Kenneth Glad
The ability to handle difficult material could become increasingly important in school, work and dealings with public institutions. Daily media habits may leave fewer people prepared to do it.
Reading is becoming less evenly distributed across the United States.
The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that only 48.5 percent of American adults had read at least one printed or electronic book during the previous year. That was 6.1 percentage points below the result recorded in 2012.
Fiction attracted an even smaller audience. Only 37.6 percent said they had read a novel or short story, the lowest share in the survey’s history. Including audiobooks brought total engagement with books to about 52 percent.
The decline is only part of the story. A relatively small audience now accounts for much of the reading that still takes place. Data reported by The Atlantic indicates that one fifth of adults were responsible for more than four fifths of the books read in the previous year.
Leah Price, a Rutgers University historian specializing in reading culture, describes the activity as “a kind of niche hobby.”
That concentration has consequences beyond publishing. Many important parts of modern life still arrive in long, complicated documents: Examination material, employment agreements, insurance conditions, tax instructions and government decisions.
The ability to understand those documents can save time, prevent mistakes and reduce reliance on someone else’s interpretation.
Unequal skills emerge at school
The gap is already visible among students.
The average reading score for American high-school seniors fell by three points between 2019 and 2024. It was ten points lower than in 1992. In the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, 35 percent performed at or above NAEP Proficient, while 32 percent scored below NAEP Basic.
NAEP uses its own achievement categories. Its Proficient standard should not be confused with the more familiar idea of performing at grade level. Students reaching that benchmark are generally expected to connect information across a text, interpret an author’s choices and draw complicated conclusions.
Performance, confidence and reported classroom experience were closely associated. Among students at or above the 75th percentile, 91 percent expressed strong confidence in their reading. The figure dropped to 43 percent for those below the 25th percentile. Higher performers were also more likely to report that teachers frequently asked them to assess evidence in argumentative material.
Benjamin Powers, director of the Haskins Global Literacy Hub at Yale University and the University of Connecticut, gave a more concrete description of the problem. He told The Atlantic that some pupils could retrieve information while struggling with “inference, synthesis, or holding ideas in mind across longer texts.”
Those abilities are built through repetition. A student who regularly finishes demanding material encounters unfamiliar vocabulary, unusual sentence structures and new subject matter. The next assignment begins with a larger store of knowledge.
Less practice can make the same work feel increasingly remote.
A pupil may be able to search for every unknown word and still fail to understand how the pieces fit together. The information is present. The difficulty lies in organizing it.
Long-form reading occupies little time
Americans continue to read messages, captions, search results and workplace correspondence throughout the day. Most of those encounters are brief.
In 2024, people aged 15 and older spent an average of about 17 minutes a day reading for personal interest, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The difference between age groups was striking. Adults aged 20 to 24 averaged eight minutes. Those aged 75 and above spent 46 minutes.
Digital devices can carry an entire library, so the screen itself is not the only issue. The same phone that displays a novel also delivers alerts, videos, conversations and recommendations selected to hold the user’s attention.
Several studies discussed by The Atlantic found lower comprehension under particular digital-reading conditions than on paper. Scrolling, links and notifications were identified as possible factors because they repeatedly offer readers somewhere else to go.
Long documents remain common in professional settings. Consider an employee reviewing a compliance manual. The first page may explain the general rule, while an exception appears much later. A summary can capture the main instruction and miss the clause that matters most.
The same problem applies to insurance policies, procurement agreements and workplace benefits.
People who can work through original documents are less likely to depend entirely on abbreviated versions prepared by colleagues, software or outside advisers.
That independence has practical value.
Institutions remain difficult to read
Public agencies have not adopted the communication style of social media.
Tax rules, benefit requirements, court judgments and proposed laws often use specialized vocabulary and long sentences. Even experienced readers can find them tiring. For someone with limited practice, the barrier is far higher.
Others depend on intermediaries.
A journalist may explain a ruling. A campaign group may summarize legislation. An online creator may describe a change in welfare rules, while a chatbot may turn official guidance into a short list of instructions.
Any of those explanations might be helpful. None is neutral by default. Every summary involves decisions about what to include, what to leave out and which details deserve emphasis.
Readers able to return to the original document can check those decisions. They can see whether an exception was omitted, whether the source supports a dramatic headline or whether a quoted sentence was separated from an important qualification.
That matters in an online environment where the shortest version often travels furthest.
Printed information has never guaranteed honesty. Newspapers have published propaganda, exaggeration and partisan attacks throughout their history. Reading skill offers a narrower safeguard: The chance to examine evidence without relying completely on the person presenting it.
The burden is uneven. Education, free time, language proficiency and previous knowledge all influence whether someone can work through a government document with confidence.
In that sense, reading ability can affect a person’s relationship with an institution. One citizen arrives prepared to question its interpretation. Another must accept an explanation from someone else before deciding what to do.
AI rewards people who can check it
Generative artificial intelligence can make complicated writing easier to approach. It can define a technical term, reorganize an unclear passage or produce a brief account of a lengthy report.
It can also make misunderstandings harder to notice.
A randomized trial led by André Barcaui of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro recruited 120 undergraduates to study concepts related to artificial intelligence. One group used ChatGPT, while another studied with traditional materials.
Among the participants who completed an unannounced test 45 days later, the ChatGPT-assisted group answered 57.5 percent of the questions correctly. The traditional-study group scored 68.5 percent.
The study does not settle the wider debate over AI and education. Results will depend heavily on how the technology is used. Asking for an explanation, testing an argument and comparing sources are different activities from requesting a finished answer.
The experiment does point toward a familiar risk. Smooth output can create the impression that learning has occurred even when little knowledge remains.
People with strong comprehension are better placed to supervise the technology. They can compare a generated summary with the source, question a suspicious claim and notice a missing condition.
Other users may receive a faster answer while becoming more dependent on a system they cannot reliably assess.
AI may therefore raise the value of serious reading. The crucial skill will be knowing when a fluent response is incomplete, inaccurate or simply wrong.
The emerging divide is easy to describe. Some people will be able to examine the documents shaping their education, employment and legal rights. Others will encounter those documents mainly through explanations created by institutions, commentators or machines.
Sources: National Endowment for the Arts, National Center for Education Statistics, United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Atlantic, Science Direct
