Reading as a Social Act
When we picture a reader, we picture a person alone. A child curled in a window seat. A teenager with a flashlight under the covers. The image is so settled that it has become the measure of the thing itself: if your child is not sitting silently with a book, your child is not reading.
That picture is worth holding up to the light. In an essay in The New York Times, Peter Schmidt, program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention, argues that reports of literacy's death are greatly exaggerated. Reading isn't ending, he writes; it's changing to meet needs that screens can't. His formulation is hard to improve on: the future of reading is a party.
His case is worth walking through, because it has a consequence for how we teach children that he doesn't quite draw out.
Literature began out loud
Start with the history, which Schmidt reconstructs nicely. For most of the life of literature, the word reader would have meant something closer to listener. The Epic of Gilgamesh was recited before it was ever a private possession. The Homeric poems were carried by bards who performed them for audiences, refined across generations of live delivery. The oral tradition was not a primitive stage that writing improved upon. It was the native habitat of story, and the written text was at first largely a script for performance.
Even after books existed, reading stayed loud. Schmidt notes that Herodotus is thought to have read portions of his histories aloud, and that recitationes — public readings of written work — were a favored form of entertainment and debate in Imperial Rome. His best piece of evidence is an aside in Augustine's Confessions, where Augustine comes upon Ambrose reading silently and finds it strange enough to write down: "While reading, his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent." A bishop reading without moving his lips was a curiosity worth reporting.
Silent, solitary, interior reading is a comparatively recent settlement. As Schmidt puts it, the spread of the printed word and the democratization of literacy cemented silent absorption as the dominant image of the reading person. That is the kind of reading we built our schools around. It is also, he points out, precisely the kind of reading students are now failing to do in ever greater numbers.
On that point: In the 2024 Nation's Report Card, twelfth-grade reading scores were the lowest ever recorded, with 32 percent of seniors falling below NAEP Basic, the largest share in the history of the assessment. The habit is thinning outside school too: a 2025 study in iScience, drawing on twenty years of American Time Use Survey data, found the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023, a drop of roughly 40 percent.
Two crises, one very good idea
The numbers are not in dispute. American high school seniors are reading at the lowest levels in over twenty years, and college students increasingly arrive unable to work through a book cover to cover. Running alongside it is a second problem that looks unrelated and isn't. In 2023, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a formal advisory titled "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation," reporting that Americans between 15 and 24 were spending roughly 70 percent less time in person with friends than their counterparts two decades earlier, and that the mortality risk of chronic social disconnection is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Similar numbers filled Jon Haidt’s Anxious Generation and the podcasts of Scott Galloway. Young people who came of age through pandemic lockdowns and the rise of social media are hungry for exactly the kind of unhurried, in-person company that used to be ordinary — asking questions and thinking something through with other human beings in a room, rather than onscreen.
What Schmidt documents is a generation solving both at once, mostly without waiting for permission. The Silent Book Club, whose members gather to read quietly in each other's company, now has more than 2,000 chapters across 68 countries. Gen Z reading groups are forming across the United States. The Consumption Book Club, run by two young artists, stages novels such as Jeff VanderMeer's "Annihilation" as meticulously themed dinner parties with facilitated conversation. A public reading of Ginsberg's "Howl" organized by twenty-somethings drew hundreds of people to Washington Square Park. Schmidt's own school convenes groups more than a dozen times a month across six states for "Sidewalk Study," in which participants read and enact long-form texts while moving through public space.
These sound, frankly, like more fun than most of what school does with a book. The best illustration is one Schmidt helped organize himself: an all-night group recitation of Whitman's "Song of Myself" in Dumbo, on the Brooklyn waterfront, on the eve of the poet's 207th birthday. Twenty-five people RSVP'd; roughly fifty showed up, nearly all of them in their twenties. Four hours of recitation, singing, repetition, and call-and-response later, the group walked down to the East River and let out a collective yawp at two in the morning. In the quiet afterward, a recent college graduate admitted she had never read Whitman before. Several heads nodded — she wasn't the only one. Then she asked: "Let's do it again?"
That is not a literacy intervention as we usually conceive of one. It is better. Nobody was assessed, and everybody wanted to come back.
Reading was never solitary anyway
Here is where we'd push Schmidt's argument one step further, because it has a quieter implication for the child in the window seat. She was never actually alone either.
Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John's College, believes that reading a book is inherently social: a dialogue between reader and author. "One of the reasons why I like books as a model of learning is that there's an author in the book who you're connecting with when you open it," she told the writer David Perell. "So there's something communal, even just in reading a book. You're in a corner, reading a book, but there's someone with you, it's the author."
What makes a book an education, Hitz has said elsewhere, "is exactly its ability to invite you into conversation as an equal" — not to hand down a lesson, but to take you seriously enough to argue with you.
On this account reading is always a dialogue. There is a person on the other side of the page making an argument, withholding something, setting a trap, changing their mind halfway through. To read well is to answer back: to object, to ask what they meant, to catch them contradicting themselves in chapter nine. The silence is a technicality. Schmidt's parties aren't importing sociability into a solitary act; they're making visible something that was in the act all along.
What this means for your child
It means "did you understand the book?" is close to the wrong question. A book worth reading does not have a message the way a memo has a message. It has layers, and the reader's work is to swim down through them, which is slow work and never quite finished, and much easier with someone else in the water with you.
This is why comprehension worksheets so reliably drain the life out of a text. They presume a single correct reading, waiting to be located and reported. Real understanding tends to arrive some other way: two people arguing about whether Achilles is admirable, a parent and a fourteen-year-old disagreeing about what Gatsby actually wanted, a question nobody in the room can settle. The meaning isn't extracted. It's built, out loud, between people.
What do we do with this?
Well, as parents, we can read aloud to our children long past the age when they can read to themselves. We can read what they're reading and pick a fight about it. Let them hear us be wrong about a poem or a novel.
We can engage with this new movement of reading socially and join one of the groups Schmidt shares. Do it with our kids!
And, of course, if you want the oldest version of this—the one the ancient Greeks would recognize—it is one learner and one teacher with a text between them, working out what it means. One-to-one learning is the original educational technology, and it turns out to be the one that survives every crisis: not a book delivered, but a conversation begun.