November 2025
“Well, I always say to people, when I went to Yale, I learned how to read. Which doesn’t sound very good. But that really is it. That’s all we’re learning. We’re learning how to read. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a scientist or whether you’re a dancer or whether you’re a literature major, the idea is to see something and experience it and go deeper than the surface.”
*Jodie Foster, The Radcliffe Forum, June 26, 2025
Jodie Foster’s reflection on her Yale education may sound almost absurd -- “I learned how to read” -- until you think about what she means. She’s not talking about decoding words on a page, but learning to see more deeply, to ask better questions, to move beyond the surface.
And that’s exactly what is slipping away for many of today’s students.
The Crisis in Reading
In September 2025, The Nation’s Report Card, a publication of the National Center for Education Statistics, released the latest reading scores for high school seniors. The results were sobering: the average scores fell to their lowest level since 1992. It was the first assessment of 12th graders since the pandemic -- and it revealed a widening gap between the strongest and weakest readers in the country.
Discussing these results in Harvard’s Thinking podcast, a panel of education experts gave no ground to prevailing assumptions that "it's the fault of the pandemic":
One panelist declared, “While it may be tempting to chalk up the decline in reading skills to COVID learning loss, the scores continue a slide that predates the pandemic.”
Another panelist added, “Reading scores for American students peaked in 2015 in Grade 4, and in 2013 in Grade 8. In Grade 8, the scores have been falling steadily since 2017. And if I showed you a graph of that decline, you wouldn’t be able to pick out the years in which school closures took place and the pandemic was raging. Rather it looks like just a steady linear decline over, now, close to a decade.”
One panelist brought the problem home – literally -- by urging parents to read aloud to their children and, just as importantly, to let their children see parents reading for their own learning, not just entertainment.
That last suggestion may be the most powerful one of all. If we want our kids to read more deeply, we must model deeper reading ourselves. But that raises a challenge: can we model the kind of college-level reading our students will soon be expected to do? Can we show them how to approach nonfiction texts -- those dense, idea-rich readings assigned in college -- that demand comprehension, synthesis, and time management?
Learning How to Read Again
One of the best guides for this kind of reading is Mortimer Adler’s and Charles Van Doren’s classic How to Read a Book. It’s a book that, ironically, teaches you that you’ve probably never really learned how to read a book.
Adler and Van Doren make a crucial distinction between passive reading -- simply following words across a page -- and active reading, which means interrogating a book as you go. The goal, they write, is not merely to finish the book but to understand it.
Here’s how parents (and students) can begin practicing and modeling “active reading”:
Create urgency and intention.
Before you start, ask yourself: How much time do I have to give this book? Be honest. Set a timer. College reading isn’t about drifting through a novel on a beach; it’s about disciplined engagement within a time frame. Learning to focus under constraint is one of the most valuable habits you can pass on.
Inspect before you read.
Adler and Van Doren call this step inspectional reading. It means previewing the book before you dive in:
Start with the table of contents. What’s the arc of the book? What subjects or authors jump out at you? What questions do they raise?
Then, check the index. Which terms or thinkers appear most often? Why might they be central to the argument?
This inspection transforms any alien book into a field of your questions.
Read to answer your questions.
Once you’ve written down those questions, read selectively to answer them. You don’t need to read from page one to the end. Start where the content intersects with your curiosity and purpose. This is how scholars read -- and how students can keep reading from feeling overwhelming.
Take notes -- actively.
Whether you write in the margins, use sticky notes, or take digital notes in an app like Obsidian, the key is to make your thinking visible. When kids see you doing this, they see that reading isn’t a passive act. It’s a form of dialogue with ideas.
Modeling Reading as a Way of Thinking
When parents read visibly and purposefully, they send a quiet but powerful message: this is what intellectual life looks like. A teenager who sees a parent pausing to annotate a passage, looking up a reference, or discussing an idea over dinner learns that reading isn’t just for homework -- it’s how thoughtful adults engage with the world.
These visible habits matter because our culture increasingly treats reading as easy consumption, reacting with emoji's and "likes," not as demanding dialogue that might change our minds. As The Economist warned on September 6, 2025, “(L)ose the ability to read complex prose and . . .you may also lose the ability to develop complex ideas.”
And those complex ideas are not optional luxuries. They are the bedrock of democratic citizenship and informed decision-making.
If, as Jodie Foster said, the real education at Yale -- or anywhere -- lies in “learning how to read,” then perhaps the best college preparation we can give our children isn’t a test-prep course or a resume-building internship. It’s showing them, day by day, how a curious, literate adult reads: with purpose, with questions, and with depth.