Gen-Alpha Can't Read

Hunter Campolo, staff writer

Diving into a good book is one of life’s greatest wonders, but unfortunately, Gen Alpha has been robbed of that. Many kids, instead of reading books, have had paper perfection ripped out of their hands and swapped for iPads with unrestricted internet access, which replaces their childhood. Instead of immersing themselves in a beautiful novel or enjoying the outside world, they brainlessly drool all over their tablets.

Literacy is the ability to read and write. With the new generation of kids growing up on technology, books are being put on the back burner. Ever since COVID, society as a whole has been more accustomed to staring at screens for long periods of time, but for kids that grew up doing it, it’s incredibly hard to break the habit. With short-form content like TikTok and Instagram Reels becoming so prominent, attention spans are being destroyed, and attention span is crucial for reading. Why look at the boring words on a page when it would be so much more entertaining to stare at flashing lights? Not just the reading, but the writing aspect of learning is being overshadowed by generative artificial intelligence. Kids no longer need to read their assigned books in school, and then they can use ChatGPT to write their essays. With all their newfound free time from cheating on assignments, they can consume more slop media.   

Believe it or not, illiteracy directly leads to higher unemployment rates, incarceration rates and poverty. Individuals with low literacy levels are likely to have trouble filling out job applications, and when getting a job, they are likely to have a hard time advancing in their careers. It’s hard enough to fill out job applications and get jobs while knowing how to read and write, it’s unfathomable to do it without those basic skills. In addition to that, the CIA must be doing jumping jacks and backflips, knowing the new generation of kids are going to be filling out prisons at unprecedented rates. They’ll be over the moon about all their new free labor. 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a U.S. program that measures student achievement in core subjects, like reading, math and science. They provide data on student performance at state and national levels to help track trends and inform educational policy. They recently released that 9 and 13-year-olds are reaching all-time lows in reading scores and have had the largest sudden drop since 1990. That’s an absurdly long time, and it’s almost as if society is slowly regressing. Kids don’t even know their there they’re and theirs anymore. 

“Throughout the past 15 years, I have seen in all ages, the lack and decrease of social interaction and emotional development. It’s scary… the playful, energetic, engaged, social children, wanting engagement with others then at a certain age are given a technology device. Phones, iPads, laptops – they now have a device that takes away interaction and causes distraction.” Said Childcare specialist Amy Lowe, a teacher with of 20 years with a Master’s degree in K-5 education 

There’s nothing more frightening than watching the younger generation not know basic literature skills. Having worked at an after-school care, I’ve seen 7-year-old kids that can’t even spell their own name, much less do their English homework, and I’m not sure how parents and teachers let them get to that point in their life without such a basic understanding of the language they speak.   

Altogether, literacy rates are dropping among children, and the world needs to respond fast before the everyday 9-5 miserable office worker becomes the average unemployed drooling doomscrolling zombie, and books are all disregarded and destroyed like in Fahrenheit 451.