‘A ticking time bomb’: How Australia’s reading slump is making us stupid

Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Books no longer get the respect they deserve. There, I’ve said it. We’re living through the greatest information revolution in human history, yet we’re daily drowning in a deluge of online misinformation and disinformation. It’s fuelling a dunderheaded doubt in vaccination, the reality of climate change, the value of democracy and truth itself. In the US, it’s ripping the country apart. But one of the online revolution’s biggest casualties – and one far less talked about – has been book culture and longform reading. While it may not rate up there with global warming and the decline of the West, mediocre literacy standards and falls in the quality of our reading habits have many experts worried. “This is a ticking time bomb: if we don’t begin to turn this around now, we’re going to have significant social and economic effects in 10 to 20 years’ time,” warns Anna Burkey, head of Australia Reads, a collaboration of book industry bodies established five years ago to combat reading decline. Although few Australians are totally illiterate, a staggering 44 per cent of adults (about 7.3 million) have low literacy, where the reading standard ranges from primary school-level up to early high school, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. People with low literacy may still be able to read menus, street signs and medicine labels, as well as get their driver’s licence, but they may struggle with longer paragraphs in a news story. Others may be able to get through the same news stories but find it difficult to tell you what they’ve just read. Only about 15 per cent of the population read at level 4 to 5 (the highest). Not surprisingly, writing competence has also been in freefall: just-released NAPLAN analysis shows the writing skills of Aussie kids have sunk to an all-time low, the result of a “30-year policy failure” in schools, according to the Australian Education Research Organisation. Analysis of 10 years of NAPLAN data has revealed that many year 9 students are writing at the standard of a primary-schooler. Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment ( PISA ) measures reading, mathematics and science literacy among 15-year-old students around the world. How did Australian kids compare? Passable at best. While reading and maths standards have been relatively stable in recent years, they’ve fallen over the longer term: in 2022, Australian students scored more than 25 points below that of those who sat the PISA in the early 2000s, which means today’s 15-year-olds are scoring at the level expected of 14-year-olds two decades earlier. Compounding the malaise has been a decline in recreational reading across all age brackets: more than one in four adult Australians haven’t read or listened to a book in the past year, according to data collected by Australia Reads . This is of special concern because of the example it sets for kids. Twenty-nine per cent of secondary school students no longer read for pleasure, according to a 2023 study – an increase of seven per cent on a previous survey in 2017. Australia Reads’ research has shown that when it comes to boosting intellectual progress in teens, regular reading is four times more influential than having a parent with a university degree. Indeed, observes Burkey, “Reading early as a child is a key predictor of success as an adult, and both teachers and parents play a role in this.” Another bonus of nurturing a love of books: for many adults, the memory of their parents reading to them as a child is one of their fondest, most comforting recollections. Parents exert the single most powerful influence on their kids’ reading habits, more so than social media or peers, according to research by Deakin University . “If children see adults around them reading for their own enjoyment, they’ll learn that reading is valued, and will mimic that behaviour,” Burkey says, adding that if a child has an established reading habit by the age of seven, they’ll be much more likely to become a lifelong reader. Australia Reads head Anna Burkey says parents exert the single most powerful Influence on their children’s reading habits. Step into a typical Australian classroom of 24 students, and you’ll find seven or eight who struggle with reading, says Jordana Hunter, education program director at the Grattan Institute and co-author of a report, The Reading Guarantee , released last year. “Reading is a foundational skill,” she says. “If you can’t read, you can’t keep up with the curriculum. Children who are taught to read well in the early years of school are best placed to make the crucial transition from learning to read to reading to learn.” It’s cold comfort to hear the US is faring worse than us, with 54 per cent of adults getting by on a literacy level below that of a sixth-grader (an 11- to 12-year-old), while 20 per cent rank below a fifth-grader (a 10- to 11 year-old), according to the National Literacy Institute. The fall in adult literacy skills in the US – now at their lowest levels in recent decades – is coinciding with some epically bad policies by the new Trump administration, which is taking a chainsaw to the federal Department of Education. The department provides nearly 14 per cent of funding for public schools and provides loans to 50 million school students and 13 million post-secondary students. The race to the bottom (Trump famously said he loves “the poorly educated”) is being hastened by a drastic increase in book bans across the US, mainly targeting texts deemed “woke” (translation: those with themes of equality, diversity and understanding towards black, LGBTQ+ and other minority characters). The bans have now taken on such grotesque proportions that even actor Julianne Moore’s autobiographical children’s book about a red-haired girl, Freckleface Strawberry , was put “under review” . Notably not on the banned list: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf . “The science of teaching reading is well-established now.” In February, America’s big five publishers – Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers and Simon & Schuster – banded together to file a lawsuit challenging the book ban in public and school libraries. Back in Australia, for too long, education experts have been at odds with one another over how best to teach reading – the foundation of all learning – but there is now broad agreement that phonics is unequivocally the most effective way of teaching young children how to crack the reading code. “The science of teaching reading is well-established now – we know what works and what doesn’t,” says Jordana Hunter. “Phonics helps kids ‘decode’ the written word, by showing them how to take the sounds of the words they hear and connect them to the letters they see on the page.” By the end of year 2, the vast majority of students should be able to make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn, notes Hunter. “But decoding isn’t the only answer to becoming a successful reader,” she stresses. “The other vital thing is comprehending what the words actually mean.” Comprehension is a puzzle with many pieces, prime among them general knowledge, she adds. “Building background knowledge and vocabulary takes much longer to teach than decoding. This needs to be a stronger focus for teachers in both primary and secondary schools. Even maths and science teachers have an important role to play here.” There is now broad agreement that phonics is the most effective way of teaching young children how to crack the reading code. Credit: Getty Images Much still stands in the way of achieving a unified, proven approach to teaching reading, reflects Hunter. “A faddishness has crept into teaching that’s not based on evidence-based teaching practices.” And here’s the thing: because education is a state and territory responsibility, no national guidelines exist on how reading and comprehension should be taught. “We don’t have good data on what teachers are actually teaching in the classroom, and that is a problem because it makes it harder to know which schools need more help,” says Hunter. “We need a national strategy for reading.” Which is not to say the states aren’t moving forward on their own: last year Victoria’s education minister, Ben Carroll, announced that all students from prep to year 2 will be taught reading using a systematic phonics approach , which has been a driving force in NSW for a few years now. AI cheats We all should spare a thought for our teachers: as if they don’t have enough stiff challenges already, they now have artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT to contend with. For starters, there’s the increasing difficulty of distinguishing an original essay from one generated by ChatGPT. (For now there are telltale signs, such as phrase repetition or inappropriate information, but the technology is advancing fast.) Teachers could face the warped scenario of providing feedback to AI-generated essays – and, if they suspect an essay has been produced by AI, being unable to prove it. And it’s not just cheating students: in May, two newspapers in the US published an AI-generated summer reading list – the only problem was, the books didn’t exist. Even more troubling is a preliminary study by MIT ’s Media Lab, released last month, which indicated that students who used ChatGPT for essay writing displayed poorer memory retention and lazier brain engagement than their peers, prompting headlines like, “Is ChatGPT making us dumb?” Reading and writing can be hard work. In a recent, widely discussed story in The Atlantic magazine , “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, journalist Rose Horowitch wrote that many students across the US are arriving at college struggling to read books from cover to cover. That’s in part because they weren’t required to read whole texts in high school – only extracts, summaries and news articles. “Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading,” Horowitch writes. “Many colleagues have reduced the number of texts students are expected to read.” There’s nothing to suggest things are any better in Australia. A comprehensive survey of the reading habits of Australian teens by Deakin University, conducted between March 2022 and June 2023, found that 29 per cent of secondary school students do not read in their spare time. Dr Lucas Thompson, a senior lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Sydney, says he has noticed a decline both in reading and in the quality of essay-writing skills among his English students since he began teaching 13 years ago. “In general, students are a little less critically engaged with the texts, perhaps because they haven’t read them deeply or put in the time to generate unique perspectives, rather than second-hand opinions,” he says via video from a sun-filled room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in his home in Wollongong. What has to be factored in, adds Thompson, is just how overloaded students are today, sometimes having one or two part-time jobs to support themselves, which leaves less time for the required reading. The 37-year-old, who grew up in regional NSW, has always been an avid reader and is keen to pass on that passion to his students (“I was one of the first in my family to go to university, and wanted to make sure I didn’t waste the opportunity”). To that end, Thompson has devised a simple strategy for encouraging his students to open their books: a reading accountability mechanism. “I pass around a physical copy of the class roll each week, with a separate column entitled: Have you finished all the required reading? Yes/No/Half, etc.” Dr Lucas Thompson, a senior lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Sydney, says he has noticed a decline both in reading and in the quality of essay-writing in students. It’s a “small form of social pressure”, he smiles. “I make it clear that by not doing the reading, a student is not only letting themselves down, but also their class.” This simple strategy has increased reading rates in his undergraduate classes. Thompson has also deliberately set fewer lengthy novels and more short ones on his courses, including autofiction: a literary genre combining autobiography with fiction, now popular among Generation Z readers (Irish author and screenwriter Sally Rooney and Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong are student favourites). Thompson’s students tell him they relate more to contemporary characters than those populating the pages of Dickens, Austen and Eliot. “Many of my colleagues have reduced the number of texts students are expected to read and chosen shorter texts,” observes Thompson, who looks every inch the literary academic with his spectacles, tousled hair and wispy beard. That’s not to say they’ve abandoned big, ambitious books like Middlemarch and Ulysses altogether. “It’s about getting the balance right across the semester,” he notes. “I try to remind students that they are paying to study, that it’s a privilege and a gift to be reading and reflecting on some of the most beautiful and interesting books ever written.” Thompson has also had success with allowing students to choose one novel per semester to listen to (such as an audiobook, including those on the volunteer-recording platform LibriVox, or other recording) instead of reading it, as a means of reducing the reading load. “This has led to fruitful discussions with students about the differences in aesthetic experiences between listening and reading.” The lost generation If you’re over 40, you belong to the last generation to remember what life was like before Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and X came along to turbocharge misinformation, fuel our insecurities, body-shame teenagers, stoke social division, upend reading habits, empower political extremism and erode democracy in ways that were unimaginable only 15 years ago. If you grew up in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s, you’ll recall a time before people were continually hunched over their phones, fixated on the endless merry-go-round of hyper-personalised, algorithm-driven content that has proved so seductive – and such a perfect vehicle for skimming, rather than close reading. Back in the late 1990s, I helped launch a new technology section in The Weekend Australian called Syte – back then, we saw the internet as offering nothing but glorious promise: a universal communications tool that would strengthen democracy, undermine authoritarianism, and increase social cohesion. In the fullness of time, it’s had exactly the opposite effect. A report by PEN America showed that students need to be taught news literacy before the age of 14 if they’re to be “inoculated” against the overwhelming tide of disinformation. Students say they relate more to contemporary characters than those populating the pages of Dickens, Austen and Eliot. Credit: Getty Images “Social media works in two- or three-second grabs – next thing, next, next, next – so what’s this doing to our brain, our concentration span?” asks Breanna Wright, a behavioural scientist with BehaviourWorks at Monash University. Thirty-seven per cent of those surveyed by Australia Reads told researchers they find it difficult to find the time to read. (And yet, they’re free to check their phones 50 or so times a day.) The latest in a mountain of studies indicating that young people are the biggest casualties of social media comes from the United Nations, and is based on surveys in the UK, US, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It found a troubling drop in youth happiness due to cyberbullying, body-shaming and the unrealistic standards set by influencers. David Blanchflower, an economics professor at Dartmouth College in the US, who organised the study, told The Guardian in March that “the young have become isolated ... they’re not going out as much; playing with their friends, interacting with others, or having as much sex.” And no doubt, along with all this, doing less real reading. Young people today, Blanchflower warned darkly, are at risk of becoming “the lost generation”. You know we’re in choppy, uncharted waters when social-media tech giants not only display a callous disregard for their young users but try to bully and coerce democratically elected governments. After tech executives from Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, appeared before a parliamentary inquiry in Canberra in June last year and airily dismissed a huge stack of research indicating how social media harms the young, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared the time had come for the company to “fess up”. “Meta are showing how out of touch and arrogant they are, ” he thundered. In the years since the meteoric rise of the smartphone (the first iPhone was released in 2007), a slew of studies has reported increased rates of depression, anxiety and sleeplessness, particularly among the young. The findings were reinforced by a robust Australian study released in October 2023, which found the most deleterious effects were among those with “high-severe” smartphone use. Last December, in a bid to contain some of the collateral damage from social media, the Australian government implemented a minimum age of 16 for users of platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X. The law is the first of its kind in the world. “It has become the No. 1 issue that parents are talking about,” Albanese said at the time. There is growing international pushback against social media’s manifold harms. “Social media tycoons should be held responsible if their algorithms poison our society,” Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the World Economic Forum in January. Jack Thorne, co-writer of the powerful Netflix drama Adolescence – about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a girl at his school, his repressed rage fuelled by toxic opinions he’d read online – has suggested children should be denied access to social media to protect them from misogynistic influencers such as Andrew Tate. Tate, who has amassed nearly 11 million followers on X with rants about male dominance and superiority, has told his impressionable young male audience that it’s unmanly to read books. “Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life,” Tate wrote on X in 2022. “Books are a total waste of time. Education for cowards.” (Tate has been accused of rape and coercive control by four women in Britain, and faces charges of human trafficking and sexual intercourse with a minor in Romania, where he is based.) The Australia Reads survey found that women (75 per cent) are more likely to read for pleasure than men (68 per cent). Among teenagers, a 2021 survey showed that males were more likely to read news online than females. But broadly, it’s women who are propping up book sales in Australia. The publishing gap Jane Novak, one of Australia’s most respected book publishing agents, with literary giants like Helen Garner and Gerald Murnane on her books, is in a wistful mood, recalling the golden years of publishing in the 1990s when she was starting out, when there was a book store in every shopping centre, when book advances and sales were plump, and writers could make a living from their income. “We didn’t know how good we had it then – or that it wouldn’t last,” she reflects. Richard Flanagan’s first novel, Death of a River Guide , and Charlotte Wood’s debut Pieces of a Girl were early touchstones, but Novak suspects that it might be difficult for these books to reach the market now. “The band of successful books being published is getting narrower every year. There are the monster bestsellers, then a big gap between them and everything else. There are wonderful books that are selling 1000 copies or less, and these tend to be high-quality literary fiction,” the 53-year-old sighs. Novak has print in her veins, having grown up in a NSW country town where, for nearly four decades, her parents ran a shop called the Mudgee Bookcase. “We still have a very healthy bookshop ecosystem in Australia, certainly compared to the US and UK,” she says. “The UK is terrible; they’re now pretty much reduced to large franchises like Waterstones; there aren’t many independent book stores left.” When I ask Novak whether she believes Australia’s book industry is on a downward trajectory, she doesn’t give a yes-or-no answer. “It’s a complicated picture,” she says. “The e-book market is healthy and Australians are among the first to embrace new technology. Plenty of people thought e-books were bad for book sales, for example, but they haven’t impacted the sales of hard-cover books in the way we thought.” Wannabe writers “How many of you want to become a writer?” novelist, writer and academic Debra Adelaide asked of her creative writing class. Virtually all the students shoved their hands in the air enthusiastically. But when she asked them whether they’d read the assigned text for discussion that day, only a few hands popped up in the class of 20 or so. “Who do you imagine is going to read your books,” she asked in mild exasperation, “if you’re not prepared to read books yourself?” That incident back in the early 2000s wasn’t a one-off, as she recalls an earlier one while teaching an undergraduate English literature class at the University of Sydney in the 1980s. “The majority of students would regularly come to tutorials having not read the texts,” she says. “It was demoralising. When I asked them, ‘Why aren’t you reading the texts?’ they’d reply ‘Oh, we don’t really like reading.’ And many were English majors studying to become English teachers!” “The year 12 exam system seems designed to destroy an innate love of reading.” The upshot: Adelaide doesn’t see any perceived decline in immersive, longform reading as particularly worrisome. “I’m not in panic mode. Book sales might be in a bit of a slump, English literature departments at universities may have shrunk, but look at all the writers’ festivals, the book clubs, podcasts, BookTok, which weren’t around 30 or 40 years ago. When I was young, I was one of a tiny handful of students who loved reading. Young people are still reading, but it’s on their devices, even if they’re just skimming stories.” Adelaide, who is 67 with a mane of thick grey hair, is speaking to me from her cosy, book-lined study in Sydney’s inner west; she has been a prolific reader since she was a child, when she’d devour every Reader’s Digest condensed book that landed in her working-class family’s letterbox. In an era of information – and misinformation – overload, it’s easy to look back nostalgically at this simpler time, when being able to buy a book was regarded as a special treat, she says. But Adelaide does feel that the teaching of English in some contexts tends to suppress any natural love of reading. Writer and academic Debra Adelaide says that while high school teachers do a great job, the system forces them to teach senior-year Englishtexts in a largely “clinical and formulaic” way. “One of the things I have a big beef about is that the year 12 exam system seems designed to destroy an innate love of reading,” she says. “It’s not the texts themselves, a great mix of classic and contemporary and Australian writers, nor the teachers who do a great job, but the clinical and formulaic way the system forces them to be taught and assessed. Years ago, my older son came home from school one day, telling me the teacher had said they were no longer to call writers ‘authors’ but ‘composers’ because ‘authors’ means authority. I told him to tell his teacher that his mother is a writer, not a composer.” Adelaide laughs at the memory. “Whenever I helped my children with their essays or creative writing, they did really poorly. I was telling them to use fewer adjectives; the teacher would encourage more adjectives.” It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that reading and writing do not come naturally in the way that speaking does, she notes, pointing to books by neuroscientists on the subject. Our brains are wired for learning to speak, not to read and write: we need several years to master those skills. Still, early reading does shape the brain, enhancing cognitive development and learning success. Adelaide is also heartened by the growth of e-books, which appear to be gaining traction as a substitute for paper books among the young. More than half of Australians aged between 15 and 34 read e-books and almost one in three Australians listen to audiobooks, according to Australia Reads. Sixty-six per cent of young people said BookTok had inspired them. By far the most troubling thing I learnt while researching this story is the decline of school libraries in public schools, both in their number and standard of facilities. While most schools have a library, this can sometimes amount to just a collection of books on a few shelves. Incredibly, there are no figures on the number of school libraries in Australia. “The decline of school libraries sends a huge message to kids that reading isn’t valued,” says Anna Burkey. The disparity between the standard of libraries in private schools and those in public schools appears to have become a lot wider over the past 20 years, says Trish Hepworth, deputy CEO of the Australian Library and Information Association. Some schools have no libraries at all, while others are severely under-resourced. And yet, time and again, school libraries have been shown to play an important role in notching up literacy. “If we care about improving literacy and student wellbeing, a simple first step is to ensure that every child, no matter their postcode, has access to a well-resourced school library,” insists Hepworth. Research undertaken by the Australian Council for Educational Research in 2020 revealed that schools with a qualified teacher librarian have higher literacy standards and students were up to two months ahead in their learning. “The difference in year 9 student literacy outcomes was particularly evident,” the report noted. Read for your health The Japanese word tsundoku refers to the love of collecting books – letting them pile up in your home with the intention of reading them all eventually or just leaving them unread. Real estate agents clearly haven’t heard of tsundoku , judging by one who came by my house a while back for a valuation, firmly suggesting I get rid of all the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books because “they’re a turn-off for potential buyers”. The way I see it, a house isn’t a home without books. During these times of international disruption and uncertainty, sitting down with a book, alone and in peace, is surprisingly comforting. Learning that reading is good for us, especially for our mental health, shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Just five minutes of reading a novel can reduce stress by nearly 20 per cent, according to Australia Reads. Multiple studies have shown that those who read for pleasure for 30 minutes or more a day enjoy higher self-esteem, a substantially lower risk of depression, are less lonely, and 58 per cent more likely to empathise with others. Overall, regular readers enjoy longer lives – some statistics suggest by up to 20 per cent – perhaps because of reading’s inherent mindfulness qualities. If this doesn’t encourage us to read a bit more, I don’t know what would. To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald , The Age and Brisbane Times .