There’s a trend that should worry every parent: Americans are reading fewer whole books than ever before.

A post-pandemic poll by Gallup showed decreases in book reading across all American demographics. The negative trend applies even to regular, avid readers. They are simply reading a smaller and smaller number of books per year. Why?

It’s easy to blame the rapid change that technology has brought to our society. On-demand entertainment and social media clearly take up more of the average American’s time than they’d like to admit.

But there are other factors at play. The adults that are coming of age now were asked to read fewer whole books in the course of their education than previous generations. Could it be that they just never got into the habit of reading entire books, because they weren’t challenged to read them?

Many schools have quietly moved away from assigning whole books in English class, favoring excerpts and summaries instead. Teachers and education journalists like Natalie Wexler blame the pressure to prepare for standardized tests that measure short-passage comprehension rather than deep, sustained reading skills. Plus, the need to meet Common Core Standards leaves less time to simply read in class, whether as a group or independently.

In the rest of this issue, we’ll explore the academic and personal benefits kids get from reading whole books and what they're missing out on when they don't.

In today’s issue:

• Following a full narrative, from beginning to end

• Building stamina and critical thinking skills

• Fully experiencing other points of view

Complete Stories

Your early elementary schooler needs complete stories to develop something crucial: the ability to understand how narratives work from beginning to end. This isn't just about enjoying a good story—it's about building skills they'll need to navigate complex situations throughout life.

Having strong comprehension means your child can visualize what's happening, identify with characters, follow a plot from beginning to middle to end, and anticipate what comes next. Reading whole books gives them invaluable practice with all of these comprehension skills that transfer directly to understanding their own experiences and relationships.

According to Dr. Linda Mayes from Yale's Child Study Center, "Literacy is the capacity to create a narrative. We typically think of literacy just as reading, but it's also being able to narrate your life. It helps you understand your life." When your child reads whole books, they follow characters dealing with problems and finding solutions, which teaches them how situations typically unfold and resolve.

Complete Thoughts

Many educators have felt pushed to reconsider whether they can afford class time for whole books. The demands of standardized testing have led to what experts call "chunking," or breaking learning into bite-sized pieces. But there's a serious downside to this approach that can affect kids’ long-term academic success.

"Because it is hard, and takes so much instructional time to read a whole book, it was easily dropped to support testing goals," explains former principal Jethro Jones to Parents Magazine. The problem with this test-first pedagogy is that the students who don't read whole books don't develop a rich vocabulary or strong critical thinking skills. They also miss out on building endurance for harder academic tasks later.

Teachers are noticing the impact. In an interview with KQED, educator Danielle Bayard Jackson said she was told to stop reading whole books with her students and focus on chapters and summaries instead. "I was being asked to do something that would be a disservice to my kids," Jackson laments in the interview. So she continued reading full books…and her students scored well on the tests anyway.

Complete Absorption

There are plenty of anecdotes about teachers reducing or eliminating whole novels from their syllabi. Like that one high-school English teacher who doesn’t make her honors students read To Kill a Mockingbird anymore, but assigns a third of the book plus a synopsis of the rest instead. And yet, The Harvard Gazette explains that when teachers do assign complete books, they generally still favor the ‘classics.’ Why?

Despite chatter about short attention spans, when asked to read a great book, teens can get completely lost in the world of the story for hours. Absorption is an enriching experience that is cyclical, according to Harvard’s M. G. Prezioso (and according to us). When teens get absorbed in a book, they want to read more, which makes them better at getting absorbed, which makes them love reading even more.

Books that create rich, complex worlds that reward this sort of deep engagement are the ones that survive to be assigned again and again. Whether it’s a Shakespearean play like Macbeth or a novel like The Great Gatsby, the teens who read these complete works become better at understanding multiple points of view and relating to other people. As researcher Catherine Snow bluntly puts it, “They’re less likely to think that if you disagree with them, it’s because you’re stupid.”

Now, we just need to get that one teacher back to assigning To Kill a Mockingbird, in its entirety.