Just before the start of the semester, I had a conversation with a friend about hobbies. I don’t think I have a hobby, I had said. Only partially true; we are distracted by colorful fluidity, the instant gratification of media content. It’s frustrating.
You read, he had said, that’s a hobby.
And, okay, sure, reading is a hobby, absolutely. But the degree to which people are reading is slowly declining. What used to be an activity has morphed into a chore, a requirement for understanding, both in academia and outside of it.
The youngest generations are rooted in technology. Work, school, communication, relationships, and pleasure are all thrown into the same device, a hub for information. And because devices and an online presence are so normalized, instilling those tactics in their children is widely supported.
While the introduction of home technology was fairly beneficial to the grand scheme of education and processing, it’s slowly taking away basic thinking properties, leaving students, young adults, and a majority of children unable to really comprehend what is in front of them.
Elementary schools have been experiencing a severe decline in literacy rates, rising and falling around mid decade. While the pandemic was a contributing factor, as well as overexposure to internet culture, it isn’t the defining cause. In a podcast hosted by the Harvard Gazette titled Harvard Thinking, guest speaker Martin West, professor and academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explains the statistics.
Martin West, professor and academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in a podcast titled Harvard Thinking, says, “The pandemic certainly didn’t help, but in particular when you’re looking at reading skills, it’s actually hard to make a case that the pandemic is the most important factor.”
West continues with the statistics, saying, “Reading scores for American students peaked in 2015 in Grade 4, and in 2013 actually in Grade 8. In Grade 8, the scores have been falling steadily since 2017. And if I showed you a graph of that decline, you wouldn’t be able to pick out the years in which school closures took place, and the pandemic was raging. Rather, it looks like just a steady linear decline over, now, close to a decade.”
A collection done in 2023 by the National Assessment of Education Process (NAEP) and reported by EdTrust showed that “Not even half (43%) of fourth graders in the U.S. scored at or above a proficient level in reading. And for marginalized students, the numbers are much worse: just 17% of Black students, 21% of Latino students, 11% of students with disabilities, and 10% of multilingual learners can read proficiently by fourth grade.”
Taylor Ross, a senior elementary education student at Salve Regina University, is witnessing the decline in literacy rates firsthand, as well as the repercussions of unethical education practices in adolescence. Students are coming to class unprepared for their education andlacking in both attention span and understanding. Part of the reason young students are struggling in literacy is because of technology, of course, but also a lack of parental engagement. Students are experiencing a type of functional illiteracy; they can comprehend the words, but not entirely what they’re asking.
This shows up in other subjects as well. Students are struggling to understand math concepts, such as word problems, despite the lengths taken to engage them.
“We try to incorporate their names or a sport they play, and that helps with interest, but while some just don’t understand it, others are completely disinterested,” says Ross.
Because of instant gratification from media and technology, students find waiting and processing to be unstimulating. As a result, there is a lack of wanting to learn or an understanding of its importance. And it’s not just affecting understanding, it’s affecting speech patterns. Taylor currently student teaches at a school with a mix of privileged and underfunded students. While the former is still often disengaged, the latter has a more difficult time learning to speak, rather than to read and write.
“Children that come from low SES families, low socioeconomic status families, are much less likely to perform well in reading than students that come from high SES,” says Phil Caplin, assistant professor of education and reading researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “And that I think is due to many factors. But one of the primary factors is related, I think, to funding — that in our country, funding is tied in many places to property taxes, which leads to inequitable levels of funding for different students.”
With President Trump’s recent defunding of the Department of Education, many schools are struggling to provide the utilities students need in order to process what they’re learning. Not only does this decision affect children’s academic performance, but it also takes away similar opportunities for adults to gain an education or learn to speak, read, and write English for themselves.
A blog post for New America, written by Braden Goetz, covers the long-term effects of this decision and who is most likely to face the backlash. Specifically in adults, the rebuke of funding will likely remove the programs, including those seeking a GED or similar to get a proper education, contributing to that lack of literacy. The importance of reading and having the capacity to read contributes greatly to how we speak.
“There’s a lot of morphology you have to learn that you gain as you read,” says Ross, speaking mainly for children. “As you grow, if you don’t know how to read well, the fluency won’t be the best.”
With the elevation of screen time, attention span is coupled with distraction. Because being online has so many components, it’s easy to get sucked into the vortex. With children and young adults, there are parts of the brain that have not yet matured, so their self-control is off. Gloria Mark speaks of this in a podcast hosted by the American Psychological Association. The developing parts of the brain are immediately being introduced to media first, in place of analog media. In turn, this puts a false perception of what attention is supposed to be focused on.
Movies and television are changing their pacing. Information is no longer searched for, but expected to be given directly. Technology, the advancement of artificial intelligence, and the surge of available media are taking away the competency to look, read, and understand exactly what a topic, in detail, really means.
In writing, the first thing they teach you is to start with a hook, to draw the reader in with one good sentence, a rich piece of information to balance out the fact. It gets the story out, hits the beats and the details, but often leaves out the context. Now, knowing the basics, you want more. Now, the search is practically useless, expected to be given, not earned.
