How I'm Trying to Address the Reading Crisis In My Syllabus

saving tin. doing a victory garden. we all have our lil part to play

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I didn’t yet know that there was a developing “reading crisis.” If you’d asked me in a general way if reading was in crisis, though, I’d probably have said “sure.” I’ve been hearing versions of that claim since before I started teaching.

I started grad school in 2005. In 2002 the NEA issued the once-notorious “Reading at Risk” report, which documented a decline in leisure reading among adults. (Critics of that report mostly focused on the fact that the steepest decline in adult leisure reading came in the several months after September 11, 2001, when maybe Americans were a little preoccupied.) A follow-up report several years later generated a further round of discourse (this by Caleb Crain is one of the smarter pieces I still remember from that moment). I could look further back, of course — Crain’s piece does, which is one reason why it’s valuable. And my point here is not the exceedingly annoying one that humanities types for some reason love to make, about all sorts of things, in all sorts of contexts: that people have freaked out about [x] before so therefore [x] isn’t a big deal. (I can’t find the post right now but that brilliant man L.M. Sacasas has some hilariously withering things to say about people who apply this type of reasoning to anxieties about technology.) To hear some intellectuals talk, everything is a “panic”; to hear some historians talk, nobody ever does anything for any reason except a motiveless, neurotic “anxiety.”