The End of Reading Is Here

The End of Reading Never Began

What “The End of Reading Is Here” gets wrong about literacy, intellectual authority, and American “decline”

“The End of Reading Is Here” - The Ringer

There’s no doubt that reading is in decline. But what is that decline doing to the way we think? Derek talks with The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch about why Americans are reading fewer books than ever and struggling more with complex texts and what that means for education, work, politics, and culture.

The dawn of the post-literate society

And the end of civilisation

This is Not the End of Reading. It's the End of Modernism.

Why academics and journalists are confusing Modernism with reading itself.

Childhood And Education #17: Is Our Children Reading

Reading is the most fundamental thing in education.

Reading Wars

Read online or download for free Reading Wars explores heated, even murderous, political struggles over who gets to read and what they get to read. Those conflicts, once again in the news, stretch back centuries. In this book, Don Herzog examines the history and politics of anxieties about readers and reading, spanning both the United States and Britain, from the 1500s right up to contemporary battles over banning library books and freedom of speech. In these pages, Herzog deftly interweaves episodes from Reformation England, when first Catholics and then Protestants cracked down on unsupervised Bible-reading, with the deadly campaigns in pre-Civil War America to keep black people – both free and enslaved – illiterate. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, he reconstructs arguments insisting that ordinary men and women could not be trusted to read what they liked – indeed, that some of them ought not read at all. And he charts struggles to promote literacy. Herzog argues that at stake in these battles is whether some people – those banned from reading – are perceived as not fully human, or lesser persons than others. The radical campaign to let more or less everyone read more or less everything is ultimately, therefore, a campaign for equality. Click here to read praise for Reading Wars "In characteristically engaging and straight-forward language Don Herzog explores the debates past and present, largely in Britain and America, about whether or not to suppress reading. By taking seriously the arguments for suppressing or restricting books and their readers, Herzog suggests that those arguments turn on the claim that for some people reading is dangerous. This assumption, Herzog compellingly argues, ignores the fact that literacy is largely a social activity. In Reading Wars, Herzog develops a powerful liberal argument for literacy and reading. An argument, Herzog shows, that has incompletely triumphed." — Steve Pincus, Thomas Donnelly Professor of History, University of Chicago "Knowledge is power - which is why efforts to acquire knowledge through reading have been outlawed, suppressed through violence, and remain targets today. Don Herzog's Reading Wars tells the astonishing history behind the wars on reading in a readable, clever style, underscoring the stakes of many of the current fights over censorship and book bans." — Leah Litman, cohost of the podcast Strict Scrutiny and New York Times bestselling author of Lawless "A rich yet accessible introduction to the many ways in which society has attempted to restrict reading materials throughout British and United States history. Equal parts illuminating and horrifying, it lays the groundwork for the 21st century’s own shameful dabbles with censorship through its careful consideration of the key concerns and prejudices that structure each generation’s literacy battles." — Alison Hicks, Associate Professor in Library and Information Studies, UCL "Political theory, historical sense, worrisome texts, unheralded documents, and great storytelling join forces in Herzog’s virtuoso investigation of the brutal fighting over who gets to learn to read (and what) in early and late modern America and Britain. The bloodshed may have lessened, but we are still fighting, and Herzog shows the deeper stakes involved in reading’s relation to equality and personhood." — Mary G Dietz, John Evans Professor Emerita of Political Theory, Northwestern University , Reading Wars explores heated, even murderous, political struggles over who gets to read and what they get to read. Don Herzog examines the history and politics of anxieties about readers and reading, spanning the United States and Britain, from the 1500s right up to contemporary battles over banning library books and freedom of speech.

Opinion | My Students Can’t Read

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us

A reflection on the reading life. What formed it, what threatens it, and what remains.

Academia: The Evolving Case For Reading

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays

Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time

Academia: What Was "Digital Literacy"?

Short Shelf Lives Make For Bad Curricular Planning

The Great Reckoning - The Ideas Letter

The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about…

The Great Reckoning - The Ideas Letter

The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about…

Andrew Tate Doesn’t Get the Point of Books

The erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas.