The story below chronicles the final chapter of reading in Australia. Depressing but it has been on the cards for 20 years. This edited story is from Greg Callaghan, Sydney Morning Herald (5 July, 2025).

“We’re living through the greatest information revolution in human history, yet we’re daily drowning in a deluge of online misinformation and disinformation. It’s fuelling a dunderheaded doubt in vaccination, the reality of climate change, the value of democracy and truth itself.

While it may not rate up there with global warming and the decline of the West, mediocre literacy standards and falls in the quality of our reading habits have many experts worried.

“This is a ticking time bomb: if we don’t begin to turn this around now, we’re going to have significant social and economic effects in 10 to 20 years’ time,” warns Anna Burkey, head of Australia Reads, a collaboration of book industry bodies established five years ago to combat reading decline.

Although few Australians are totally illiterate, a staggering 44 per cent of adults (about 7.3 million) have low literacy, where the reading standard ranges from primary school-level up to early high school, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

People with low literacy may still be able to read menus, street signs and medicine labels, as well as get their driver’s licence, but they may struggle with longer paragraphs in a news story. Others may be able to get through the same news stories but find it difficult to tell you what they’ve just read.

Only about 15 per cent of the population read at level 4 to 5 (the highest). Not surprisingly, writing competence has also been in freefall: just-released NAPLAN analysis shows the writing skills of Aussie kids have sunk to an all-time low, according to the Australian Education Research Organisation. Analysis of 10 years of NAPLAN data has revealed that many year 9 students are writing at the standard of a primary-schooler.

There’s a decline in recreational reading across all age brackets: more than one in four adult Australians haven’t read or listened to a book in the past year, according to data collected by Australia Reads. This is of special concern because of the example it sets for kids. Twenty-nine per cent of secondary school students no longer read for pleasure, according to a 2023 study.

Australia Reads’ research has shown that when it comes to boosting intellectual progress in youngsters, a parent who regularly reads to their child has four times more positive impact than if the adult had a university degree. Indeed, observes Burkey, “Reading early as a child is a key predictor of success as an adult, and both teachers and parents play a role in this.”

Step into a typical Australian classroom of 24 students, and you’ll find seven or eight who struggle with reading, says Jordana Hunter, education program director at the Grattan Institute and co-author of a report, The Reading Guarantee, released last year. “Reading is a foundational skill,” she says. “If you can’t read, you can’t keep up with the curriculum. Children who are taught to read well in the early years of school are best placed to make the crucial transition from learning to read to reading to learn.”

It’s cold comfort to hear the US is faring worse than us, with 54 per cent of adults getting by on a literacy level below that of a sixth-grader (an 11- to 12-year-old), while 20 per cent rank below a fifth-grader (a 10- to 11 year-old), according to the National Literacy Institute. The fall in adult literacy skills in the US – now at their lowest levels in recent decades – is coinciding with some bad policies by the new Trump administration, which is taking a chainsaw to the federal Department of Education. The department provides nearly 14 per cent of funding for public schools and provides loans to 50 million school students and 13 million post-secondary students.

Much still stands in the way of achieving a unified, proven approach to teaching reading, reflects Hunter. “A faddishness has crept into teaching that’s not based on evidence-based teaching practices.” And here’s the thing: because education is a state and territory responsibility, no national guidelines exist on how reading and comprehension should be taught. “We don’t have good data on what teachers are actually teaching in the classroom, and that is a problem because it makes it harder to know which schools need more help,” says Hunter. “We need a national strategy for reading.”

We all should spare a thought for our teachers: as if they don’t have enough stiff challenges already, they now have artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT to contend with. For starters, there’s the increasing difficulty of distinguishing an original essay from one generated by ChatGPT. (For now there are telltale signs, such as phrase repetition or inappropriate information, but the technology is advancing fast.)

Teachers could face the warped scenario of providing feedback to AI-generated essays – and, if they suspect an essay has been produced by AI, being unable to prove it. And it’s not just cheating students: in May, two newspapers in the US published an AI-generated summer reading list – the only problem was, the books didn’t exist.

Even more troubling is a preliminary study by MIT’s Media Lab, released last month, which indicated that students who used ChatGPT for essay writing displayed poorer memory retention and lazier brain engagement than their peers, prompting headlines like, “Is ChatGPT making us dumb?”

Reading and writing can be hard work. In a recent, widely discussed story in The Atlantic magazine, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, journalist Rose Horowitch wrote that many students across the US are arriving at college struggling to read books from cover to cover. That’s in part because they weren’t required to read whole texts in high school – only extracts, summaries and news articles.

“Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading,” Horowitch writes.

“Many colleagues have reduced the number of texts students are expected to read.”

There’s nothing to suggest things are any better in Australia. A comprehensive survey of the reading habits of Australian teens by Deakin University, conducted between March 2022 and June 2023, found that 29 per cent of secondary school students do not read in their spare time.

Dr Lucas Thompson, a senior lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Sydney, says he has noticed a decline both in reading and in the quality of essay-writing skills among his English students since he began teaching 13 years ago.

“In general, students are a little less critically engaged with the texts, perhaps because they haven’t read them deeply or put in the time to generate unique perspectives, rather than second-hand opinions.”

What has to be factored in, adds Thompson, is just how overloaded students are today, sometimes having one or two part-time jobs to support themselves, which leaves less time for required reading.

It’s a “small form of social pressure”, he smiles. “I make it clear that by not doing the reading, a student is not only letting themselves down, but also their class.” This simple strategy has increased reading rates in his undergraduate classes. Thompson has also deliberately set fewer lengthy novels and more short ones on his courses, including autofiction: a literary genre combining autobiography with fiction, now popular among Generation Z readers (Irish author and screenwriter Sally Rooney and Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong are student favourites).

Thompson’s students tell him they relate more to contemporary characters than those populating the pages of Dickens, Austen and Eliot.

“Many of my colleagues have reduced the number of texts students are expected to read and chosen shorter texts,” observes Thompson, who looks every inch the literary academic with his spectacles, tousled hair and wispy beard.

If you’re over 40, you belong to the last generation to remember what life was like before Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and X came along to turbocharge misinformation, fuel our insecurities, body-shame teenagers, stoke social division, upend reading habits, empower political extremism and erode democracy in ways that were unimaginable only 15 years ago. If you grew up in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s, you’ll recall a time before people were continually hunched over their phones, fixated on the endless merry-go-round of hyper-personalised, algorithm-driven content that has proved so seductive – and such a perfect vehicle for skimming, rather than close reading.

“Social media works in two- or three-second grabs – next thing, next, next, next – so what’s this doing to our brain, our concentration span?” asks Breanna Wright, a behavioural scientist with BehaviourWorks at Monash University. Thirty-seven per cent of those surveyed by Australia Reads told researchers they find it difficult to find the time to read.

The latest in a mountain of studies indicating that young people are the biggest casualties of social media comes from the United Nations, and is based on surveys in the UK, US, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It found a troubling drop in youth happiness due to cyberbullying, body-shaming and the unrealistic standards set by influencers.

David Blanchflower, an economics professor at Dartmouth College in the US, who organised the study, told The Guardian in March that “the young have become isolated … they’re not going out as much; playing with their friends, interacting with others, or having as much sex.” And no doubt, along with all this, doing less real reading. Young people today, Blanchflower warned darkly, are at risk of becoming “the lost generation”.

You know we’re in choppy, uncharted waters when social-media tech giants not only display a callous disregard for their young users but try to bully and coerce democratically elected governments. After tech executives from Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, appeared before a parliamentary inquiry in Canberra in June last year and airily dismissed a huge stack of research indicating how social media harms the young, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared the time had come for the company to “fess up”. “Meta are showing how out of touch and arrogant they are,” he thundered.

In the years since the meteoric rise of the smartphone (the first iPhone was released in 2007), a slew of studies has reported increased rates of depression, anxiety and sleeplessness, particularly among the young. The findings were reinforced by a robust Australian study released in October 2023, which found the most deleterious effects were among those with “high-severe” smartphone use.

Last December, in a bid to contain some of the collateral damage from social media, the Australian government implemented a minimum age of 16 for users of platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X. The law is the first of its kind in the world. “It has become the No. 1 issue that parents are talking about,” Albanese said at the time.

The Australia Reads survey found that women (75 per cent) are more likely to read for pleasure than men (68 per cent). Among teenagers, a 2021 survey showed that males were more likely to read news online than females. But broadly, it’s women who are propping up book sales in Australia.

Jane Novak, one of Australia’s most respected book publishing agents, with literary giants like Helen Garner and Gerald Murnane on her books, is in a wistful mood, recalling the golden years of publishing in the 1990s when she was starting out, when there was a book store in every shopping centre, when book advances and sales were plump, and writers could make a living from their income. “We didn’t know how good we had it then – or that it wouldn’t last,” she reflects.

“The band of successful books being published is getting narrower every year. There are the monster bestsellers, then a big gap between them and everything else. There are wonderful books that are selling 1000 copies or less, and these tend to be high-quality literary fiction,” the 53-year-old sighs.

“How many of you want to become a writer?” novelist, writer and academic Debra Adelaide asked of her creative writing class. Virtually all the students shoved their hands in the air enthusiastically. But when she asked them whether they’d read the assigned text for discussion that day, only a few hands popped up in the class of 20 or so. “Who do you imagine is going to read your books,” she asked in mild exasperation, “if you’re not prepared to read books yourself?”

That incident back in the early 2000s wasn’t a one-off, as she recalls an earlier one while teaching an undergraduate English literature class at the University of Sydney in the 1980s. “The majority of students would regularly come to tutorials having not read the texts,” she says. “It was demoralising. When I asked them, ‘Why aren’t you reading the texts?’ they’d reply ‘Oh, we don’t really like reading.’ And many were English majors studying to become English teachers!”