Graham Ormiston

And we are living through one of the great shifts in cultural history. To future historians the most distinctive cultural feature of the 20th century will not be cinema or jazz but the mass literacy that flourished after late-Victorian education reforms abolished what HG Wells referred to as the social “gulf” that once separated readers from the... See more

“If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore,” she said. “Because school isn’t fun.”

That, to many observers, is the original sin of the reading problem: the nation’s uneven commitment to teaching reading in ways we now know are more effective, such as explicit phonics instruction, which systematically teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds. Other, less effective methods, such as “whole language” instruction,... See more

Without literacy, democracy may not survive.

reading class

Neil Postman put it succinctly, if more broadly, in 1985: Only in the printed word can complicated truths be rationally conveyed.

Maryanne Wolf introduces a subtle but urgent concept into the discourse on reading: cognitive patience. It is, at heart, the willingness to linger in difficulty. The capacity to stay with a complex sentence, a knotty idea, a layered argument long enough for meaning to emerge.

A quarter of a century later, did he—did we—manage to salvage the wreck? Or have Birkerts’s worst fears come to pass? It’s hard to tell from the numbers. More independent bookstores are opening than closing, and sales of print books are up—but authors’ earnings are down. Fewer Americans read for pleasure than they once did. A major house’s... See more