Back to the Dark Ages?

After three weeks off, ABPTL is back.

Our ability to read and our love of reading is under attack.

“Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge….”

“Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone ‘eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,’ a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studies there as well.”

“This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.”

“Traditionally the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.”

“Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. ‘It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, not that its survival would have improved  those ages,’ the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.”

“Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.”

“The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggest an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature….”

American’s also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.”

“Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.”

All of this comes from an article published in the August issue of The Atlantic, written by staff writer Rose Horowitch. You can read more if you like, but you probably get the gist of what Horowitch is suggesting – we are in danger of losing reading as we have known it for thousands of years.

So let’s just say the way we read is changing or has already changed. What institutions are responsible for making sure our “new reading” is supported as we move into the future?

Is it the library? While the absolute number of public library systems have remained the same here in the U.S., physical visits to libraries has dropped from 1.6 billion in 2009 to 671 million in 2022. Libraries are in trouble.

Is it school? Most schools are still employing teachers who expect kids to learn to read and then read to learn. Too many schools don’t know how to change their pedagogy so that kids learn to read and then read to learn based upon the technology available today.

Maybe those who need to take responsibility are individual adult learning coaches well-trained in the mechanics of reading, along with how young readers like to receive information, i.e. how does one balance traditional reading with learning based on social media and artificial intelligence?

A big reason the Dark Ages came upon human civilization was because there weren’t enough protectors of skills and knowledge – like reading – to combat neglect and ignorance. If traditional institutions like the library and school aren’t up to today’s challenges, then we must identify, recruit, train, and support those adult learning leaders, those adult reading leaders, to fulfill the role of “keepers of the skill” – however that skill looks moving forward.

Til tomorrow. SVB