Kindling a Fire: The Vanishing Act of Deep Reading

About seven years ago, I found myself in one of my favorite settings: early morning light streaming into my sunroom, a hot cup of coffee next to me, and an imposing tome of Russian literature in my hands (yes, this is actually my idea of fun).

But it was far from a happy moment. Instead of being immersed in one of the great texts of Western thinking, my mind was racing, eyes flitting back to my phone, brain unable to sustain focus. As I struggled to even read one page, I felt a sense of panic and existential dread: I couldn’t read a novel.

That feeling is sadly familiar to many educators today, both for themselves and their students. Simply put, our ability to engage in deep, sustained reading – our cognitive endurance and empathic reasoning – is rapidly eroding.

Recent research on this subject is not reassuring. One new study shows that the percentage of U.S. teens who read for pleasure every day has fallen from almost 40 percent to close to 10 percent. More than half of teens almost never read for pleasure.

This data is not worrying just for book nerds like me. It reflects (and potentially contributes to) profound changes in the way humans process information, engage in cognition, and make sense of the world.

It is no coincidence that the share of American 18-year-olds who report difficulty thinking, concentrating, or learning new things has risen dramatically in the past decade – almost in lockstep with the decline of reading. Similarly, average student scores on science, reading, and math assessments in high-income countries have plummeted since 2012. It’s not just that children aren’t reading like they used to; they aren’t thinking like they used to.

But, significantly, it’s not just the kids who are struggling. Over the same period, studies show that adult performance on literacy and numeracy tests has also declined substantially. In most Western countries, adults struggle to process information at record rates.

What could cause such a change for both teenagers and adults? School curriculum, teaching practices, and Covid closures can’t be the only answers if adults have been equally impacted. By now, you’re probably already expecting me to say, “It’s the phones.” And yes, it is in part the phones. There can be no doubt that digital technologies, particularly smartphones, social media, and unending supplies of short videos have reshaped attention spans and altered how humans engage with information.

This is most notable when it comes to reading. Educational author Doug Lemov puts it well:

On the digital screen we read fleetingly, flittingly. We are predisposed to attend to new information; from an evolutionary perspective, what’s new, bright, and flashing could contain survival information. It gets priority. We are repeatedly distracted by whatever pops up, rewarded for each distraction with a tiny surge of dopamine. We read in a constant state of partial attention.

If you’ve worked with students recently, you’ve no doubt seen this approach to reading. Many students no longer read, they scan; their working memory is so overloaded that, instead of synthesizing information or engaging in reflective inquiry, they are merely trying to filter the torrent of information flooding their brains. In doing so, they demonstrate what neuroscientists know: the brain is simply not able to multi-task. As Lemov puts it, this approach “crowds out reflection, creative association, critical analysis, empathy…the deep reading process.”  

But the good news is that we are not powerless to change this trajectory. At Cincinnati Country Day School, we have implemented a range of efforts to counteract the decline of deep reading: smartphone bans during the school day, screen-free Socratic seminars, intensive teacher-led textual analysis of classic literature, and regular independent reading periods during the academic schedule. Like anything, it requires steady practice, but it can be done.

Happily, I have come a long way since that terrifying day seven years ago. Through many months of effortful training, I managed to retrain my focus and regain my attention – I thought of it like “going to the gym for my brain.” But once again, I am able to enjoy the deep reading experience Niccolo Machiavelli so beautifully described hundreds of years ago:

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them…and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.

Now that is a timeless experience we should all work hard to preserve.

"Kindling a Fire" is a column submitted regularly to Indian Hill Living by Head of School Rob Zimmerman '98. This ran in the May 2025 edition of the publication.