What Teachers and Parents Can Do to Preserve a Culture of Reading

Every few months, it seems, another article announces the end of reading.

Young people no longer read books. Attention spans are disappearing. Screens have won. We are entering a post-literate age. Soon, presumably, War and Peace will be reduced to a 14-second TikTok featuring a dancing Napoleon.

I exaggerate. Slightly.

But the evidence of a reading problem is real.

The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 35 percent of American twelfth graders performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level in reading. That was lower than in 2019 and five percentage points lower than when the assessment began in 1992. Even more troubling, only 68 percent reached the Basic level or above—twelve percentage points fewer than in 1992.

Those numbers should alarm us.

What they should not do is convince us that the decline of reading is inevitable.

After more than three decades as an English teacher, I have become increasingly skeptical of the fatalism surrounding this subject. If students are reading less, concentrating less, and struggling more with sustained text, our response cannot simply be: Well, that’s what young people do now. Adults should not simply “give in” to these disconcerting trends.

No.

Teachers and parents have some say in what young people “do now.”

Reading Isn’t Dead. Deep Reading May Be in Trouble.

It is easy to overstate the case.

Americans have not stopped reading books altogether. In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 75 percent of American adults reported reading at least part of a book during the previous year. Sixty-four percent had read a print book, 31 percent an e-book, and 26 percent had listened to an audiobook.

So I am not prepared to hold a funeral for the book just yet.

My greater concern is something harder to measure: the erosion of sustained, attentive reading.

Reading ten pages of a novel is not the same cognitive experience as reading twenty-seven social-media posts, three headlines, six text messages, half an online article and the comments underneath a video of a dachshund wearing sunglasses.

Technically, words were read.

That doesn’t make the experiences equivalent.

Anyone who has spent time in a classroom in recent years has seen students struggle to remain with a difficult text. A challenging paragraph asks something that much of the digital world does not: Stay here. Read it again. Think about it. Don’t click anything.

That last one may now qualify as an advanced skill.

I listen to a teacher podcast on YouTube, and I will say this: WOWEE! Some of the teachers in current classrooms report some scary stuff. One young gentleman, an English teacher in Ohio, said that he asked a student what he could do to help him pass a reading test that was two paragraphs long. Where is it, he queried, that the student got confused. Was it the vocabulary, maybe? The answer was ,” Mr. ____, I’ll just be honest with you. I didn’t read the paragraphs. They are too long.”

What About Reading on Screens?

I have long preferred physical texts for serious academic reading, and my experience as both an English teacher and an SAT/PSAT tutor has reinforced that preference.

But the research is more nuanced than simply saying, “Screens bad. Books good.”

A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis of 33 experimental studies involving 2,799 participants found a small comprehension advantage for reading on paper rather than screens. The advantage appeared primarily with expository texts rather than narratives. Readers using paper also judged their own comprehension more accurately.

Another large meta-analysis similarly found better comprehension with paper and found that factors such as time pressure and the type of text mattered.

This does not mean that meaningful reading cannot happen on a screen. Of course it can. Nor do I propose that we confiscate every Chromebook in America and fling it ceremonially into the sea.

Technology is a tool. I use it constantly. My students use it. It provides extraordinary access to information and literature.

But tools encourage habits.

Students reading on screens can easily develop the habit of scrolling rather than lingering. Physical texts make other behaviors natural. Students underline. They annotate. They circle an unfamiliar word. They put a question mark beside something confusing. They turn backward three pages because they suddenly realize that something they read earlier matters.

The book gradually becomes a physical record of the student’s thinking.

That matters.

When I tutor students for the SAT and PSAT, I sometimes feel that I am ostensibly teaching test preparation but am actually teaching something more fundamental:

Slow down. Read what the sentence actually says.

It is remarkable how revolutionary this advice can seem.

So What Can Teachers Do?

For starters, we can give students time to read.

Not because they have finished their “real work.”

Reading is the real work.

I strongly recommend an independent sustained silent reading period of at least thirty minutes once or twice per week. Students should have access to a large and varied collection of high-interest books—not merely the books adults believe they ought to enjoy.

That means novels, mysteries, biographies, sports books, graphic novels, science fiction, history, music, humor, memoir, fantasy, true stories, and anything else that might cause a teenager to forget for thirty minutes that a phone exists.

Teachers often end up creating these classroom libraries themselves through donations, library sales, garage sales and, naturally, large quantities of their own money. This is one of education’s less charming traditions.

Students should also be explicitly taught how to annotate.

Annotation should not become another elaborate assignment that destroys the pleasure of reading. Its purpose is to teach students to interact with a text: underline something important, question something confusing, notice a pattern, respond to an idea.

I also recommend a simple book diary. After independent reading, students write briefly about what they read.

And yes, I grade it.

I am an English teacher. Eventually I grade everything.

Mostly, however, I grade the diary for effort and consistency. The goal is to establish a habit: read, think, respond.

And What Can Parents Do?

First, let children see adults reading.

We cannot spend four hours staring at our own phones and then announce to a thirteen-year-old that they spend too much time staring at a phone. Adolescents have many faults, but failure to recognize hypocrisy is generally not among them.

Make books visible.

Go to libraries and bookstores. Give books as gifts. Talk about what you are reading. Ask children what they are reading without immediately turning the conversation into a comprehension quiz.

Read aloud together when children are young—and occasionally when they aren’t so young.

Audiobooks count, too. They can be wonderful, particularly for reluctant readers or families listening together. When appropriate, encourage children to follow along in the physical book.

And let children choose.

A child obsessed with basketball does not need to begin with Dickens. Find a book about basketball.

A child fascinated by sharks should read about sharks.

Music. Cars. Fashion. Space. Ghosts. Presidents. Dinosaurs. Murder mysteries. Manga. World War II. Dogs.

The gateway into a lifetime of reading does not have to be the book that won the most prestigious literary award.

It has to be the book that makes the child want to turn the page.

We Should Not Accept the “End of Reading”

I have taught middle school students, high school students, college students and adults. I have watched technology transform education in ways that are sometimes wonderful and sometimes deeply troubling.

I wrote extensively about that transformation in my memoir, Red Pens, Blue Screens: A Teacher’s Life Through Politics, Technology & Cultural Upheaval.

What worries me now is not simply that students may read fewer books.

It is that we are beginning to talk about diminished attention and diminished reading ability as though they were evolutionary developments over which human beings have no control.

“Kids don’t read anymore.”

Why not?

“They can’t concentrate that long.”

Then let’s teach them to.

“They want everything on their phones.”

Children also want to eat dessert before dinner. Historically, adults have occasionally survived the experience of saying no.

Education has always required us to ask young people to do things that are initially difficult.

Read this.

Stay with it.

Think about it.

Go back and read that paragraph again.

Tell me why you disagree with the author.

Find the sentence that changed your mind.

Those are not obsolete skills. They are among the skills we need most.

Why This Matters

Reading does far more than improve test scores.

Deep reading asks us to inhabit another person’s mind for a while. It develops vocabulary and background knowledge. It demands patience, imagination and judgment. It exposes us to ideas we would never encounter if an algorithm continually served us more of what we already liked.

And in a democracy, the ability to read carefully is not merely an academic skill.

Citizens are asked every day to distinguish evidence from assertion, fact from manipulation, argument from propaganda, and complicated truth from appealing nonsense.

That requires attention.

It requires knowledge.

And very often, it requires reading something longer than a caption.

I don’t believe the age of reading is over.

But I do believe it is possible to lose a culture of deep reading if schools and families decide that its disappearance is simply the unavoidable price of technological progress.

It isn’t.

A society that stops reading carefully eventually stops thinking carefully.

So give students books. Give them choices. Give them paper. Give them time.

And every once in a while, give them thirty uninterrupted minutes in which absolutely nothing flashes, beeps, vibrates, scrolls, recommends something, asks for a password, or needs to be charged.

Then leave them alone and let them read.

You might be surprised by what happens.