If you teach, especially in the liberal arts, someone has probably already sent it to you. Rose Horowitch’s cover story in The Atlantic argues that America is not becoming illiterate but postliterate—that people still decode words perfectly well while losing the higher-order capabilities of comprehension and synthesis.
We strongly recommend the article. It’s the most useful thing published on this subject in some time, and the numbers in it are worse than you’re expecting.
The End of Reading Is Here — Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic, August 2026
Follow-up Are we living through the end of reading? — Horowitch interviewed on NPR, seven minutes, no paywall, transcript available.
We think her diagnosis is right. We disagree about what follows from it.
The part that isn’t about reading
The study of English majors attempting the opening of Bleak House is the detail worth sitting with. Not because those students couldn’t read—every one of them could decode every word on the page. What failed was inference, contextual reasoning, and the willingness (attention? interest?) to notice their own confusion and do something about it.
That’s not a story about literacy. It is a story about a set of skills nobody taught them, being required of them anyway.
An administrator quoted in the piece describes students who now regard assigned reading as an inefficient way to receive information—as though a professor requiring a book is deliberately making things harder than they need to be. That belief is perfectly rational if reading has only ever been a delivery mechanism to you. After all, why not a picture or short-form video? Aren’t they worth thousands of words? And entertaining?
That idea becomes absurd the moment reading is something you know how to do.
Where we part company
The article’s register is elegiac. Literacy was a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages; the darkness is gathering; something is ending.
If comprehension were a cultural inheritance—something a society either holds onto or loses—that would be exactly the right note. But it isn’t an inheritance.
It’s a set of learnable performances: previewing a text for its structure before reading a word of it, separating what the author established from what you inferred, noticing the precise sentence where your understanding broke, forming the question that would repair it, and building meaning across a long argument instead of harvesting facts out of it.
Those are learning skills. They can be named, modeled, practiced, assessed, and improved—at any age, in any discipline, including with students who arrive at your door without any of them.
Which is why the standard institutional response fails so reliably. Assign more pages. Add a reading quiz. Put the readings on the exam. But volume was never the variable: a student who has’nt been taught to read analytically will read three hundred pages exactly as unproductively as thirty, and will conclude, with proof based on experience, that reading doesn’t work.
The postliterate age Horowitch describes is real and arriving. What we reject is the idea that it is weather rather than a design problem.
What we can offer
Asked on NPR whether there are fixes, Horowitch is honest: She points to real bright spots: cellphone bans in two dozen states, a Dallas district that saw 200,000 more library books checked out in a single year after its ban, and teachers pushing back against excerpt-based curricula. But then she concedes that a wholesale fix would have to happen at a much larger level.
She’s right that the trend is larger than any of us. An instructor holding a syllabus in August can’t possibly act on a civilizational scale. What they CAN do is act on the scale of one course. And that is enough to matter.
Pacific Crest has spent decades on this specific gap. The Reading Methodology makes the process of analytical reading explicit and repeatable, so it can be taught rather than assumed. Reading Logs turn reading from private intake into a documented and concrete performance that a student can assess and an instructor can actually respond to. Both sit inside the Learning to Learn framework, alongside the other skills that reading quietly depends on.
If students are arriving unable to do something we have always assumed they could already do, the answer is not to assign more of it. None of this requires changing what you teach. It simply requires treating reading as a performance to be developed rather than a prerequisite to be assumed.
We’re pleased to offer a Reading Log and the Reading Methodology, both pdf and free.
There is also an online version of the Reading Log, browser-based, with nothing to install. Students work the steps as a guided sequence and then export everything they’ve written—every prompt and every response—as a document to keep, print, or hand in.
It does one thing the paper version can’t. Students enter their learning objectives at the start, and the log brings each one back at the end to be assessed against. On paper, Step 12 is a blank box and most students never look back at what they wrote in Step 2 unless specifically prompted. Here the loop closes itself.
One thing worth telling your students: it needs to be finished in a single session. Responses live in the browser tab, so the log should be opened when they sit down to read and exported before they close it. That fits how the log is meant to work anyway…kind of like a literacy sandwich: purpose and objectives before, assessment after, with one reading in between.
We’re running the online Reading Log for the next 60 days to find out whether it earns a permanent place. If you try it with a class, tell us how it went. That’s the only way we’ll know!
