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The Reading Panic
All the best people are panicking about declining reading and reading skills. So says The Atlantic.
Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales[.]
And kids are using AI:
A student told [his teacher] he used Chat GPT to “translate” Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange from “Old English” to easier language.
And my pal Jeffrey A Tucker agrees with The Atlantic.
Hardly anyone is reading real books anymore. We are not illiterate. We are postliterate.
Here are some more nuggets from The Atlantic article:
Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments.
The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.
In the 19th century, composing a letter was an art form.
Print culture helped political revolution:
“The ancient Roman and Greek Orators could only speak to the Number of Citizens capable of being assembled within the Reach of Their Voice,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1782. “Now by the Press we can speak to Nations; and good Books & well written Pamphlets have great and general Influence.”
But I wonder. I’d say that anyone writing in a magazine or a newspaper has an investment in their developed literacy skills. So of course they think it’s important. And yet 97.2% of writers and scholars are just regurgitating received wisdom. Anyone that diverges from received wisdom, such as World War II and the Holocaust, gets punished.
And anyone that steps outside the sacred transgender narrative finds that they’ll never work in this town again.
I have spent a good part of my life trying to step outside conventional wisdom to consume and write stuff that the ruling educated class hates. I did it because I am a snob and wanted to be better than the average conventional wisdom consumer.
Today, I go for my media advice to Martin Gurri and his The Revolt of the Public. The point of his five wave theory of media, from writing to alphabet to printing to mass media to internet, I think, is that each stage allowed a much bigger audience for people with ideas.
But all along, media was a one-way process, until the internet. And when it came to mass media, that one-way process became a hurricane of ruling-class propaganda. I doubt if we could have had the two world wars without mass media.
But the fifth wave, the world of the internet and now AI has lowered the barriers to entry into the public square, both for creators and consumers.
For the sophisticated, this seems to be a huge devaluation of the public square.
[T]he average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media. For much of that time, it appears, they are watching videos, often at 2x speed.
Here’s an idea. Back in the day, the crucial skill of humans in sharing knowledge and information was conversation. But conversation is one-on-one. The point of writing and printing and mass media was to convert one-on-one to one-to-many. Each wave obviously increased the reach of a man and an idea by an order of magnitude.
The point of internet media and podcast and social media is that you don’t have to be a professional writer or mass-media expert to communicate. Anyone can speak into your smartphone and send a video out to the world. Now media is many-to-many.
Is 97.2% of internet and social media rubbish? Of course. But then so was mass media.
Does someone asking a question of AI obtain the depth of knowledge and understanding that a study of books would yield? No. But my experience of getting information from AI is that it is much better than Wikipedia, and much faster and more reliable than reading books. And I use it to check my understanding against conventional wisdom.
Back in the day, if you wanted to acquire knowledge you had to develop reading and writing and analysis skills. Otherwise you learned nothing. Today, AI takes care of those skills.
Think about the skilled trades: carpentry, metal-working, plowing. Driving a wagon and a 20-mule team up a mountain pass. Writing computer code by hand. All tremendously difficult skills that require enormous effort to acquire. A few people continue to learn those skills because of the satisfaction of acquiring them, and a sense of connection with the past. But the world has moved on.
The fact is that the cost of broadcasting and exchanging knowledge has been staggeringly reduced by the internet and now the AI age. To people with the old skills of reading and writing difficult books it seems like the end of the world. No doubt there are a lot of things that we will lose.
But the internet and AI have increased the bandwidth of knowledge and cultural exchange enormously. And that, I believe, is a good and beneficial thing.
But kids that don’t know nursery rhymes and fairy tales? That, I agree, is a problem.
| Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:30:29 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Once you believe your education makes you superior to others, then your education has failed you.
There is no politics without an enemy — Curtis Yarvin
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Government is Protection Against Enemies
