As everyone is well aware, our country is facing a literacy crisis, some of it surely fueled by the school shutdowns during Covid. Nevertheless, both the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress report (commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card) and the Manhattan Institute’s thorough analysis of that report indicate that the decline in literacy predates the pandemic. The 2024 NAEP reading proficiency numbers are startling: only 31% of 4th-graders; 30% of 8th-graders; and 35% of 12th-graders proved proficient readers. Both the NAEP and the Manhattan Institute indicate that the crisis is the latest in a long decline beginning in the 1990s with some respite in the early 2000s and then cratering after the early to mid-2010s. We would be remiss not to note that the last date corresponds to the wave of technology and digital devices overwhelming our students in school and out.
Finally, professors at the country’s most prestigious universities candidly confess that their students, by and large, cannot competently read entire novels or long-form articles. Many students cannot concentrate long enough to follow the full development of characters or the complexity of an argument. They lack attentiveness and endurance when confronting a complete text. As a result, professors have resorted to assigning excerpts rather than entire works. This robs the students of the full development and trajectory of a narrative or an argument and reduces education to fragments of ideas and bits and pieces of knowledge.
These are dispiriting statistics and anecdotes for all of us, especially for those leading primary and secondary schools that assign rich and complicated imaginative and expository literature.
To make matters even worse and because students struggle to read, many frustrated teachers and professors have turned to encouraging their students to use audiobooks rather than reading the text independently. Many of these works are available on Audible and Spotify in highly adapted and even reduced versions, which means the students may not even be hearing the full text. This is a serious pedagogical mistake, and it only further cultivates a nonreading culture.
When I first began teaching, our students made a firm commitment not to consult commentaries of any kind when studying great works of literature. It was even a written policy in our student handbook. Why? Because reading commentaries short-circuits the acquisition of the intellectual skills associated with reading and interpreting the words on the page. Furthermore, we were training students in what constitutes a legitimate and thoughtful interpretation of a passage. Not all interpretations are, in fact, equal. Most of the important discussions in a humane letters seminar, for example, hover around this precise issue: Is this a sound interpretation of that passage? If not, what does our colleague have wrong? Reading commentaries undermines the rigorous, independent thinking requisite for this kind of argument by artificially settling complex reading questions and distracting students from the important task of engaging a particular text.
Listening to audiobooks is very much like reading commentaries, except it is even lazier. The audiobook reader has already made the critically important interpretive decisions for the listener, thus preempting the most important objective of any humanities course: that is, to train students in careful, close, interpretative reading skills. The students do not actually have to read at all when using audiobooks. They just have to listen, and listening is not the same as reading. Even listening with the book in front of one’s eyes is an intensely passive exercise, demanding little of the reader. High school teachers on the ground confess that the majority of their students are employing audiobooks. As a result, the students have difficulty locating key passages in the text; understanding important developments in plot, character, and the use of words; and recognizing the beauty and elegance of the writing. These are all critical habits of mind a humanities teacher wishes to impart.
What the students need to learn is how to actively and rigorously engage with the written word and puzzle over its meaning. That can only be accomplished by picking up a physical book and reading, marking, and interrogating it. The latter means that the student is asking questions of the line of argument or the behavior of a character. In the case of an expository argument, the student is retracing the logic of the argument in the movement of his own mind. He is stopping to reread the last sentence and the one before it and even the one before that, laboring to see how one thought leads to another. He is also puzzling through fundamental premises. For instance: What is Aristotle saying in the opening line of his Nicomachean Ethics when he says that “every action and choice seem to aim at some good; the good, therefore, has been well defined as that at which all things aim.” Was Alexander’s slaughter of the innocents aimed at the good? What could Aristotle possibly mean?
In the case of imaginative literature, the student is recreating the movements and thoughts of the characters, puzzling over their motivations. Take, for instance, Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady: What does Isabel notice in the silence between Osmond and Madame Merle in the parlor? What is happening between Osmond and Merle? What has Isabel discovered? The student may even be responding to this moment with shock, disbelief, and sudden comprehension of the dangers Isabel faces. Everything about Isabel’s prior choices is thrown into deep relief in light of the present moment. If the student has been reading deeply and carefully, he will have already experienced some uneasiness about that relationship, but he will not have been able to put his finger on the cause of that uneasiness until now.
In Book IX of the Iliad, three ambassadors come to Achilleus to beg for his return to battle. They bring news that Agamemnon is willing to satisfy Achilleus’ demands and much more in order to make peace. Agamemnon’s gifts are so lavish that Nestor remarks, “none could scorn any longer these gifts you offer.” When the ambassadors approach Achilleus, Odysseus makes a compelling case for the great warrior’s return, but Achilleus responds with the following words: “For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who / hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.” The reader pulls up short here. Who is Achilleus referring to? Is Odysseus dissembling? Is Agamemnon? The student may want to return to the speech Agamemnon gave at the assembly at lines 115-161, detailing his terms for peace. Did Odysseus corrupt Agamemnon’s words? Did he leave something out? What irritates Achilleus?
Because the student is managing the speed of his reading, he has the leisure to stop and notice the whimsy and poignancy of a particular line. Take, for instance, Ruby Turpin’s revelatory moment in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”: “Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs.” What mystery could a self-confessed obese, middle-aged woman with a hardy streak of bigoted tendencies possibly see at the bottom of a pig parlor?
Puzzling over a passage, worrying over it, teasing out its implications, relishing its beauty, craft, and humor—these are the activities of a thoughtful, active mind at work when reading an important piece of literature. Reading is discovering a word that delights the mind or a logical move that brings pleasure and new understanding.
Here is some advice: Do not short circuit all of this crucial activity by putting audiobooks in front of your students. Do not undermine the arrival of that glorious moment when a student independently puts the pieces together to see what is going on. Do discuss with colleagues how to train younger students to proficient reading so that when these great works are put before them, they are ready to read and explore them.
Reading is about more than seeing words on the page or even reading those words. It is the student’s interpretation and discovery of meaning that makes that student a reader.
Jeannette DeCelles-Zwerneman serves as Director of Instruction and a Master Teacher at Cana Academy. Her thirty published works include Teaching Fiction From the Inside Out; A Lively Kind of Learning: Mastering the Seminar Method, and twenty-eight other resources on teaching imaginative and expository literature and writing.