Academia: The Evolving Case For Reading

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Throughout my career, I’ve consistently argued that when we want students to do something, we can’t just say “it’s a rule” and rely on enforcement. If you don’t want students to plagiarize, you have to do more than just explain clearly what plagiarism is and what the consequences will be. You have to discuss why plagiarism is a problem, and in a way that opens that up as a question rather than just a demand. Is it bad? There are times where what we call plagiarism was normalized, and there have been real-world circumstances where some people get away with plagiarism with few or no consequences. If I acknowledge that, I think I have a chance to explain more clearly why it’s not allowed in my college and not wanted in the world we’re trying to shape.

That’s the heart of persuasive teaching: you talk about the world as it is and has been, you lay out what your goals and hopes are, you treat your students as people with minds of their own, and you aim at cultivating real motivations to do the right thing rather than commandments that lose all authority the moment you’re not there patrolling around, looking for malefactors.

Are we at such a moment when it comes to reading challenging texts, both in length and substantive difficulty? Yes.

Because I believe in skepticism in the face of sustained public panics, there are a lot of things about the current furor over reading that I am willing to question. I am not sure that most of us used to read as closely or as well as many of the older people complaining about this crisis seem to believe. I’m quite sure that some of the individuals sounding the alarm right now have no love for reading now and never did, any more than they actually care about educational standards or rigorous grading. In higher education, I think many faculty assigned a ridiculously excessive amount of reading forty years or so ago and rewarded students who were good at performing having done the reading rather than students who made a real effort to do so. I am not sure that reading a great deal, or reading any particular kind of texts (such as fiction), makes people more moral, more wise or even in sometimes more knowledgeable. I think we are still reading a huge amount of text on a daily basis, and I’m not always sure that the differences between text on electronic devices and text in a printed book are as significant or consequential as many people wish they were. (Among things that I don’t think people read very closely are the details on effect size in referencing those favored studies of digital media and printed media, or note-taking on laptops versus note-taking on paper.)

But plainly there is a substantive change happening to reading, especially reading that involves longer texts and more intensive engagement with texts. The effects of that change are both spread out across our society and more intensely evident in people under the age of 25. Even the belief that there is a crisis is intensifying the crisis, as people expect less ability and willingness to read from others, especially in classrooms, and pre-emptively forgive themselves for not reading what they probably ought to read. Young people almost can’t help but accept themselves as non-readers considering how often they are told by everyone else that they are.

I don’t think it’s a purely technical change, e.g, just an inattention to early literacy that has led to the later loss of a concrete skill, or the displacement of reading by some other skills or activities. There’s something deeper going on that is correlated with but not solely caused by digital technologies. There may even be a sort of epiphenomenal side effect of philosophical shifts that weren’t centrally intended to make an impact on reading.

For example, the shift away from thinking about authors as coherent, masterful sovereign individuals who minds were the origin of and explanation for what they wrote—the so-called “death of the author” argument that saw texts as complex outcomes of material and cultural infrastructures of writing and reading, that re-situated interpretative authority in readers and audiences, that saw “the author” as a story we told to nail down property rights in creative work. All of it true in its way, and part of a wider abandonment of the modernist understanding of selfhood, but maybe that had a downstream effect on reading as an act.

I’ve had friends make persuasive arguments against holding up “reading for pleasure” or “loving literature” as the antagonistic opposite of reading for purpose, as political and intellectual labor, as the job of scholarship, but it might be that we overdid an instrumental understanding of what reading is and of what comes of and through reading. I was struck recently by a thread on Reddit where the original poster, almost certainly just looking to get a rise out of everybody, asked why anybody still bothers to read long-form nonfiction. Since it’s just information, he said, why can’t we just boil down all nonfiction to its informational core and communicate that instead? However exaggerated or deliberately provocative that question was, there was some emotional truth to it, such that we have accidentally (or deliberately) created a sense that text is just communicative and that anything that goes beyond the necessary minimum of communication is TL DR.

It’s important to explore what has happened without immediately looking for a single culprit, without narrowing right away to a single-cause diagnosis. If you want reading to thrive, you have to understand all of what might be involved in its present diminishment, understand that as a researcher ought to—with curiosity, with uncertainty, with skepticism.

For my part, however, if I would like to see reading resurface to some extent even in the absence of a full understanding of how we got to this point, I have to start where I normally would, trying to make the case for why reading closely, reading deeply, and reading at length should be something students want to do as well as expect to be required to do. Considering that I am in fact assigning whole books in both of my fall classes, this is not an abstraction. I will be saying some of these things to my students in a little over six weeks.

The central message in all of my appeals is that if you don’t read, you will usually struggle to think. You won’t be able to form your own ideas, evaluate the information you have and guess at the information others might be holding, think about different and better ways to do things, and so on—all of what I think a “high agency” person in any workplace has to be able to do well and what human beings often want to do in their everyday lives. There may be some other roads to travel towards “thinking well” that rest in embodied experience, in emotion and intuition, in conversation and movement, but reading is at least one of the best structured methods for developing and focusing the ability to think. In particular, it opens a vast archive of the dead as well as a world of living people who are somewhere else than where you happen to be. There is more in reading than can be found in any other cultural form or lived experience. The odds of thinking well, thinking distinctively, thinking with value, go way up for reading. So maybe, yes, if we were the readers we believe ourselves to have been fifty years ago, the world was potentially better off because of reading—though maybe that also means we squandered our opportunities despite our advantages.

As a first stab at that effort, here’s where I’d start in trying to sermonize about the ongoing necessity of reading. I’d like to hear if there are appeals you would make instead or in addition.

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That meaning is not reducible, semantics are not extractable, that a text is not just information. That even simple texts mean differently each time you read them, and that exploring meaning through interpretation is how information becomes knowledge. A summary or extraction kills the lively potential of a text.

That you can’t challenge or disagree with an offered reading of a text without being able to read it yourself. That to just rely on summaries or received understandings, many of them without provenance in the age of generative AI, is to be helpless, is to surrender agency, is to lose thought itself. You can only recite and repeat.

That you don’t know how a text knows what it knows or why it says what it says without reading it and thus you don’t know whether to trust in it or rely on it. Method and purpose are only revealed through reading for yourself: most summaries remove method and purpose in the process of making a text into mere information.

That a thinking reader can find contradictions, oddities, digressions, confessions in a text that are smoothed out or overlooked by summaries. That a longer text contains more multitudes in this sense by virtue of its length. That a longer text or a more difficult one is generative, that a reader can form a relationship to that text which is living and rewewable. That a thinking reader thus can find a new text inside of an old one—a different summary, a different way of adding up what is going on. Or a side point that can be made to bloom into an entirely different implied text if attention is paid.

That a thinking reader can use a text like breadcrumbs in a maze, as a way to find the texts that came before, to gauge the texts that were missed or avoided, to think towards what to say next. That reading is necessary in order to think towards the next thing you need to understand or know, and to do that thinking on your own.

Image credit: British Museum Original Reading Room, By Bobulous - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95780567