Everybody can read but nobody does

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For many of us, reading involves mostly scrolling through content on our phones rather than picking up a book. James Marriott writes for The Times of London, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how high literacy rates have ushered in human rights and leaps in scientific understanding – and what happens to a society that stops thinking deeply and focuses on the doomscroll. His essay “The dawn of the post-literate society” was published in his Cultural Capital Substack.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	If you define literacy as the ability to read, write, listen, and speak well enough to effectively communicate and function in society, the National Literacy Institute estimates about one in five U.S.
0:22.6	adults can't do this.
0:24.6	That's a real problem for this country, but we know it could be fixed with greater access to education,
0:29.6	especially for people who are not fluent in English.
0:32.6	What we really don't know how to solve, the reality that many people who can read and write perfectly well
0:38.3	are increasingly choosing not to bother engaging with long-form text. From KERA in Dallas,
0:45.1	this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. The percentage of Americans who say they read for pleasure has
0:50.5	plummeted 40% just since 2005, and we've all experienced the ways that easy to absorb content delivered by our digital devices can pull focus from more demanding, sustained reading of complex materials.
1:03.0	And my guest worries that this is not just a matter for independent bookstores and libraries to fret over,
1:09.0	but something that could threaten
1:11.3	the enormous progress human society has made since the dawn of the reading revolution
1:16.5	in the 18th century. James Marriott is a writer at the Times of London. His essay, The Dawn
1:22.4	of the Post-Literate Society, can be found at the Cultural Capital capital substack. James, welcome to think.
1:28.7	Thank you very much for having me. For reading habits to decline the way they have, of course,
1:34.3	we need to have reached their zenith at some point in our past. Why did literacy rates start to
1:39.9	climb so quickly in the 18th century? It's a really interesting question. And there's probably not a
1:45.5	particularly straightforward answer to it. I guess the proximate causes of what we sometimes call
1:49.9	the Reading Revolution were an expansion of education, more people being taught to read in the 18th
1:54.5	century than before by quite in quite significant numbers. And also books became cheap enough
1:59.8	that ordinary people could afford them for the first time.
2:02.8	Books were obviously still expensive, but there were other methods by which people could read
2:05.9	books.
	...

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