Blog: We’re Becoming Illiterate.

Something disturbing that’s becoming harder and harder to ignore is the fact that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are becoming increasingly illiterate. This was recently illustrated by a video that went viral a few weeks ago in which a high school student asked his peers if they could read a simple sentence. The sentence was “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.” This sentence isn’t that hard to read or comprehend (though “silhouette” and “gauche” – coming from French – are, admittedly, a bit strange to pronounce and “gauche” isn’t a word commonly used) but the students in question failed miserably. They struggled to pronounce longer words, one of them immediately gave up, and when asked if they understood what the sentence was talking about, couldn’t answer.

Once again, this is a simple sentence talking about a woman wearing clothes that give her an interesting shape but look kind of ugly or awkward.

However, it wasn’t just this video taken at this one particular high school that illustrates this issue. Since the original video went viral, other street interviewers online have taken to asking strangers to read the same or a similar sentence. The results of this vary. Some people can read the sentence and understand what they’re reading. Others can read the sentence, but have no understanding of it whatsoever and still others fail in both areas.

Obviously, this concerning trend has led to much discourse around why this is happening. Most people blame the schools, technology, and bad parenting…and they aren’t wrong. A combination of all three has led to this.

Starting off with bad parenting, fewer parents than ever before are reading to their children and teaching them how to read. According to Education Weekly, in a 2025 survey in the UK done by Harper Collins, only 41% of UK parents read to their children 4-years-old and younger. 36% reported reading to their 5-7-year-olds regularly, and only 40% of survey respondents reported that reading to their kids was a fun experience.

Now, to some, it may seem unfair that I’m calling parents who don’t read to their children “bad parents,” and to some extent I can see why. But what many parents have forgotten is that it’s not the schools’ job to teach your kids to read. The majority of that task is on you. In fact, studies have shown that parents not reading to their kids correlates with fewer kids reading for fun or even being able to read at all. I have heard multiple teachers and professors say they can tell immediately who in their class was read to by their parents and who wasn’t going off of how well they could comprehend the English language.

Additionally, more parents, instead of sitting their kids down with a book to read, shove a screen in front of them, starting a dependency on technology at an early age. Why take the time and patience to read words on a page when you can be overstimulated by Cocomelon and Mr. Beast? Why teach your kids to understand a sentence when they have Google to read to them or interpret the sentence for them?

Then, there’s the schools. Over the past few decades, schools have increasingly begun moving away from using phonics to teach kids to read. Some teachers have even been reported discouraging their students from sounding out words, instead teaching them to guess the words based on context, pictures, and meaning. They don’t even teach them parts of language anymore. A friend of mine who’s an English professor once said that he could tell who in his class went to public school because they could not name a part of speech. It was a completely foreign concept to them.

Obviously, this way of teaching kids to read flies in the face of everything that teachers and scientists have observed for years about how the human brain understands written language, but why use that when you can make kids dumber and easier to control?

Moreover, schools have moved away from having students read full books and now have them read excerpts of books. This would already be concerning if it was just in elementary schools. However, it’s in every level of academia – elementary school, middle and high school, and even college. You can now get an English degree without ever having read the classics or studying a full book.

Thus, from a mixture of parents not teaching their kids to read, technology taking over kids’ attention spans and making them dependent on it for everything, and schools not effectively teaching kids to read, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have become functionally illiterate. They haven’t learned to read for fun or enjoyment, thus expanding their vocabulary and their knowledge of the world, but instead, to hate reading, seeing it as something forced upon them.

Need I say how dystopian this is? If we continue at this rate, we may reach a point where life is like that in Brave New World, where only the elite can and want to read.

Until next time,

M.J.