The Joy of Reading Isn’t Going Away

To borrow a famous (but often misquoted) line from one of America’s most famous writers, the reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated. Technology will undoubtedly march on, and in ways that we can’t even imagine, but literacy will always remain a staple of the human experience. The word, whether on paper or on a screen, is a timeless entity, and it is sure to survive in some form or another. Literacy is essential to our species because of our need to make sense of the signs and symbols around us; it is part of our endless pursuit to construct meaning out of chaos. Reading is thus a kind of primal activity, grounded in our evolutionary development and hard wired into our individual and collective DNA.

Literacy is also a primary avenue of learning and a path to knowledge; this adds to my belief that we shouldn’t worry too much about the fate of reading even in so-called times of crisis. We continually seek out new information to feed our minds and look to books and other materials not only for cognitive growth but also to enrich our souls. I’m inclined to believe that the foundation of this process goes well beyond our tendency to define the purpose of reading in either practical terms or as entertainment. Reading is rooted in a survival instinct, making our attraction to text at some level a biological phenomenon. This, too, makes me feel good about the future of reading despite claims that young people would prefer doing almost anything else.

It is particularly interesting to me how reading morphed and shape-shifted throughout the last century, adapting itself to different social climates, in the process both reflecting and helping shape the cultural values that were in circulation at a given time. Rather than simply being a pastime, then, reading has been put into service to work as an active force in promoting certain ends, notably those related to citizenship and tolerance for others. Through storytelling, there are lessons and wisdom to be gained from reading, Americans have been told, making it in our best interests to spend at least some time with a book.

Given that guiding ethos, it’s not surprising that worry and anxiety have pervaded the broad sweep of reading in America. Fears that citizens were vulnerable to foreign ideologies were often the backdrop to such fretting, as it was assumed that an informed public would be able to resist political philosophies that threatened the American “Way of Life” grounded in consumer capitalism. Reading helped people make the right decisions, it could be said, with literacy linked to intelligence and plain common sense.

That high numbers of “ordinary” Americans, however — notably soldiers in both world wars — were functionally illiterate was cause for major concern. This was a dangerous thing, government officials were convinced, as competing on a global stage relied heavily on a literate people. Such sentiment peaked during the Cold War, when it appeared that we were falling behind the Soviets in the education race. Before and after the post-World War II era, however, reading in America was consistently viewed as a troubled arena, making it difficult to pinpoint a single moment in its history when the subject was judged to be in a truly positive state. Americans weren’t reading enough, were reading badly, or were reading the wrong things, with a sense of chronic dissatisfaction attached to the activity. This is somewhat strange, given that, on an individual level at least, reading is generally considered an enjoyable thing to do.

One theme has most defined literacy in America over the past century: How the skill should be taught has turned the field into a battleground, a sad and unfortunate thing given that the experience of reading itself is separate from the argument between whole language and phonics. It is within the public education arena where the drama of the field has played out, with economic and political forces shaping how and when children learn to read. What children should and shouldn’t read has been another major battlefront, with materials often chosen or rejected based on ideological agendas. Kids have been caught in the middle of these literacy wars, innocent bystanders in the struggle over control of curriculum and taxpayer-funded budgets.

Issues related to race and class, too, shaped the contours of the field, part of the systematic inequities built into our institutions. Literacy was deemed a pathway to “success,” we heard over and over, although of course that term means something different to each of us. Literacy became a symbol of something much greater than an individual’s ability to understand the meaning of words, viewed as a measure of the intelligence and even quality of life in American society as a whole. Having crossed over into the public domain, it was not surprising that not only scientists and psychologists but also sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and even medical professionals were brought into the field, each discipline seemingly having a solution to the problem that was literacy in America.

Focused on process and techniques, this long line of experts largely ignored the principal reason to read: to have an emotional experience through the string of words that another person structured into a certain form. The emphasis on the shapes or sounds of letters overshadowed the psychic resonance of the work for the reader, an example of how education, and really all institutions, prioritize the rational, logical, and factual over feelings. By stressing the mechanics of reading rather than the mental states it is uniquely capable of producing — joy, sadness, anger, empathy — I believe that the educational power structure has done a disservice to young people in terms of preparing them for the emotional roller coaster that is life.

From our bird’s-eye view, it’s strange to see what most would agree is one of the better things in life turned into such a problem. Reading has nearly always been located in a state of crisis, with a continual series of technological threats or negative forces — radio and movies between the world wars, soldier illiteracy in World War II, television and Cold War anxieties in the post-war era, the decline in scores in the 1970s and 1980s, and the rise of digital culture from the 1990s to today — bringing undue attention to the activity. Teachers were undeservedly blamed for not being able to resolve the crisis, even though such culturally determined phenomena were obviously beyond their purview. Considerable pressure was applied to fix the problem, with a myriad of methods, programs, and approaches based on an equal number of theories used in the attempt to achieve “100 percent literacy.” Still, there seemed to never be enough research or evidence to solve the predicament, making reading one of the most challenging issues within education.

It is, however, the now decades-long push to high-stakes testing that has, ironically, represented the biggest threat to seeding a lifelong love of reading, I believe. The “mania for measurement” has guided reading instruction despite questionable research methodologies (and the fact that data can be juggled to produce whatever results one wants). Translating the reading experience into quantitative terms is simply a bad idea, as test scores have nothing at all to do with what reading is all about, and we should spend more time encouraging such activities rather than applying metrics to sort students into buckets based on predetermined criteria.

Still, I’m confident that children can negotiate this institutionally assigned role of reading alongside a much more personal and meaningful one. Durable, resilient, and somehow resistant to external forces, literacy at its core remains a fundamental human endeavor. Reading is not simply a sanctuary from the cultural storm; it is a healing, therapeutic agent that appears to be based in brain chemistry.

I can personally vouch for an optimistic scenario for the future of reading, despite its troubled past, in another compelling way. Since kindergarten, my 11-year-old daughter has been subjected to the typical battery of tests, both in reading and math, all of them designed to assess her proficiencies and use those numbers to guide instruction in those subjects. In addition, my daughter engages in the usual electronic games found online, sometimes for hours at a time.

None of this testing or technology has impacted my daughter’s reading habits in the least. In fact, every night she curls up with some non-assigned middle-grade fiction and thoroughly enjoys the words on a page without thinking at all about the scientific measurement of her reading skill and how chat may affect her academic career. Kids are remarkably equipped to compartmentalize, seamlessly juggling the workings of the educational machine and copious amounts of screen time with old-school reading.

This serves as a firm reminder that literacy, despite its uneasy yesterday and uncertain tomorrow, will never go away.

Lawrence R. Samuel is a Miami-based independent scholar who holds a Ph.D. in American studies and an M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota and was a Smithsonian Institution Fellow.

From Literacy in America: A Cultural History of the Past Century by Lawrence R. Samuel, Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, now part of Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2024  by Lawrence R. Samuel, All Rights Reserved

This article is featured in the November/December 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.