Why aren’t kids reading anymore? Maybe because teachers treat them like children

Steven Tucker

December 17, 2024 11 Reactions

Judge a book by nothing but its cover

Another culprit fingered by Bate for the more recent decline in his students’ reading skills was the “currently fashionable” idea that it was all due to “the attrition of [teens’] attention span due to smartphones, six-minute YouTube videos and instant TikTok dopamine hits.”

Inspired by Bate’s words, British tabloid the Daily Mail went on the hunt for the most comically moronic examples of so-called “Book-Tokkers”, a tribe of generally female millennial social media influencers whose brand centres upon making short, ultra-enthusiastic and chatty videos for the clip-sharing app in question, proclaiming their enthusiasm for works which disproportionately seem to be from the genre of Young Adult fantasy romance – think gay elves, lesbian mermaids, and other such fairies, both literal and figurative.

These seem little more than teenage Mills & Boon, but even their limited requirements appear too high for some. The Daily Mail highlighted the sad case of Miranda from the US, known online as @probablyoffreading, who held out her hands in measurement and said “If there’s a paragraph this big, I’m skipping it, I’m skipping it,” which would be a bit unfortunate if said long paragraph happened to be the one in which Sherlock Holmes finally revealed who the killer was or something. 

Other BookTokkers cited by the Mail admitted that they “only read the dialogue” in books, not any of the actual descriptions. Why not stick to reading play-scripts, then? Better not skip the stage-directions if you do, though, otherwise you might miss that King Duncan gets stabbed.

The most notorious example was that of another US BookTokker called @yannareads, who apparently can’t. This highly blonde individual went viral back in August after asking this of the Young Adult fantasy novel Six of Crows: “Why are the pages filled with so many words?” Because it’s a book. This classic idiocy promptly produced mocking tweets like the following: 

 This sounds true. A rival group to the BookTokkers are the “Bookstagrammers”, who post boastful photos of themselves enjoying books on the online photo-sharing app Instagram. But by “enjoying” here, they don’t necessarily mean “reading” – some simply purchase books to match them to their outfits, like so:   

As a sale is a sale, publishers are now designing book covers with social media specifically in mind; some Bookstagrammers buy multiple copies of the same title with different coloured covers so as to co-ordinate them with their chosen daily outfits. Books have become fashion accessories, things to be seen reading (or pretending to read), rather than to actually read per se – a bit like when everyone bought Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time back in the 1980s, placed it prominently on their bookshelves, but never actually got beyond page ten, as it was incomprehensible.

So, this phenomenon is not entirely new – but what is perhaps new is that, today, decisions about what actual books to publish in the first place are beginning to be made based purely on how they will look on social media, it is not simply the surface superficiality of their covers as such that are being designed to play well online.

If influencers wanted to be truly adventurous in their humour, though, they’d pose for selfies holding the original-name first edition of The  N***** of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad. Or maybe even just a copy of Mein Kampf?  

Sending text messages

Bookshops too are being remodelled to cater for such highly online persons. A few years back, I remember being initially puzzled by seeing a teenage girl in my local branch of Waterstones (Britain’s biggest book retailer), wandering around the place holding up book after book whilst smiling inanely into a cameraphone being compliantly wielded by her mother, and making “peace” signs, etc. After 20 minutes, the pair left the shop without making a single purchase. “We get this a lot …” an assistant wearily explained – and that is how I first learned what BookTokking and Bookstagramming were: i.e., the pure work of Satan.

Today, branches of Waterstones nationwide now have special “BookTok Recommended” tables, explicitly designed for tweenage girls to gather around giggling and taking selfies, hopefully before actually buying something this time. And, if not, maybe stores could just employ Humbert Humbert as a highly creepy assistant to keep such underage timewasters away – they certainly won’t be well-read enough to know who he actually is.

A poll of 2,000 16-25-year-old bookworms found around 59 percent credited BookTok with sparking their love of reading in the first place – but what does the phrase “reading a book” even now truly mean here? Going online and bragging about having done so; on BookTok and Bookstagram, you merely perform being a reader more than actually being one. You could even just be lying, bluffing your way through your enthusiasms, based on skim-reading summaries of the books elsewhere.

Being well-read still carries some kind of cultural cachet, in spite of everything, being popularly viewed as some kind of vestigial proxy for traditional ideas of intelligence, culture, or whatever. Seen in this light, BookTokking is pure vanity more than anything. Why, acting like this would be as utterly show-offy and self-conceited as writing an article on a public news and commentary website boasting about having read an entire 1,269-page edition of Michel de Montaigne, or something …

As for myself, I’m afraid I’ve only read about 20 of Mercator’s “101 Books Millennials Must Read Before They Die” – but I can assure you, they’re all the longest and most complex ones with by far the greatest literary worth. They’re all lined up coded neatly by colour and size on my bedroom bookshelf, and I can provide you with the highly reshareable photos to prove it if you want.  

Have you ever read a book more than 250 pages long (not including the Harry Potter novels)? Would you repeat the experience?   

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

Image credit: Bigstock