So, 2025 was the year everyone grew terribly concerned about declining literacy rates in the West. Yes, we heard a few grumblings about it before – about the students at elite universities who couldn’t read full novels, so had to resort to extracts and summaries – but now the full extent of the crisis has been revealed. Take it from the once-in-a-decade report from the OECD on “adult skills”: reading ability has declined or stagnated, pretty much everywhere.

Now there are reports that English literature students at American universities are struggling to parse the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House. This novel – as pointed out by James Marriott, the English critic who is most vocally despairing of the literacy crisis – was once regularly read by children. But something about mud accumulating “at compound interest” and the dogs “undistinguishable in mire” evades the reading capacity of college-age kids in 2025. Marriott calls this the “dawn of the post-literate society”. Too-clever-by-half optimists say it is all just a moral panic.

I do not think it is a moral panic; none of my friends........

© The Irish Times