Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic cover story makes a compelling case that America is entering a postliterate era.
I would extend her logic one step further: even when students do read, we routinely mistake recognition for comprehension.
Her piece, “The End of Reading Is Here,” documents the decline. From 1984 to 2025, the share of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent.
I’ve spent twenty-five years teaching students one-on-one, and the difference between finishing a passage and understanding it is hard to miss.
When I teach reading comprehension, I routinely pause and ask: “What does this word, sentence, or paragraph mean - in your own words?”
Even with the text open, the task is difficult for many students. Once I close the book, it often becomes nearly impossible.
I often remind my students:
Familiarity isn’t fluency.
More reading still matters. But students who cannot explain a passage need more than additional pages. They need explicit instruction in how to build meaning from a text.
When students know how to work through a difficult passage, they understand more, persist longer, and return to reading more willingly. Depth and volume begin to reinforce each other.
Schools teach decoding explicitly through phonics and fluency instruction, but often leave the operations of comprehension implicit.
Then they assess comprehension as though students should have discovered the method for themselves.
Comprehension can be taught. I teach it as translation:
1. Close the text.
2. Rebuild the idea in your own words.
3. Explain how the parts connect.
4. Check your explanation against the page.
5. Where your explanation breaks, return and revise.
This is the right kind of friction: the student has to produce the explanation, not merely recognize it.
This practice is one part of Functional Learning, which develops three core literacies: reading to learn, organizing knowledge, and sequencing complexity. In instructional terms: comprehension as translation, critical thinking as structure, and problem solving as sequence.
These are not traits students either possess or lack. They are operations that can be named, practiced, and assessed.
I help students, families, and schools build these capacities - so students read more willingly and carry more understanding away from what they read.
Readers aren’t born. They’re built.