Read Real Books
There should be nothing controversial about a new bill aimed at getting kids to read
Hollywood’s latest degrowther nonsense takes the screen today. This time, it takes the form of a cuddly little beaver and its wisecracking friends from the animal world. Hoppers, out today from Disney-Pixar, tells the story of a 19-year-old girl who becomes a beaver in order to protect a backwater pond from being developed by greedy humans.1 What do we have to do to get a YIMBY Pixar movie? If it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:
Easy as A-B-C: The BOOKS Act might help stave off the brain-rotting effects of short-form video
Another Think Tank Weighs In: New child care paper from the Center for Renewing America
It’s Me, Hi: Christian Post, Washington Stand, WSJ Free Expression
Parting Shots
Easy as A-B-C
Last year, The Argument’s Lakshya Jain wrote up a delightfully juicy finding that didn’t quite get the attention it deserved. When you ask Americans if they’ve read a book in the past year, 74 percent of Americans will reply “yes.” Ask them to name the specific book, and the number falls to 58 percent.
The Argument didn’t poll high school students but there’s no reason to believe their results would be any different. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (commonly referred to as the “nation’s report card”) asked 13-year-olds how often they read for fun in 2012, more than half said weekly or more often. By 2023, that had fallen to one-third of 13-year-olds; the number who said they read for fun “almost every day” had fallen by half.
The results speak for themselves: After years of progress, peaking in 2012, the average reading score for a 13-year-old on the national assessment have fallen back to the same level as in 1975. Female high school seniors saw their average score on the national reading assessment fall by 5 points from 2013, a 1.7% decline. For their male counterparts, who already started at a lower level, average scores fell by 7 points over the decade, a 2.5% drop.
If you want to bet that reading will become less important as the singularity approaches and we all have Large Language Model outputs beamed directly into consciousness, these trends may not trouble you. But for the rest of us, living in a society that is largely premised on a citizenry able to weigh competing claims, assess the strength of arguments, and have some degree of empathy in being able to put oneself in an author’s shoes, these trends should be red lights blinking fast enough to require one of those pre-show “may affect photosensitive viewers” labels on Netflix.
Into the breach steps my EPPC colleague, Stanley Kurtz, who together with First Things contributing editor Mark Bauerlein has introduced a new piece of model legislation with a radically simple idea — schools should require middle and high schoolers to read a book. Two of them, actually, each semester of sixth through twelfth grades. In their New York Post piece previewing the new approach, Kurtz and Bauerlein write:
“Reading scores continue to fall, college teachers find they can’t assign novels and expect them to be read in their entirety, and leisure reading by Gen Z tallies barely eight minutes a day.
“Some blame cellphones and social media, which erode the attention span needed to carry out long-form reading. Others blame Common Core, which emphasized close reading of short passages, as do the SAT and ACT exams. Curriculum providers, too, make more money on their own assembled anthologies than on complete works such as “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“However much these and other factors are at play, the result is disastrous…Requiring a minimum of four a year in English, while allowing teachers to assign more, if desired, would essentially restore the previous norm: That was the typical load prior to the 1990s; since then, the number has dropped, hitting around one to three books a year in the 2020s…[the BOOKS Act would] leaves plenty of room for modern texts, while still exposing students to the rich vocabulary, varied customs and splendid masterpieces of earlier eras.”
I don’t know if we can brute force our way into reviving a culture of literacy, and I suspect the authors don’t either. The trendlines are daunting and the scope of the problem larger than any one initiative. The U.S. Department of Education (or what is left of it) posted a meme encouraging families to remember that “Parents are the best educators. Literacy starts at home!” True, but discouraging — children who have the privilege of being raised by two college-educated parents will almost certainly need less direct legislative inducement to pick up a book than those who grow up in households where parents are stressed, short on time, and likely less interested in reading on their own. (Jain’s more precise specification finds that seven in ten Americans with a college degree or more could name a specific book they read last year, compared to half of those without a college degree.)
But there seems to be almost no downside to trying to encourage middle and high school students, in particular, to develop the critical thinking and attention span necessary to get through a whole book, instead of the excerpts and paragraphs too often used in English classes today.
Family Matters encourages reading but does not pretend to have any deep insights into cultivating a child’s love of literature or helping them find books worth reading (though two Substacks that can be recommended on the topic are Alyssa Rosenberg’s The Shop Around the Corner and Rachelle Peterson’s The Hundred Acre Bookshelf.)
With the parties having realigned along educational lines, the political coalition most likely to have read a book in the last year is Democrats, not Republicans. So one might naturally think the BOOKS Act could receive some bipartisan support. Two things might get in the way: Kurtz and Bauerlein would require books on English class syllabi to be “of proven merit;” at least one would have to have been written before the year 1900.
“Who determines ‘merit’?”, one can hear the naysayers protest. “Don’t you know students get more excited to read contemporary novels, from diverse perspectives, in which they can see themselves reflected in the stories?” Well, maybe some do, but if the results from the last decade or two of relying on contemporary narratives are any proof, perhaps fewer do than those who make this argument realize. If shelves of diverse, contemporary voices alone were enough to get kids reading, we would be having a different conversation. But given our trajectory, we need to shake things up. Our goal is, or should be, to produce citizens capable of participating in a free society. To do so, we may find necessary to require them to make their way through material that is slightly more challenging, if more foreign to modern eyes, than the kind of titles that go viral on YA BookTok.
The BOOKS Act recognizes that the lowest-common denominator approach to reading has failed. Allowing teachers to assign paragraphs, even chapters, rather than whole books is, in essence, giving up. Too many states have effectively allowed schools to slide the metric down to where social media-addicted teenagers are found, rather than trying to help them discover they, too, have the ability to do what generations did before them. This is where the 1900 threshold comes in. It posits an educational paradigm that wants to situate students in the context of where they have come from — to see that their struggles are perhaps not so different than the loves, lusts, and longings of characters from centuries gone by, and that there is a lot we can learn about ourselves and our situation from the best of what has been written and said. This approach does require the barest of all normative claims; namely, that some books are better than others. Some progressives might shudder at the thought; others should look at the possibility of a world in which too many of tomorrow’s young adults have had their brains one-shotted by short-form video and be willing to try something new (which is, in fact, something rather old.)
According to the Washington Post’s Rachel Roubein and Lauren Weber, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is putting his high-profile questions around vaccine safety, which poll poorly, on the back-burner ahead of the impending midterm elections. Instead, the Secretary is foregrounding a new campaign dubbed “Eat Real Food.” Mike Tyson appeared in a Super Bowl commercial promoting the campaign (no word on whether Evander Holyfield’s ear meets the designation of “real food” or not). The BOOKS Act, and accompanying support from red state governors or Trump administration officials, could become part of a campaign designed to get high schools to “Read Real Books.” We might even convince some adults to join the movement as well.
Another Think Tank Weighs In
The Heritage Foundation made waves with its behemoth white paper on the status of the family and how policy might better shore it up. Now, another Washington think tank has unveiled their entry, which is more concise and targeted, and perhaps more tractable.
The Center for Renewing America’s Paige Hauser has released a report entitled “Family Formation and Child-Care Policies,” which takes on the child care affordability question through a first principles lens. The role of government, Hauser argues, is not to subsidize child care, but to recognize “the ability to care for one’s own children is a social good of the highest order.” She proposes:
A $5,000 Child Tax Credit, fully refundable to any household with children so long as at least one parent is working full-time2;
A 50% ($2,500) increase in the Child Tax Credit for married households, so long as one parent is working full-time;
A monthly young child supplement Child Tax Credit supplement, paid for by eliminating other existing federal support for child care (Head Start, CCDF, and CDCTC). She suggests that it could be distributed broadly, at around $1,300 per child, or focused on families at or below median income, for a benefit of about $2,600.
The final two sections focus on expanding more informal options and supply-side efforts to boost child care supply, which is interesting if somewhat at odds with the goal stated previously.
Of course, there are big trade-offs in trying to convert the federal approach to early childhood into an all-cash approach. As she notes, a family currently receiving heavily-subsidized child care through a CCDBG certificate would almost certainly be worse off. A newly-married couple with a single breadwinner and a new baby, however, could find themselves with an additional $8,800 to $10,100 a year, depending on the program design. Politically, I’m pretty sure that won’t have legs; the sticker price alone is going to give all but the most ardent populist heartburn. But as another entry into helping conservatives think harder about the ends and means of supporting family through policy, Hauser’s new paper is a worthwhile and welcome addition to the fray.
It’s Me, Hi
Ryan Foley of the Christian Post and Dan Hart of the Washington Stand writes a piece pegged to my recent IFS post about the changing geography of American family life.
For WSJ Free Expression, the Wall Street Journal’s extension into Substack, Mary Julia Koch links to my recent Family Matters post on Israeli fertility:
Parting Shots
For the Daily Wire’s new Upstream vertical, Emily Zanotti writes about the foolishness of a new Tennessee bill that would punish women for seeking out an abortion, up to and including the death penalty. (Daily Wire)
Dr. Leonard Sax MD PhD, a family physician for over three decades, writes about the growing partisan divide in parenting styles he sees (Commonplace)
Lauren Lumpkin and Praveena Somasundaram on the growing momentum to teach the “Success Sequence” in state legislatures — seven red states have introduced bills to date (The Washington Post)
Dylan Macinerney writes about the relative lack of “fatherhood” groups relative to “mothers” groups — I think the conversation can be generalized to “men,” rather than just “fathers,” given some of the dynamics explored, but good reflections (Yahoo!)
Anecdotes aside, the data does not suggest a Great Religious Reawakening among young adults today. Elise Ureneck reviews a new book by Christian Smith to understand why. (Angelus News)
Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) writes about his Parents Over Platforms Act, which would set minimum ages on smart phones apps, among other changes (The Hill)
In her Bloomberg column, Abby McCloskey argues that a change as simple as changing when families are able to draw down support from government can improve their well-being, if additional spending is not in the cards (Bloomberg)
A bill passed by the Florida House of Representatives would ban contracts for international adoption or surrogacy in the state from any resident of a foreign country of concern (including China). (WLRN)
Matt Darling offers a killer analogy to understand what’s happening to the labor market — it’s turned into Tinder (The Argument)
Christine Emba writes on why Gen Z is in a dating recession: “it makes more sense to turn inward than to make oneself vulnerable, to nihilistically maxx rather than actually encounter the other.” (New York Times)
Katelyn Beaty looks at the legacy of 1990s raunch culture and wonders — what if religious conservatives were right?
An update on what’s really happening to wages for young men — and what it says about the state of marriage — from AEI’s Scott Winship at his Substack, First World Problems:
Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.
In his Wall Street Journal review, Kyle Smith says the film’s “heroine is an excitable activist who seems to be aiming for a future dreaming up legal roadblocks at zoning-board meetings.” Where have you gone, Mr. Incredible, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you…
In theory, this is a tidy way of trying to address the perennial conservative concern about work disincentives. One big challenge with defining “full-time” work in tax benefits, however, is that there’s not an especially good way of tracking this; you can ask employees to self-report hours, or try to jerry-rig some way of maybe trying to track hours worked using state payroll taxes, but there’s not an elegant or simple way to do it, which is why the conventional approach uses household income. And then you also get to situations — say, an economic downturn — in which a parents’ hours fall below the “full-time” threshold through no fault of their own.