Do you hear the bells? Reading’s death knell is being tolled again by critics, teachers, and authors, in books and essays that turn an expectant face toward their own oblivion. Intellectuals and moralists have long worried about people reading the wrong things, or reading in the wrong way, or not reading enough. But this time, the alarm may be justified.
Mass readerships first emerged in the nineteenth century due to the happy coincidence of several factors. These included “public school systems, cheap wood-pulp paper, browsable bookstores, and taxpayer-funded libraries,” Leah Price writes in her 2019 study What We Talk About When We Talk About Books . Today, there is a darker convergence of trends.
There is a crisis in education: misguided techniques for teaching literacy and the overhauling of curricula in response to standardized testing have imperiled the formation of a new generation of readers. College costs have pressed humanities enrollments downward, as students assume that the humanities offer poor job prospects.
There is a crisis in culture. The stranglehold that tech companies exercise over public life through addictive devices and media platforms has sidelined the literary. The constant stream of ephemeral media might numb a moment’s boredom or nudge you to buy a product, but the clamor of algorithmically targeted content tends to drown thought, not inspire it.
Meanwhile, conservative politicians have taken an interest in literature in the same way we take an interest in a mosquito that whines in our ear before we squash it. Florida, Iowa, and other states banned, in total, more than 10,000 books last year in public schools. In the United Kingdom, some 773 libraries closed during Britain’s decade of austerity. Relentless attacks painting the humanities as effete left-wing nonsense have eroded public support for these fields of study.