Are we becoming a post-literate society? - The Sunday Story
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When an Oxbridge professor says his students are “functionally illiterate”, you know something is wrong. With reading levels in freefall and screentime rocketing, is the era of mass literacy over? In his wildly successful blog, James Marriot argues that three centuries after the reading revolution ignited democracy and modern science, we are now witnessing its great undoing. Where once we spent hours poring over books, contemplating complicated theories and ideas, we now scroll emotive, short form content. What effect is this major shift having on our brains? And are we are really at the dawn of the post-literate society?
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Guest: James Marriott, Times columnist.
Host: Luke Jones.
Producer: Dave Creasey.
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Photo: Chris McAndrew for The Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is The Story. |
| 0:05.8 | I'm Luke Jones, and this is Chapter 1 of Bleak House. |
| 0:14.2 | London, Micklemish term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. |
| 0:19.4 | Implacable November weather. |
| 0:21.2 | As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. |
| 0:25.6 | And it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus 40 feet long or so, |
| 0:29.4 | waddling like an elephantine lizard up Hoban hill. |
| 0:32.4 | Our columnist James Marriott is worried about reading. |
| 0:36.7 | Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot, |
| 0:41.3 | in it as big as full-grown snowflakes gone into morning one might imagine for the death of the sun. |
| 0:51.3 | A recent study in the US had English literature students at two universities read this first passage from Bleak House. |
| 1:02.5 | Dogs undistinguishable in Maya. Horses scarcely better. Splash to their very blinkers. |
| 1:08.3 | Most didn't understand it. |
| 1:11.8 | Did you have any look? |
| 1:15.1 | Maybe you're part of this growing trend of illiteracy that's got James so worried. |
| 1:17.2 | It's a funny argument to make |
| 1:18.5 | because it's the kind of thing |
| 1:19.5 | that you feel columnists have always said. |
| 1:21.7 | Everyone's getting stupider. |
| 1:22.9 | No one's reading anymore. |
| 1:24.3 | The interesting thing is the evidence |
| 1:25.8 | this is actually happening |
... |
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