Is the decline of reading making politics dumber?

As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear.

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The experiment was simple; so too, you may have thought, was the task. Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them.

In other words: Some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?

Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: One student thought that when a man was said to have "whiskers", it meant he was "in a room with an animal, I think... a cat?"

The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.

Reading is in trouble. Multiple studies in multiple places seem to be showing the same thing. Adults are reading less. Children are reading less. Teenagers are reading a lot less. Very small children are being read to less; many are not being read to at all. Reading rates are lower among poorer children — a phenomenon known as "the reading gap" — but reading is down for everyone, everywhere.

In America, the share of people who read for pleasure has fallen by two-fifths in 20 years, according to a study published in August in iScience, a journal. YouGov, a pollster, found that 40 per cent of Britons had not read or listened to any books in 2024.

Reading for displeasure is little better: as Sir Jonathan Bate, an English professor at Oxford University, has said, students "struggle to get through one novel in three weeks".

Even the educated young, another greybeard said, have "no habits of application and concentration".