Why Gen Z Doesn’t Read

It was educational sabotage.

Jean M. Twinge on her substack Generation Tech documents the long decline of reading. She suggests that the smartphone, and before that video games, may be at least partially responsible..

I suggest another explanation. The rise of whole language reading instruction.

She writes that reading is not natural. She’s right, but there’s a relatively straightforward brain hack to make reading easier. It’s called phonetics.

The Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets are phonetic. The individual characters have little meaning in themselves. Instead they represent, singly and in combinations, sounds. It’s not perfect. Current languages have more vowels and consonants than we can represent with single letters. The combinations of letters, diphthongs and blends, we use to represent the extra vowels and consonants are awkward. That doesn’t make phonetics useless. It does make it harder to teach. English is particularly bad because we stopped transliterating borrowed foreign words, particularly French, written in the Latin alphabet.

Sometime in the late fifties or early sixties a “new” method of instruction came into vogue. It was marketed by consultants who billed it as easier to teach and learn. It was supposedly modeled on the way expert readers read. It goes by different names. One is “Whole Language”. It is also called “Look Say”. It discards the phonetic nature of our writing system. Instead students are taught to recognize entire words as a unit. Phonetics, now called “phonics”, is reserved for emergencies, as a way to figure out which word an unfamiliar letter combination represents.

This method is arguably easier to teach. The teacher doesn’t have to suffer through days and weeks and months introducing the various sounds the letters make, singly and in groups, and more importantly drilling the students on them, so they get at least a minimum of practice. It puts the onus on failure on the students. Johnny has trouble reading? It’s not the teachers’ fault. He must be dyslexic.

It’s much harder to learn and use.

Phonetics rewires the brain to connect your eyes to your language center. You hear the words as your eyes travel across them. It gets very fast with practice. An expert reader does it so quickly that it looks as though they recognize whole words.

A phonetic reader can recognize any word they already know, and can sound out words they have never heard. It’s not perfect. Nothing is. It’s better than treating our texts as though they are imperfectly systematic ideograms.

If reading instruction wasn’t killed deliberately, it was at least negligent homicide.

Are books dead? Why Gen Z doesn't read