Literacy used to be a ladder to new worlds; now it feels like a forgotten muscle. We are losing the ability to truly read — to focus, to imagine — as our culture quietly leaves reading behind.

54% of adults have a literacy below a sixth-grade level, with 20% being below the fifth-grade level. While this article has a central focus on students, the gaps prevalent in these separate age groups aren’t mutually exclusive. The rates of low literacy in adults is directly correlated with educational outcomes, meaning many students are also reading below their grade level.

For a young person in the 21st century, high-level literacy is not merely the ability to decode words; it is the capacity to analyze, synthesize and critically evaluate complex information from diverse sources — skills essential for navigating college, career and a democracy saturated with misinformation. But with our current state of inadequate proficiency and cultivation, the results are an obvious consequence of this large culture shift.

Technology has been around for centuries, yet the last 50 years have seen the largest decline in reading performance, where one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low. Even prior to the pandemic, national reading scores have been decreasing since 2019.

Since the invention of the screen (ever so ominously stated), the books we used to be indebted to have instead been collecting dust on shelves, discarded for the next evolutionary product made to capture our attention. It brings forth the ironic question of how a generation with the most access to widespread information can be so lacking in academic prospects.

The stakes are higher than ever in 2025, as national assessment scores for high school seniors have plummeted to historic lows, signaling a crisis that jeopardizes the preparedness of the entire graduating class. But the comprehensive issue can be attributed to far more complex reasonings than just the internet.

In recent years, the way English Language Arts is taught in high school has changed, which is cyclical as both a cause and result of decreasing literacy rates. There have been multiple magnitudes of curriculum shifts, as we modify our educational methods from deep reading to digital skimming. Complex literary texts have fallen out of favor with students: no one has the interest or stamina to read novels like “Wuthering Heights” or “The Odyssey” as they did in previous decades.

There is a documented trend of reducing or eliminating assignments to read full-length books in advocacy for selected passages, poetry and articles. This is often a concession to shorter attention spans and the pressure to cover material for standardized tests.

“A big shift that I’ve seen is a lesser focus on longer texts and old classic novels, and more of a focus on shorter texts,” AP English teacher Kathryn Goff said. “There is also more of a focus on student choice in independent reading instead of teaching a text [for the whole class].”

Another conflict arises as research has shown that the complexity of high school textbooks (measured by Lexile scores) often plateaus, making texts for grades 9-12 shockingly similar to those for grades 7-8. This invisible gap means students are not being adequately challenged to reach the complexity level required for college-level reading.

While elementary schools often dedicate time for reading intervention, only about a third of high schools offer dedicated, scheduled time for reading support. This cut in sustained reading time is often caused by standardized testing pressures, making teachers prioritize content coverage and test-taking strategies over sustained silent reading (SSR) or deep, in-class reading.

While this time of learning and interpretation is being cut, the immersion in digital media is more common than ever, and has conditioned students’ brains for skimming and quick switching. Teachers may cut SSR time because students struggle to stay focused or view it as a “waste of time” due to a lack of perceived immediate measurable benefit.

“As things have been more digital, I have noticed more of a weakness in attention to detail in the ability to write cleanly,” Goff said. “As far as punctuation and spelling, I think that typing lends itself out of the nature of autocorrect and students have a harder time focusing for longer periods of time.”

The most severe high school reading failures often originate from a lack of foundational skills taught in the elementary and middle school grades. In a poll conducted with 36 Hebron students, 38.9% claimed they had a mostly positive reading experience in elementary school and middle school, with 27.8% stating it was neutral.

Despite this, studies show a large decline in literacy in the transition from middle school to high school, especially since this current age group, specifically seniors and juniors, experienced the pandemic during the more inconvenient time of changeover between educational levels.

32% of 12th graders scored below the basic level in reading, only a two-point increase from 2019. Many older, struggling readers lack core decoding skills, especially with complex, multisyllabic words. Their problems are often masked in high school where general comprehension is tested, but the root cause of is a foundational failure that was never addressed.

“Reading impacts so much – basic comprehension, grammar, creativity, the way students write and their knowledge about the world,” English teacher Samantha Craig said. “I think my challenge as a teacher is to help students read more deeply and write more thoughtfully in meaningful ways, which is not an easy task.”

Generally described as the “Mathew Effect,” gaps between struggling and capable readers widens dramatically as students move through school. Capable students read frequently, building rich vocabulary and background knowledge, while struggling students fall further behind.

This crisis in literacy is equally fueled by a seismic cultural shift occurring outside of school walls. The rise of omnipresent, highly stimulating digital media has managed to fundamentally rewire the youth’s brain’s relationship with text and focus. In this new environment, where the swipe is faster than the page turn, long-form reading is increasingly perceived as laborious rather than a source of enlightenment.

Factors ranging from the cognitive impact of constant notifications to the documented inferiority of digital reading compared to print have created a powerful opposition against the sustained, deep attention necessary for high-level comprehension.

Surveys show a massive generational shift away from books, magazines and newspapers. The percentage of 12th graders reported reading any of these mediums almost every day declined precipitously over the last few decades.

“Reading [can] get boring really fast, mostly because everyone has really short attention spans now,” National English Honors Society president Arjun Parthiban said. “Some people can’t even sit through a whole Youtube video”

Recent studies show a significant correlation between increased social media use in early adolescence and measurable declines in specific cognitive skills. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that adolescents who showed high-increasing social media use trajectories between ages nine and thirteen performed significantly worse on tests measuring oral reading, memory and vocabulary skills compared to non-users.

A leading theory explaining this correlation is the displacement hypothesis. Time spent engaging with social media displaces time that would otherwise be spent on cognitively beneficial activities like reading books, completing homework or even sleeping. This can also impact real world relationships with others, as the increase of online communication can displace the time spent with existing friends, thereby reducing the quality of these friendships.

More conflicts are caused by these platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, as they have been designed in order to actively train the brain to skim and switch focus, which is counterproductive to any type of real reading. It’s the sort of attentional fragmentation the creators of these apps were counting on, where long term usage has led to addiction and mental health issues.

“The rise of streaming services and social media has really impacted reading in general,” English teacher Kate Mayo said. “It seems like more people prefer to watch a video, especially very short videos, than to read a book for enjoyment.”

The constant flow of fast paced, short-form videos causes attentional disruption and reduces executive functioning, such as the brain’s ability to plan, focus and manage tasks. It is due to the constant availability of instant, high-reward content that makes the effort required for longer reading feel disproportionately arduous to most.

“We like simple; we like eye-catching; we like easy to understand, because it doesn’t require any work [from] us,” Goff said.

Studies consistently show that print reading leads to better comprehension and retention than digital reading, a phenomenon often called the screen inferiority effect. Multiple meta-analyses suggest that when students read the exact same material, those who read on paper consistently score higher on comprehension tests than those who read on screens. The difference is often more pronounced with informational texts than with narrative texts.

Another benefit is that print books provide spatial cues and physical feedback that help the brain create a mental map of the text. In contrast, digital reading often disrupts this mental mapping, which is essential for retention.

This waning of high school literacy is not a localized academic problem; it is a cascading crisis with devastating consequences that reach beyond the classroom, impacting the civic health of an entire generation. They cannot be understated nor can they be ignored, and many do not understand that we have just recently been seeing the outcomes.

When students cannot simply analyze a complex text, they are not only struggling within their education, but losing the essential cognitive tools needed to navigate modern life. This deficit translates directly into higher college failing rates, a crippling inability to discern truth from the deluge of online misinformation and a large decline in the quality of our media.

Poor literacy skills are equated to, and one of the greatest predictors of academic struggle in higher education, leading to remedial course requirements and delayed graduation. A significant percentage of first-year college students are placed into non-credit remedial courses, often around 30% to 50% community colleges, and higher in open-enrollment four-year institutes. These courses are designed to teach skills like basic comprehension that students should have mastered in high school. Students placed in remediation are significantly less likely to earn a degree. 

These lacking dexterities lead to even more issues in the future, acting as a fundamental barrier to economic and social mobility. Nearly all high-growth, high-wage jobs require skills like interpreting technical documents, writing detailed reports and synthesizing complex information—skills dependent on high-level literacy. Students with poor reading skills are largely locked out of the modern knowledge economy. A U.S. Department of Education study  found that adults scoring in the lowest literacy levels were far more likely to be unemployed or earn significantly lower wages than their highly literate counterparts.

The inability to deeply comprehend complex text also directly undermines a person’s ability to be an informed citizen and a participant in a democracy. In today’s digital landscape, misinformation is increasingly prevalent on many platforms, and it is becoming harder to decipher what is true or false.

Low literacy can prevent individuals from distinguishing between credible, nuanced journalism and biased or inaccurate content. Research by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) on students’ civic online reasoning skills showed alarming deficiencies, as they found that most students struggled to identify the source of news, differentiate between news and opinion or critically evaluate political arguments.

A poorly literate society is forced to rely on soundbites, headlines or trusted intermediaries, making individuals highly vulnerable to polarization and manipulation. We are less able to hold leaders accountable or participate meaningfully in debates about composite societal issues, such as climate policy and economic reform.

As consistently expressed throughout this article, people of high illiteracy will have faulty expressive, communicative, and comprehensive skills. It is no wonder media creators in 2025 are adjusting the complexity of their output to be more superficial. In order to maintain their market share, they must “dumb down” their material to match their general audience’s literacy level decline, leading to a decrease in cultural sophistication.

“When you see others writing, you’re learning how to think. And then you can choose to think in that way or not, and that’s the beautiful thing,” Goff said. “But unless you have the tools in your toolbox, you’re not going to be able to create better movies or art for anyone to watch in the future.”

Studies analyzing popular movies, TV scripts and song lyrics have found a tendency toward simpler vocabulary and less complex sentence structures compared to media from past decades. We are stuck in a feedback loop, as this simplification is an economic response to lower average reading and comprehension levels, and because the overall content is less advanced, it limits the intellectual challenge available to consumers.

Specific linguistic analyses of popular music have shown a clear trend of decreasing vocabulary size and thematic complexity in lyrics across genres since the 1980s. Not every artist has to be a Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, but the frequency of mediocrity that’s persisting in our music and other art forms is leading to limits in cultural discourse, reducing the audience for high-level art, literature and journalism.

This is ultimately lowering the ceiling of intellectual aspiration for our society. So no, you’re not crazy. Our art and media are genuinely worsening.

The last bit of irony I bring forth is that those needing to read this article, probably won’t.

And while this bitter paradox hangs heavy over the present reality, the truth remains that the responsibility to reverse the decline falls squarely on the shoulders of those who can and will read it.

This is why we must pivot from diagnosis to action, because, as stated, this decline in high school literacy is urgent, fueled by the interplay of systemic failures – from insufficient foundational instruction in early grades to the attention-fracturing dominance of social media. Confluence of curriculum changes and cultural pressures has created a generation ill equipped to handle the rational demands of college, career and critical citizenship.

Reversing this decline requires a coordinated effort to reframe reading as a fundamental skill for all. Whether prioritizing sustained, focused engagement with complex, long form print texts or making reading and writing instruction a responsibility shared by all subject teachers, we must make some sort of adjustment within our education to promote stronger literacy.

Crucially, students themselves are driving change. National English Honors Society (NEHS), for instance, are actively working to restore literacy culture.

“The purpose of NEHS is to promote literacy and reading everywhere,” Parthiban said. “This year we’re shifting more to using less and less AI in writing, because that’s been really bad with the ninth graders especially.”

Their initiatives include volunteering in elementary schools to close foundational gaps, creating a writing center in the high school freshman center to offer peer support and promoting the reading of banned books to spark engagement with challenging ideas.

While these student-led solutions offer an effective model for change, the true, lasting victory in this crisis will not be secured by small-scale efforts alone; the fate of the next generation’s critical thinking and informed citizenship rests not on a single policy change, but on a collective cultural shift that revalues the enduring power of reading and writing.

The choice is clear: We can continue to accept our downfall of media and our comprehension of the world, or we can choose to actively work towards the path of a more literate, critically engaged future.