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DL 439

Who Controls a Postliterate Society

Published: July 15, 2026 • 📧 Newsletter

Hi all, welcome back to Digitally Literate.

I'm on the road this week, facilitating sessions at the 2026 A.I. Educator Summer Institute, and literacy, especially reading, keeps coming up. It's a tension I've been circling in the last couple of issues: whether we're becoming an illiterate society, and whether the AI boom is masking that fact rather than causing it. This issue digs into that.

This week, I published this piece on Defining AI-literacy and AI-illiteracy: how teachers and their students are using and misusing AI in English language and literature classes.

As always, your support is valued. Reach out anytime at hello@wiobyrne.com, and subscribe if you haven't already.

🪦 The End of Reading Is Here

The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch argues America isn't illiterate, it's "postliterate." And that's arguably worse.

We haven't forgotten how to decode words. We've lost the will to sustain attention long enough to actually think with them. Horowitch's essay argues that this is a civilizational shift, not a moral panic, and draws on 2,300 years of history to make the case.

The frame: Horowitch opens with the Library of Alexandria, destroyed not primarily by fire or war, as legend has it, but by the slow erosion of the will to maintain it. She argues that reading culture is dying the same way. No single culprit, just accumulating neglect.

The numbers:

The culprits: Short-form video is the big one — average screen attention span has collapsed from 2.5 minutes (2004) to about 47 seconds today. AI is the newer threat. Students aren't just skimming books; they're outsourcing the reading entirely. One Harvard student reportedly had ChatGPT "translate" A Clockwork Orange so he wouldn't have to read it.

The twist: This isn't just a literacy story, it's a politics story. Leaning on McLuhan and Postman, Horowitch calls Trump "our first postliterate president." A communication style built for an oral/meme culture (repetition, contradiction, epithets) rather than the linear argumentation print culture rewards. Her claim is that declining literacy and rising populism are the same phenomenon, viewed from different angles.

The counterpoint she doesn't quite buy: Print sales are up, indie bookstores are opening. But she notes just 20% of adults now account for 80%+ of books read. Reading isn't dying so much as shrinking into a hobbyist subculture, like stamp collecting.

Why it matters: If she's right, the stakes go beyond test scores. They're about whether large numbers of people retain the capacity for sustained, linear, analytical thought at all, and what that does to a democracy that assumed an informed reading public.

📚 Deciding What Kids Can Read

Late last month, the Texas State Board of Education did something no state has done quite like this before. It mandated a literary canon.

Starting this school year, every public school student in Texas, more than 5 million kids, will be required to read a state-specified list of titles in their entirety, no excerpts allowed. The twist drawing national attention is that Bible stories sit alongside the classics on that list, part of a broader push by conservative education reformers to bring Christian teachings into public classrooms.

It didn't happen in isolation. The same vote overhauled the state's social studies curriculum, killing the 6th-grade "World Cultures" course and expanding units on communism, signaling this is as much a battle over what ideas students absorb as it is about literacy itself. Public reaction has been sharply split, with parents and teachers packing board hearings on both sides.

The irony is hard to miss as reading itself is in freefall nationally, Texas is legislating, in granular detail, exactly what the dwindling number of people who do read should be reading. Worth watching whether other red states follow Texas's lead, as education-policy watchers say this could be a template.

That tension between prescribing and restricting isn't unique to Texas. ALA's 2026 State of America's Libraries report found 4,235 unique titles challenged and 5,668 banned in 2025, with nearly 92% of challenges driven by organized pressure groups rather than individual parents. Meanwhile, eight states (CA, DE, IL, MD, MN, NJ, RI, WA) have now passed "freedom to read" laws barring officials from pulling books for partisan or ideological reasons, a direct counter-current to what Texas just did.

Same underlying fight, opposite instincts. One side decides what kids must read. The other fights over what they're allowed to read.

🌿 The Understory

In 1939, alarmed by libraries around the country banning John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the American Library Association (ALA) adopted the Library Bill of Rights. It didn't stop anything. By 1953, McCarthy-era pressure had gotten the State Department to strip hundreds of books by dozens of "un-American" authors, including Hemingway, Twain, and Langston Hughes, from its own overseas libraries. In response, ALA and the American Book Publishers Council issued the Freedom to Read Statement that May. This was a joint declaration that readers, not organized pressure groups or government censors, get to decide what's worth reading.

Seventy-plus years later, the same shape reappears. The ALA's own 2026 report found the vast majority of last year's book challenges traced back to organized campaigns, not individual parents. In addition, a handful of states have passed freedom-to-read laws almost identical in spirit to that 1953 statement, while others move in the opposite direction.

See you next Wednesday. As always, my email is hello@wiobyrne.com.

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