The worrisome trend in the U.S. that could explain what’s dividing the country

Whether it’s Donald Trump’s ‘instincts’ on bombing foreign sovereign nations, Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinian people, or who’s going to win next year’s Super Bowl, it’s startling to see just how divided the country is at the present time.

It feels as though sides must be taken; nuance no longer exists and battles, in person and online, must be fought at every opportunity. If someone doesn’t agree with you, they’re the enemy.

And now we (maybe) know why the country is like the way that it is: it’s the fact that America’s children aren’t reading as much as they used to.

Federal data has been released (despite Musk’s torching of government) that shows a steep decline in the number of children reading for pleasure in the United States across three decades, For example, an astonishing 16% of nine-year-olds “never or hardly ever” read for fun, a vertigo-inducing drop-off from previous years.

The good numbers are going the other way, too. Let’s stick with the niners. For decades now, the number of kiddos who said they read for fun “almost every day” bobbed happily above the 50% line like a carefree duck on a garden pond. For example, in 2012, that figure was 53%.

But by 2020, it had dropped to 42%, and in 2022 the number plummeted to 39%.

The trend is the same if we move on to 13-year-olds. In 2012 the ‘reading for fun “almost every day”’ number was at 27%; by 2020 it had fallen to 17% and two years later, it fell again to just 14%.

Adults, as you may expect, are following the trend, too. Over the past year, the percentage of American adults who said they read at least one book was at 48.5%, down from 52.7% five years earlier, and 54.6% ten years earlier than that.

All these damning stats beg the question: why? The answer is simple, dear friend: social media.

The National Education Association report says that social media is “a threat” that can “impair literacy and literary imagination”. It adds that even for those who read on a screen, issues with education arise: “the relationship between leisure digital reading and text comprehension proved downright negative for primary and middle school learners“, it writes.

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I’ll even add that social media is working hard at making us divisive, angry, and polarised on quite literally every current topic on planet Earth. Elon Musk bought Twitter and not only killed the bird but also turned the platform into a cesspit of AI mush and misinformation that has fuelled political division and hatred across the country. Supporting your political party has been turned into supporting your football team: you have to hate the other side, and it’s killing us.

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