What Happens If No One Reads

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.