GEOFF BENNETT: In the last few years, there's been growing concern about how reading habits are changing among children, both in school and at home.

That includes questions about what kids are reading and why fewer books seem to be part of their educational diet.

Now a provocative new essay is widening the lens, raising similar questions about reading habits across the broader population.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has our conversation.

JEFFREY BROWN: You can see it in the numbers.

Fewer than half of all American adults reported reading a book of any kind in 2022, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.

And just 38 percent read a novel or a short story.

A separate survey found the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent two decades ago to 16 percent in 2023.

In some ways, it's a continuing trend, but a provocative new cover story in "The Atlantic" puts it far more dramatically, "The Age of Reading Is Over."

It's by Rose Horowitch, a staff writer at "The Atlantic," who joins me now.

And thanks so much for being with us here.

Now, it's a big statement that you're making, so why don't we parse it a little bit?

What do you mean, first of all, by the age of reading?

ROSE HOROWITCH, Staff Writer, "The Atlantic": Yes.

So what I meant by the age of reading was that this is bigger than what the statistics are showing us, that what is really going away is a time when reading was a major way that people transmitted culture, information, news, and really derived meaning from text.

And my piece is arguing that that's ending and that we're entering what I call a post-literate age.

JEFFREY BROWN: And as you remind us at the beginning of this essay, this age of reading, which we have -- many of us have been so immersed in for so long, it actually doesn't have that long a history.

ROSE HOROWITCH: Yes.

Well, so I think we think of reading as kind of something that's innate or inevitable, but actually it's quite historically contingent.

Reading first emerged 6,000 years ago, and it was only relatively recently that large numbers of people could read, and that people spent a lot of time pleasure-reading.

So this is something that is kind of new.

And when this age started, it really transformed society and the way people thought and the way politics and culture worked.

And as it's going away now, I think we're seeing changes of the same magnitude in our society.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you refer to what we're entering as a post-literate age.

And there's been plenty of discussion, of course, about social media, short videos on TikTok and elsewhere, and you're arguing that we are reading differently already.

So what do you mean by a post-literate age?

ROSE HOROWITCH: Well, if we look at the statistics, people still know how to read.

The literacy rate is actually historically very high.

And in many ways, we're probably reading more words than ever, if you think about the number of e-mails and text messages and social media posts you're reading.

Like, we're inundated with words and we're surrounded with them.

But what's happening is that this kind of -- these number of words that we're swimming in has made it so that it's almost so difficult to focus on any serious or complex work of literature for an extended period of time.

And so it's not a crisis of literacy.

It's that we are entering a post-literate age.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you write: "Reading shaped the modern mind.

Its disappearance will reshape it."

How will that change things?

ROSE HOROWITCH: The bedrock principle in neuroscience is that you get good at what you practice and your brain adjusts to improve at the things that you spend time doing.

And so if we are spending less time reading, as we know that we are, we are going to struggle much more to do it.

And it's not that we're going to be unable to decode words, but we have much less background knowledge and vocabulary to aid in comprehension.

We are less accustomed to persisting through something for an extended period of time.

And, already, we see that, two decades ago, the average attention span on a screen was 2.5 minutes.

And five years ago, it fell to 47 seconds.

So we're already seeing people kind of being less accustomed to focusing on something.

We're already seeing an erosion of some of our abilities to do complex synthesis and analysis and comprehension.

And we can expect that that would continue.

JEFFREY BROWN: And some of these things, we have been looking at on our program, and of course, have been well-documented elsewhere, just the way this impacts children and the way they learn.

ROSE HOROWITCH: Yes, I think, for me, reporting this piece, sort of the most chilling statistic I found was that only 2 percent of American adults report reading to a child on any given day.

And so I think we see now that this current generation, the current young generation enjoys reading much less and spends less time reading than today's adults did when they were kids.

We know that every year older a child gets, the less they like to read.

In focus groups, high school students described reading for pleasure as an alien practice.

And something else that we know is that schools are assigning fewer and fewer books throughout middle and high school.

In a survey last year, teachers in middle and high school reported assigning between zero and four books a year.

And 80 percent of elementary schoolteachers in a separate survey said that students receive a digital device by the time they enter kindergarten.

So we're seeing that schools are really changing, where they're assigning far fewer books.

And so I think that we can expect that this trend that we're seeing will only accelerate in the years to come.

JEFFREY BROWN: So one thing you write about in the piece is the way that the changes in thinking, the changes in reading impacts who has influence in our culture.

It's gone away from some of the traditional perhaps sources as writers to influencers and others.

Tell us a little bit about that.

ROSE HOROWITCH: You know, in a recent poll, 30 percent -- or 60 percent of Gen Z said that they would be an influencer if they could.

And so I think it's a very different way of culture being passed, of power being in society.

We know that cultural and economic power tends to flow to people who are skilled at using the dominant communications media of the age, and right now that is short-form video, and it's not text.

JEFFREY BROWN: I can't resist at the end of our conversation here pointing out that this death of writing warning comes in a very long and fairly complex essay form.

ROSE HOROWITCH: Yes.

So I write in the piece about my own experience reading and growing up in a family of readers and having books passed down to me from my parents and my older siblings.

And there definitely was an irony in putting this warning about how nobody reads in a 9,000-word essay.

But I wanted to share my experience, because I think that other people can relate to it.

I loved reading when I was a child, and I still love reading today, but I noticed that it almost slipped away from me without me even noticing.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Rose Horowitch, thank you very much.

ROSE HOROWITCH: Thank you for having me.