In a Q&A with Interview Magazine, lifestyle influencer Alix Earle confessed, “I’ve never read a book. Like, maybe Dr. Seuss?” With 8.7 million followers on TikTok and 6 million on Instagram, Earle’s reach is something out of the ordinary, but her comment was not. In fact, the American Time Use Survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found in 2023 that only 16 percent of participants read for pleasure on a given day.
America is in a literacy crisis, and normalizing not reading is dangerous and irresponsible.
In order to fully understand the literacy crisis, we must understand what it means to be literate. The simple definition is the ability to read and write. But this is not quite what the crisis is about. The crisis is about functional literacy: the ability to understand complex texts, connect ideas, and analyze deeper meanings.
According to the National Literacy Institute in 2026, 56 percent of American adults read below a 6th-grade level, and in 2025, U.S.A. Reads reported the highest rates of illiteracy in American adults in 155 years.
It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of the crisis. One common suspect is the pandemic. However, Harvard education professor Martin West points out that student reading levels peaked in the mid-2010s and have been declining ever since. For instance, 8th-grade reading scores peaked in 2013, and 4th-grade reading scores peaked in 2015. Scores were falling years before schools ever shut down.
Another popular suspect has to do with the attention economy. The infiltration and reliance on screens have caused a drastic decrease in attention spans. The American Psychological Association revealed that in 2004 the average attention span on a single screen was 2.5 minutes, and in 2023 it went down to 47 seconds, with the median being 40 seconds.
Regardless of the cause of the crisis, the dangers the crisis poses are hard to dismiss.
Democracy depends on literate citizens. Literacy is the foundation for developing close reading skills and critical thinking. The practice of reading is invaluable, especially in today’s political climate.
Reading gives citizens insight into the lives of people completely different from themselves, and in turn builds empathy. It also allows citizens to detect unreliable narrators, bias, and misinformation; all necessary skills in the current media environment. Informed citizens must be able to detect what is reliable and accurate news. News must be read with a critical eye; if not, we become susceptible to propaganda.
When we read less and our skills weaken, all of us become that much easier to manipulate.
The crisis is further heightened by book banning, which has most recently ramped up in 2021 due to political agendas. In the 2025-2026 school year alone, public schools across the country banned 11,982 books.
“Protect our children” is the most common cry when it comes to banning books. In reality, book banning tends to target themes of LGBTQ+, race, history, social justice, sexuality, etc. This is incredibly dangerous, as Ohio State University professor Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop argues, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.”
Students feel disvalued, and others don’t get to see lives different from their own, making it that much harder for them to sympathize with others. The inability to sympathize with minority groups is perhaps a main goal of book bans.
Additionally, fewer stories available to students only discourages reading. Lack of reading leads to illiterate adults, which in turn makes them that much easier to exploit.
This becomes even more concerning given how closely poverty and literacy are linked. A Michigan Journal of Economics study found that the relationship runs in both directions: socioeconomic status shapes how well a person learns to read, and a person’s literacy level, in turn, shapes their socioeconomic status for the rest of their life. The result is a cycle that is difficult to break.
While we cannot pinpoint the cause of the literacy crisis to one cause alone, there is absolutely no doubt that it is incredibly dangerous with very real consequences. The current administration may not have caused the crisis alone, but they are unequivocally reinforcing it.
The Zeitgeist aims to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
