What Preschoolers Know About the Future of Reading

I subscribed to The Atlantic for quite awhile, but recently let it expire when I decided to limit my consumption of "political news." I don't have the time or bandwidth. I'm too busy playing with children and reading books.

That said, they currently have a long article up about the demise of reading books. It's called The End of Reading is Here. All I've read is a longish excerpt because the rest of it is behind their paywall, but if I did want to read it I could find it at my local library. 

I don't, however, expect it to say anything surprising. People have been predicting the end of phonetic alphabet based literacy for some time. Probably the most famous is Marshall McLuhan who, in 1962, the year of my birth, in his mind-blowing book The Gutenberg Galaxy, introduced the idea that electronic media are returning us to a kind of "tribal" or "post-literate" culture. 

As early childhood educators, we know what it's like to exist in this kind of society. We spend our days surrounded by highly intelligent, yet illiterate humans, who create their culture through stories, music, gesture, curiosity, and play.

The adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet by the Ancient Greeks (~800 BCE) happened in a culture that stored and transmitted its knowledge, stories, and history via an oral tradition, not so unlike what we experience on a smaller scale in our classrooms. The creation of the Greek alphabet, however, with its letters representing vowel sounds, introduced a more efficient, but far less nuanced way to store and transmit. As McLuhan points out, 24 letters, even when we consider digraphs, trigraphs, and blended consonants, can't even come close to representing all the sounds we're capable of making with our voices, not to mention non-verbal communication. This means that as powerful as it is, the phonetic alphabet has greatly narrowed what and how we communicate compared to an oral culture. 

The temptation is to become concerned about the decline of literacy, but it was never going to last long as a human "fad." I mean, if The Atlantic is right (or even ahead of game by a few centuries) the kind of literacy we fret over in schools will have only been a "thing" for less than 1 percent of our species' history. At best, it will be considered a kind of bridge between the Ancient Greeks and electronic media.

The decline in novel reading in favor of movies and programs is one of the ways we're moving beyond reading, but I'm really curious about how we'll handle things like laws, contracts, and other bureaucratic things. The future will tell, but not in my lifetime.

Reading books is on the decline, but not in my home. I'm a product of the age of books. My wife reads even more than I do. Our walls are lined in books, most of which we've read, many we've re-read, and there remains an enticing sufficiency of "aspirational" reads. It makes me feel both wealthy and smart. 

I like having read The Gutenberg Galaxy with its dense, convoluted sentences. The kind of things that AI would try to chop up into more easily digested bits. The often ponderous prose of Moby Dick (Herman Melville) presents an ordeal for the modern reader that is every bit as difficult and messy as the lives of the whalers it depicts. I've tackled that white whale of a book twice, including, both times, the famously skip-able chapter on cetology. 

It's become popular to advise modern readers that there is no shame in not finishing a book if it doesn't spark something, but c'mon! Some of the greatest reading experiences of my life have involved real struggle. When I first tackled Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, I got to the halfway point only to realize that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. In frustration I began re-reading it from the beginning each morning, while simultaneously continuing to read from where I'd realized I'd gotten lost. Amazingly, this process revealed the novel's incredible architecture, its themes, and its story, in a way that I would have missed entirely had I not taken action or worse, stopped reading. I consider having read the book in this way to be one of the crowning achievements of my intellectual life.

The truth is that much of what we call classic literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is written for a different generation of readers, one that pre-dates me. Just has the oral culture of the pre-literacy Greeks produced people with the capacity for feats of what we would today see as prodigious memorization, the culture of literacy produced people capable of appreciating prodigious sentences.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense was published in 1776 and almost instantly became the best selling book up to that point in history. It was praised for its conciseness and clarity. Today, of course, it could never be published as it is. Editors (and AI tools) would demand shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences (especially fewer nested sentences), an eradication of semicolons and rhetorical flourishes, more frequent headings and white space, more concrete examples, and simpler syntax. 

Modern readers, for the most part, don't often make it beyond the first few pages, unless it's required reading. Of course, we're capable of understanding it, but sustaining engagement with long, layered sentences is a societal muscle that has atrophied in the intervening centuries, especially since the advent of radio and then television. What pre-electronic media cultures once found to be rich and rewarding reading now just feels like unnecessary effort to many of us. I feel that this is why I often struggle with older texts, at least until I get going. I'm lucky that I've discovered the joy of getting over the hump enough to delight in nested sentences, long paragraphs, and semicolons. 

"The medium is the message" is McLuhan's most famous line (sometimes phrased as "The medium is the massage.") His assertion is that new media don't merely change what and how we consume information, but they reshape our minds. This is clearly seen in this brief flash of human existence during which books were king.

Middle and high school teachers as well as university professors are reporting that many of their students simply refuse to read entire books any more. Even as recently as when I was at university in the early 80's, we were regularly assigned reading lists with a dozen books. I once read 20 books for two classes over the span of three months. Students from 200 years ago, I suspect, would have been ecstatic at the prospect of so many books, much in the way that we get excited today when a new season of our favorite network show drops. 

The evidence that this kind of print literacy is on the wane could not be more clear. It's not caused by intellectual laziness, but rather the kind of transformation of our species that attends the introduction of every new technology.

When I'm among preschoolers, I often find myself pitying them. So many are destined to move on to elementary school where they will be hammered with literacy instruction and made to feel badly about themselves when they find it difficult. Others will find reading easier, even enjoyable, but the "work" of reading books, I fear, will get them too. Just as I was born into the first generation for whom Latin was no longer considered a standard part of education, it's quite possible that these children could be among last for whom reading books is prerequisite for being deemed "educated." It's quite possible that some of them will never read a book.

I also see the future when I'm with them, telling stories and jokes, negotiating, making agreements, then doing it all again the next day. They are citizens of today's world, becoming citizens of tomorrow's. 

In my lifetime, I've seen television become the dominant media, followed by personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and now AI. One could say that my life has been lived almost exactly at the hinge between what might be called the late age of print and the early age of electronic media. I feel lucky to have escaped Latin, one of the oldest rites of passage of print culture, but I'm even more lucky to have grown up with books. People my age are both products of the age of books and children of the beginning of its decline. Today's youth are living during a similar hinge. Maybe everyone always has.

I'm often accused of being too wordy here on the blog, of dragging my sentences out with comma after comma, of taking detours and side roads instead of getting straight to my destination. I try, sometimes, to accommodate the modern reader with more white space and fewer rhetorical flourishes, but sadly, I'm afraid, I've read far too many books for that.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is starts on Sunday! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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