I’m enjoying Ted Gioia’s Substack newsletter, The Honest Broker. He covers a range of topics, from the state of the avant-garde to the decline in reading among young people in the US. According to the Pew Research Center, cited by Gioia, the percentage of 17-year-olds who hardly or never read for fun went up from 9% in 1984 to 27% in 2020, while only 19% said in 2020 that they read daily. Among 13-year-olds, the percentage of every-day readers declined from 35% to 17%. Parents are paying their kids to read (Gioia points us to a recent confessional by parent Mirielle Solcoff) and “the literati aren’t reading new releases anymore.”

The aversion to reading could have real consequences down the line, not just for the publishing industry–Gioia’s concern–but also for how we talk each other effectively. If I drop a “it was the best of times” quotation into conversation will anyone in the room will even get the basic reference, let alone the deeper cultural and historical resonances? Do people have the capacity to follow (let alone craft) a multi-point argument and be ready to respond anymore? And, are we even able to use the written cultural artifacts around us, which are so essential to helping us define and shape our world?

I think we know the answer to these questions is Probably not, which leads us to the question of how we got here. Some blame the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2009 and still used by 41 states. Common Core’s reading and language arts directives emphasized the analysis of texts to understand and develop arguments, ignoring any interpretive or creative work. This is hardly the way to turn anyone on to reading and certainly does little to fully educate students as to just how multi-faceted a tool language can be.

Others blame the adoption of any top-down educational standards, including those ushered in through federal programs like Race to the Top, which bribed states to adopt the US Department of Education’s standards with a total of $4.35 billion in grants. Tom Loveless, writing on the Brookings Institute website, notes that a major problem is that “coordinating key aspects of education at the top of the system hamstrings discretion at the bottom. The illusion of a coherent, well-coordinated system is gained at the expense of teachers’ flexibility in tailoring instruction to serve their students.”

I get that living under Common Core, as teachers do here in California, can be restrictive, and I wouldn’t want to build out a syllabus for a high-school English class. But teachers do have some leeway to choose the writing they get to teach, and when they do, I wonder if they’re making good choices. The books my kids brought home sometimes read more like political screeds than literature, more tailored to political persuasion than textual analysis (let alone enjoyment).

Ultimately, though, parents are big part of the problem. We expect our schools to do everything for our kids all the time, to not just teach them academic subjects but also instill in them all the habits, customs, and behaviors they need to be successful adults. Reading is a practice, and it’s not something our kids can develop in their English class alone. They need the time and space to read at home, and the encouragement of those around them. They need to have someone who will take them to a bookstore or a library on a Saturday afternoon. And they need to see other people reading, probably most of all. People like their parents.