The End of the Age of Reading? Not If You Can Help It.
The purpose of a system is what it does. That goes for schools, and it goes for your home. Join the 2%.
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The Atlantic published its new cover story this week: “The End of Reading Is Here,” by Rose Horowitch. It opens at the Library of Alexandria, and it corrects a myth we all learned in school. The library was not destroyed by Caesar’s fire. It died of neglect. Papyrus rots, and mice eat what humidity spares, so the collection survived only as long as scribes kept recopying it. The piece, drawing on the classicist Roger Bagnall, lands on a chilling verdict: The library’s death did not cause a dark age. That people let it die proved the Dark Ages1 had already come.
Then Horowitch turns to today. The share of thirteen-year-olds who rarely or never read for fun has nearly quadrupled since 1984, from 8 percent to 29 percent. Nearly 30 percent of American adults now struggle to draw inferences from a text longer than a page. On any given day, only 2 percent of American adults read to a child.
Most middle and high school English teachers now assign between zero and four books in an entire year, and one elementary school principal reports that administrators are instructing teachers not to assign whole books at all: Excerpts and reading drills only, the better to resemble the tests.
The British cybernetician Stafford Beer (1926-2002) gave us the right lens for all of this. He compressed a lifetime of studying organizations into one blunt dictum: The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it intends, not what its mission statement declares. Beer wrote that there is no point in claiming that a system’s purpose is “to do what it constantly fails to do.”2 Judge the system by its output.
The stated purpose of American schooling is to teach children to read. Its output, sustained across decades and undisturbed by any reform or budget, is children who have been deliberately dumbed down.
Faced with falling comprehension, the system did not prescribe more books. It prescribed fewer. We need not claim that any committee of villains planned this. Nobody planned the death of Alexandria either. By Beer’s rule, intent does not enter into it: A system that reliably produces non-readers is a system for producing non-readers. That is what it does. That is its purpose.
You may find this bleak, but this cuts both ways.
Your household is also a system, and its purpose is also what it does. Not what you intend for your evenings, not the values written on the refrigerator, but what actually happens between dinner and bed. If the evening reliably produces two hours of screens, that is what your evening is for, whatever anyone meant by it. But if the evening reliably produces twenty minutes of a real book read aloud, you are running a system that produces readers, and no administrator, no curriculum, and no algorithm on earth can reach a child inside it.
Horowitch is proof herself, though she buries it near the end: Her father read aloud to her nearly every night, all the way through middle school. The writer announcing the end of the age of reading is the product of a house that produced a reader.
This is why we say that reading is rebellion. A free man is one who cannot be controlled. A slave is not allowed to read. The school system will go on doing what it does. The question in front of you is smaller than the system and far more powerful: What does your house do?
So do not share this cover story with a sigh. Answer it. Tonight, after dinner, take down a book worth keeping and read it aloud to your children for twenty minutes. Do it again tomorrow. Join the 2 percent. This conviction is the foundation of Chapter House, and the whole reason this publication exists.
The Atlantic has measured the darkness. Light your candle anyway.
The “Dark Ages” is arguably a myth, but that is an argument for another article.
Stafford Beer first used the dictum in The Heart of Enterprise (1979) and repeated it for the rest of his career. It is often abbreviated POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does.