A counter-cultural reading movement

Are there solutions to getting more kids reading as the tidal wave of culture moves away from text?

A photo I took of my New Year’s Day hike at Radnor Lake here in Nashville. December and January give Tennesseans the best hiking weather.

Happy New Year, Bell Ringers! I’m so proud of what we are building here over the last nine months, and wanted to let you know what Bell Ringer patrons are saying about why they chose to became paid subscribers:

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One of my 2025 resolutions is to get The Bell Ringer more organized—you can always search for a post or science of learning concept at the archive link on the website homepage, but now it’s even easier to find what you’re looking for. The Resource Guide, a growing library of research and resources focused on the science of learning, and Tools for Practice, stories from practitioners on how they are using evidence in real classrooms, can now both be found in the main navigation bar at the top of the website.

We’re just getting started—both of these new pages will continue to grow as I add research, resources and tools. I’ll be sure to give you a heads-up when new stuff is added!

What to read next

* Thinking about better ways to teach math in the new year? Dig in to The Bell Ringer’s math coverage. From classrooms’ relentless focus on problem-solving at the expense of foundational skills to why math practice is a crucial but undervalued classroom habit to why early math should be on parents’ radar but isn’t, read up on evidence-based math instruction right here—and get ready for even more math coverage in 2025.

* My tutoring story at Education Next in print. More families are seeking one-on-one help for their kids. And while there’s some pretty solid evidence that “high-quality” tutoring can help the growing number of students who have fallen behind in reading and math, all the ways individualized education is creeping into schools and homes requires a thorough examination of the benefits and costs. Read my story “The Tutoring Revolution” at Education Next online, or get yourself a print subscription. I still love seeing my words in print. Look at this gorgeous, tactile, paper magazine. (As my teens would say, “You sound like you’re from the 1900s!” Which I am.)

Coming soon

Next Friday’s newsletter: The Knowledge Gap author and Minding the Gap Substacker Natalie Wexler talks with me about her new book, Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning. This special video interview will be in your inbox Friday, January 10, don’t miss it!

Here’s a preview on the connection between retrieval practice and the comprehension strategy of “making inferences.”

Also coming soon—on Friday, January 24, a long and fascinating interview with psychology teacher Blake Harvard, about his new book, Do I Have Your Attention?

The tidal wave of culture is moving away from text for adults and kids. Are there solutions to stop this momentum?

“As teachers, we were encouraged to teach kids ‘internet literacy,’ how to watch a video and answer comprehension questions. Calling this ‘literacy,’ I believe, was a huge mistake.” –fifth grade teacher Adrian Neibauer

I’m considering a new habit at our house. Actually, it’s an old one. My idea is to read from a book, together, for a few minutes at the dinner table each night. Our two oldest will be out of the house next year, and while they’re away at school it will be just my husband and I with our youngest, who is 14. This might not be my greatest idea. Not only is he at the age where everything I do, including breathing, makes him deeply embarrassed, he also prefers being in motion to just about anything. He would rather be playing a sport or building something or jumping off something dangerous than to sit and read. With his mom and dad, of all things.

He is also the one I’m most worried about developing any kind of lifelong reading habit at a time when it feels crucial to try something—anything—to help him do so.

Our family used to read a lot together, many years ago when his brothers were first reading and he was just a toddler. We listened to books in the car, and we read like crazy before bed every night. Current circumstances—older kids with jobs, cars, sports, etc—has made that all but impossible. But could I bring it back, just briefly, for a few minutes a night? Something fun or interesting for him. Am I crazy? Probably.

But I’m beginning to think that in order to change the way the tide is moving—away from books and book-reading altogether—something more drastic must be done. Why aren’t more schools feeling the same sense of urgency? A new culture must be built, brick by brick, that values reading, and that can start with schools motivated to change. But to breed a culture of book-reading today is certainly swimming against the tide—a defiant, counter-cultural act.

You know the stats by now, and we’ve covered it here time and time again: all of us are reading less, much less. Across most developed countries, with a few notable exceptions, the OECD recently found decline and stagnation in adults’ literacy skills. (The US adult literacy score declined nearly 13 points from a decade ago.) Students, of course, are spending much less time reading for pleasure now than they did even a decade ago—according to a 2023 NAEP survey, about 35% of students said they liked to read in their free time in 1984; in 2023, that number was 14%. One in three of today’s students said they never read for fun.

Could some of this be connected to the kind of poor reading instruction that’s happened across the English-speaking world over the last few decades? Perhaps there’s a connection there.

But a recent piece in the Financial Times suggests something bigger’s going on, larger than instructional reading methods and data: that we are quickly becoming a post-literate society that spends more time with video than with text—most likely coming as a surprise to approximately zero readers of this newsletter.

“Technology has changed the way many of us consume information, away from longer, more complex pieces of writing, such as books and newspaper articles, to short social media posts and video clips,” writes reporter and columnist Sarah O’Connor, citing the OECD survey.

O’Connor goes on to describe “Twilight of the Books,” a 2007 New Yorker story by Caleb Crain, imagining what this post-literate culture looks and feels like. “In oral cultures, he wrote, cliché and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because ‘it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for.’ Does that sound familiar?” I can hear the deadpan grimness in O’Connor’s voice.

A companion piece in the same publication—this time by book critic Mia Levitin—called “Social media, brain rot and the slow death of reading,” refers to the Oxford University Press word of the year, brain rot, something, maybe not coincidentally, I heard my college student say over the holiday break, referring to friends who stay in their apartment bedrooms and play video games. Brain rot, Levitin writes, is both “The ‘low-quality, low-value content’ found online and the intellectual deterioration from its overconsumption. First recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden, this year’s uptick in usage is (ironically) attributed to references in TikTok videos.”

But it’s not the size and scope of the problem that I need to convince you of. The question is, what can we mere mortals do about it? As former high school English teacher Cafeteria Duty so memorably wrote in this newsletter back in November, the obstacles for teachers and schools to help students read more books, to develop it into a habit (and maybe, if we are lucky, an enjoyable one) are many, and complex. There are no easy answers.

But what if we just went looking for solutions anyway? It is the new year, after all; I’ve gotten lots of sleep and I’m ready to do battle.

What would increasing reading look like in real classrooms? As teachers have shared here before, there are many obstacles making it challenging. But there must be a path forward—here I’ve put some [possible/impossible] solutions into a few different buckets.