a new idea, shares it, connects it to teaching, disagrees with it or hears another person’s perspective.

What I wanted was a reading culture. What has begun to emerge instead is something I value more: a culture of collaborative learning.

That experience has also made me less evangelical about books.

Reading is not the only legitimate route to intellectual life. A powerful conversation can teach us something. So can a lecture, a podcast, a project, a documentary or a discussion with a colleague.

The goal should not be to preserve reading merely because reading is what educated people are supposedly meant to do. The goal is to preserve the kinds of curiosity, reflection and thought that reading can help create.

Every generation worries that the new thing is ruining us

This is ultimately why I am not particularly frightened by the prospect of a “postliterate” civilization. I prefer to call it the digital age. And as a historian, I am suspicious whenever people become convinced that the technology transforming their own time represents an unprecedented civilizational catastrophe.

Horowitch places today’s anxieties about reading in a much longer history of fears about new forms of communication. As she points out, Socrates worried that writing itself would weaken memory because people would begin relying on written words rather than exercising their own memories. She also notes that novels were later accused of damaging serious reading, and that in 1900 The Atlantic published an essay warning that newspapers—with their gossip, sports, and miscellaneous distractions—were undermining sustained attention and literary culture. Horowitch then turns to television, citing Marshall McLuhan’s 1962 prediction that the West was becoming “post-literate” as television rapidly entered American homes. Seen in that context, today’s concerns about the internet, smartphones, social media, and now artificial intelligence are part of a much older pattern of anxiety about new media.

History suggests that we should take these anxieties with a pinch of salt.

That does not mean the critics are always wrong. Writng changed human memory. Television changed politics and culture. Smartphones have clearly altered attention. Social media has changed how we communicate. AI will undoubtedly change how we read, write and think. New technologies have consequences.

But human beings adapt to technologies too. We lose some capacities, extend others, and develop practices that previous generations could scarcely imagine.The question, therefore, is probably not whether civilization will “survive” the digital age. The more useful question is what we want to preserve as it changes. For me, that answer is quite practical.

As a teacher, I will continue asking my students to read difficult things and write carefully—not because I want to drag them back into some romantic literary past, but because I believe those activities cultivate forms of thought worth preserving. As a parent, I will continue reading to my son, buying books for my children, keeping books around the house and letting them see me read. And as an individual, I will simply keep reading. Not because I think everyone must. Not because civilization depends upon my finishing another book. But because I love it.

I do not know whether mass reading will survive the digital age. History gives me little reason to believe that any particular form of communication remains dominant forever. But I do know what reading has given me: curiosity, concentration, pleasure, reflection and a way of thinking slowly in a world increasingly designed to make us think quickly.

As a teacher, I want my students to experience some of that. As a parent, I want my children to have the opportunity to discover it. And for myself, I hope never to lose it.