People don’t read as many books as they once did, and that makes me sad. I love books. I want everyone to love books and for children to learn to love reading. And yet, for over 30 years, most children have learned to hate reading, and they have now become adults who hate to read.

Why? Because their schools taught them to.

In 1987, California adopted a destructive and now discredited method of teaching reading called Whole Language. Whole Language rejected phonics and instead treated words like symbols. Teachers stopped saying, “sound it out.” For example, a child would be taught to recognize the word, “frog” but could not sound out any other word starting with “fr.” When confronted with words like “friend” or “freeze,” the child would have to be “cued” with a picture or a hint. As a result, children learned to guess. Some learned to do it well and eventually came to phonetic pronunciation on their own. Many did not and remained functionally illiterate, able to read only what they could recognize, but unable to “sound out” words they had never seen before.

By the early 2000’s, all 50 states had at least some school districts using Whole Language, and some of the most populous states, such as California, Texas, New York, and Massachusetts, mandated Whole Language in all schools. State teachers’ unions and the National Education Association all supported its adoption. But the experiment on America’s children failed miserably.

The nationwide use of Whole Language over three decades has caused incalculable damage and is the worst pedagogic injustice in U.S. history. An excellent documentary podcast, Sold a Story, details the rise and fall of Whole Language and the people who profited from it, including Lucy Calkins, who finally admitted in 2022 that she was wrong all along. (Oops! Sorry about the functional illiteracy, kids.)

Now, I would think an 800-pound gorilla like the Whole Language fiasco might at least be mentioned once in an 8,600-word article about America’s reading problem. I was wrong.

The massive lament by Rose Horowitch declares The End of Reading is Here in The Atlantic’s August edition, and she fears for the Republic if people don’t read more. Daily Wire columnist Jonathan Minnema says she is wrong in a much shorter article: The Age of Reading Isn’t Over.

I agree with Minnema that reading will be just fine because Whole Language has now been banned in 42 states. What bothers me most about Horowitch’s article is her utter lack of curiosity as to the root cause of declining literacy. She certainly cites some depressing figures:

… it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade… In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument… Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

Scary stuff. Horowitch’s own magazine published a story on Whole Language and Lucy Calkins in 2024, yet she doesn’t mention it. Daily distractions from video slop and social media, though bad, do not somehow prevent students from acquiring reading skills in any functional classroom. The popularity of such junk is not the cause, but rather the result of the Whole Language era. Kids who dislike reading and see it as an uninteresting chore will entertain themselves somehow.

People are indeed spending less money on books. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank, annual retail book sales peaked at $1.4 billion in 2007 and fell sharply thereafter to $650 million in 2025. Just after the 2007 sales peak, new technologies entered the world: the iPhone (2007), the iPad (2010), E-readers (2007), and Netflix streaming (2007).

But something else happened in 2008: thousands of kids crippled by Whole Language began to graduate from high school. As if on cue, average critical reading SAT scores also began to decline in 2008 as more students began taking the test. Young adults who hate reading probably won’t buy books, ever again.

Ms. Horowitch’s essay is ultimately cowardly and predictably elitist. Rather than seeking a more likely systemic or bureaucratic cause for the disaster she sees, she instead fixes blame on parents:

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… (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.)

Perhaps I ask too much of Ms. Horowitch, a Yale graduate who also attended the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, a $60,000-a-year high school in New Hampshire. She was certainly not subjected to the vagaries of the Whole Language era. But a journalist with 8,600 words at her disposal has a duty to investigate the likely causes and origins of any danger to the Republic.

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Harry Angell is a petroleum geologist and a visiting fellow at the California Policy Center. He is also the author of The Anastomosing Dendrite, a Substack newsletter.

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Smartphones Didn’t Kill Reading; The Schools Did