Postliteracy and the End of Democracy

Intercollegiate Studies Review:

Read Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and you’d never mistake it for a book about dinosaurs. Yet more than 25 percent of college English majors in a 2024 Kansas study thought otherwise. The confusion traces to a single word: Dickens describes London’s mud as so thick it “would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus” waddling up the street as part of an extended simile, not a plot point. Many students missed the joke entirely.

This miscomprehension is not surprising, argues Rose Horowitch in a thorough and unsettling article for The Atlantic. Drawing on recent studies, she argues that America has become a postliterate society. Many have traded books and newspapers for TikTok and tweets, with devastating consequences.

Horowitch points out that teachers are assigning fewer and shorter books (if any at all), even in classes built around the written word. Meanwhile, some pre-K schools now hand tablets to three-year-olds. How can attention spans survive these practices, especially when instilled at such a young age?

Horowitch acknowledges that book sales are up, book clubs are back in fashion, and audiobooks are thriving. But she notes that this is confined to “a dwindling proportion of the population.” Horowitch believes that the collapse of literacy means societal trouble for the majority of Americans.