I think Paul Thomas is asking the wrong historical question. (Scroll down to see Paul's full Substack post)
The issue is not whether every generation has complained that "kids today can't read." Adults have always complained about the young. Complaints about declining standards, declining morality, declining discipline, and declining literacy can be found throughout recorded history. The existence of the complaint tells us very little.
The more important question is whether significant numbers of children have repeatedly failed to acquire functional reading skills despite more than a century of educational reform, research, teacher training, new methodologies, new programmes, and changing theories of literacy. On that question, the evidence appears difficult to dismiss.
Paul suggests there was never a golden age when nearly all children learned to read well. I agree. But that is not evidence that the problem is imaginary. It may be evidence that the problem has never been solved. For over a century, educators have changed the terminology, changed the theories, changed the programmes, changed the assessments, and changed the explanations, yet substantial numbers of children continue to emerge from school unable to read fluently and confidently. At some point we should ask whether this reflects a successful system or a system that has learned to accept a predictable level of failure.
Paul argues that the United States became a global power despite these reading difficulties. That is true. But that only proves that a nation can prosper while leaving many children behind. It does not prove those children were taught successfully.
In fact, I think the argument raises a far more troubling question. If the United States became the world's leading economic, scientific, and military power while millions of children struggled unnecessarily with reading, what might have been achieved if those children had been taught effectively from the beginning? How much human potential was lost? How many capable minds spent years believing they were incapable simply because they could not make sense of print?
The story of Thomas Edison is revealing. He is often cited as an example of an educational failure that did not matter because he later became a genius and one of the world's most prolific inventors. Yet Edison is evidence of the opposite. Imagine a school system so ineffective that it writes off a child who later transforms the modern world. The lesson is not that schools can fail children without consequence. The lesson is that we do not know what is being lost when they do.
The same applies to every successful adult who overcame early reading difficulties. We hear about the Edisons and the Tom Cruises because they survived. They are visible. They became famous. What we never count are the thousands upon thousands of children with similar potential who did not survive the experience so successfully. We celebrate the Edisons who survived the system. We never count the Edisons the system lost.
That is why I have never been persuaded by arguments that focus primarily on poverty. Poverty matters. No reasonable person would deny that. Children need food, security, books, support, and opportunity. But poverty cannot explain everything. I have worked with children from educated families living in comfortable homes who could not read. I have also worked with children from modest backgrounds who learned rapidly once confusion was removed. Poverty undoubtedly creates barriers, but it does not fully explain why bright children with normal intelligence, supportive parents, years of schooling, and access to resources still fail to learn to read.
The children who concern me most are not those whose difficulties can be readily explained by social disadvantage. They are the children who should have learned to read but did not. They are the children who slowly conclude that reading is a game everyone else understands but they do not. They are the children who stop asking questions, stop raising their hands, stop volunteering answers, and eventually stop trying. The tragedy is not merely that they fail to learn to read. The tragedy is that many come to believe the failure lies within themselves.
After years of assessing struggling readers, I have become convinced that many reading failures are not caused primarily by low intelligence, dyslexia, poverty, trauma, or a lack of phonological awareness. They are often caused by confusion. Children are taught letter sounds inconsistently. They are taught rules plagued by exceptions. They are told to sound out some words, memorise others, and guess at still others. Unsurprisingly, some conclude that reading itself does not make sense.
What strikes me most about literacy debates is that everyone wants to discuss ideologies, programmes, policies, social justice, neuroscience, research studies, standards, and teacher preparation. Yet very few seem interested in asking a simpler question: can a child look at an unfamiliar printed word and work out what it says? If large numbers of children cannot do that after years of instruction, then the debate about whether "kids today can't read" is missing the point.
The real scandal is not that adults complain about children's reading. Adults have always complained. The real scandal is that generation after generation of educators have become accustomed to a predictable proportion of bright, healthy children failing to learn to read and have come to regard that outcome as normal.
Perhaps the most revealing fact is that after a century of reading crises we are still debating whether there is a problem rather than asking why the same problem keeps reappearing. If the complaint has persisted for a hundred years, that may not be evidence of nostalgia. It may be evidence that we have spent a hundred years accepting avoidable failure.
Here is Paul's post on Substack:
Let’s start an examination of the claim that “kids today can’t read” by considering if that claim is true or if, as Chris Ferguson suggests, it is merely “a perennial gripe”.
So here is the problem.
First, is there evidence that over the past century US public schools have never taught students how to read well enough, and thus, the public and political rhetoric has always been “kids today can’t read” because that has always been in fact true?
This premise raises another problem because if “kids today” have never been able to read well enough, there simply has never been any catastrophic social consequence for that fact.
Certainly there have always been individuals who have not learned to read well enough and have suffered significant negative consequences.
But over the last century, the US has remained the dominant country in the world in nearly every category you can identify.
This calls into question the causal relationship between education and any country’s power.
Second, has there been an identifiable period in US history when US public education has taught reading well and “kids today” did in fact read well enough?
As a scholar of literacy and the history of education, I have never had anyone identify that period, and I have never discovered evidence of that period, and thus, I currently think the answer to that second question is “No.”
So I want to return to Ferguson’s conjecture for a moment.
It seems reasonable to admit that over the past century, the vast majority of students have learned to read reasonably well, and that, regretfully because of human nature, some students fall through the cracks for hundreds of reasons and have not attained the literacy they need and deserve.
That said, at any moment in history including now, we as a society are ethically called to address that better than we have thus far.
We damned well know who is falling through our educational and social cracks, and frankly, we culturally and politically don’t give a damn about those children and teens—and we never have.
However, there is a caveat here: The way to address reading and all learning by students is primarily through addressing poverty and social inequity directly, not changing standards, tests, programs, or teacher training.
Note how Lou LaBrant responded to the reading crisis of the 1940s:
An easy way to evade the question of improved living and better schools for our underprivileged is to say the whole trouble is lack of drill. Lack of drill! Let’s be honest. Lack of good food; lack of well-lighted homes with books and papers; lack of attractive, well equipped schools, where reading is interesting and meaningful; lack of economic security permitting the use of free schools—lack of a good chance, the kind of chance these unlettered boys are now fighting to give to others.
We as a society also do not like that fact because of our cultural and political beliefs, beliefs not supported by decades of research.
And thus, the best explanation for the “perennial gripe” that “kids today can’t read” is that the claim itself has almost nothing to do with “kids today” but with the persistent way that “adults today” always misread “kids today” through some sort of misguided nostalgia for their own childhood and education as well as an entrenched urge to criticize younger generations.
Also as a response to the 1940’s reading crisis Emmett A. Betts asserted: “In a democracy, the people get the kind of schools they want.”
To be a bit more cynical, in the US we have gotten the exact kind of schools and society we want—and yet seem justified in always complaining in baseless ways about the very things we created.
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