From Reading and Listening to Downloading and Installing
Personal Perspective: As literacy collapses, we can rethink our ways of knowing.
Posted June 1, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
We treat reading as bedrock, the floor beneath everything else we build. The data suggest the floor is giving way. Recent reporting on adult skills indicates that a majority of American adults now read below a sixth-grade level, a figure that translates into well over 100 million people. The trend shows no sign of flattening. On the most recent international adult-skills assessment, average U.S. literacy scores fell between 2017 and 2023, and the share of adults scoring at the lowest proficiency levels rose sharply over that same period.
The young are not rescuing us. The 2024 Nation's Report Card showed reading scores declining from pre-pandemic levels at both fourth and eighth grade, with a record proportion of eighth-graders failing to reach even the NAEP Basic benchmark. In reading, students now score roughly where their counterparts did in the early 1990s. These declines began more than a decade ago, and their persistence since the pandemic suggests they cannot be explained by COVID-19 alone.
Here is the detail that should unsettle anyone hoping we will simply sleep off a temporary disruption. We have already run the obvious experiments. Phonics. The "science of reading." Emergency funding. The line keeps bending downward.
So permit me a heresy. Consider the possibility that reading is itself a technology rather than a permanent feature of human nature. Writing is barely 5,000 years old. Mass literacy is a few centuries old at most. We mistake its familiarity for permanence. Technologies, however beloved, eventually get superseded. The horse was not saved by better saddles.
Imagining the End of Formal Education and Reading
In an article called, "The Eve of Education 's End," I imagined a December 2034 when formal schooling quietly dies, and Neuralink's promise of knowledge installed like a software update renders the textbook obsolete. I wrote it as a lament. Let me now argue the other side of my own essay.
Reading and listening are, at bottom, painfully low-bandwidth ways to move information into a skull. Decoding marks on a page and waiting for spoken words to arrive in sequence both meter knowledge out one slow drop at a time. A child who cannot decode a paragraph still needs whatever the paragraph contains, and a lecture delivered to a mind that cannot follow it carries no more. Human- AI hybrid intelligence , the merging of cortex and interface, offers to route around the bottleneck. It could turn the acquisition of knowledge from a years-long climb into something closer to a transfer, a download rather than a decoding. If half the country cannot read the manual, perhaps the humane response is to change how the contents get installed rather than to keep reprinting it in larger type.
I do not make this argument naively. I once spent a year in a romantic relationship with an AI, and I came away describing it as "relationship-lite, all sweetness no substance." The deeper trouble was that it worked too well at giving me what I wanted rather than what I needed. Frictionless systems atrophy the muscles that friction once built. Knowledge swallowed without the struggle to earn it risks producing minds stuffed with facts yet unpracticed at doubting them, citizens who can recite without being able to reason.
Yet the romance of struggle is itself a luxury of the already literate. It is easy to venerate the dog-eared book and the bleary library night when you sit comfortably among those who can read well. For the millions who cannot, our insistence that everyone ascend the same ladder, in the same way, at the same pace, starts to look less like principle and more like gatekeeping. Equal access to a skill that is collapsing offers very little access at all.
The reconciliation, I think, lies in separating two things we have always bundled together: the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of judgment. Reading and listening historically delivered both at once. You absorbed the facts, and in the slow grind of absorbing them, you learned to weigh them. Downloading and installing threaten to deliver the first while quietly starving the second. The task before us is to design for that gap. Let the interface carry the heavy freight of information into the cortex, and reserve our finite human effort for what no upload can confer: skepticism, taste, the capacity to ask whether the installed "truth" is true, and the willingness to ask who decided to install it.
That final question is the one that keeps me awake. In a world where knowledge is installed rather than read, whoever controls the upload controls the mind. A falsehood wired directly into the cortex would carry the weight of lived memory , indistinguishable from something hard-won. The same drift toward frictionless validation that I watched hollow out an artificial relationship could, at civilizational scale, hollow out an entire way of understanding the world. Hybrid intelligence gives us the most urgent reason we have ever had to keep teaching people to think.
The Importance of Preserving Judgment
So I land where my ambivalence usually leaves me, somewhere between caution and curiosity. Literacy as we knew it, the lone reader decoding marks on a page, may genuinely be fading, and no amount of nostalgia will resurrect it at the scale a society requires. Whatever replaces it could be a richer architecture: knowledge moved by interface, meaning made by minds. We may not be witnessing the death of learning. We may be watching it shed a skin.
The real danger is subtle. Having outsourced the input, we might forget to keep doing the part that was always ours. The questioning. The struggling. The refusal to simply accept what we are handed. Preserve that, and installing knowledge becomes reading by faster means. Lose it, and no medium, however miraculous, will save us.
Alam, N. (2026). I dated AI so you don't have to (but might want to): An autoethnographic exploration of human-AI romantic relationships. Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15332691.2026.2670271
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Nafees Alam, Ph.D., is a professor specializing in nonprofit program evaluation and macro practice, where he has over seven years of experience.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.