Reading Widely and Well

They bent their heads to the task, and pencils scratched across pieces of paper. As I often do, I marveled at how I could ask my students to do something, and they would so readily comply. They aimed to please, to get it right.

I approached the raised hand in the second row. “What does seldom mean?” he asked.

I teach Advanced Placement English Language and Composition, a course for which students can earn college credit if they earn a qualifying score on the exam administered in May. Struck by the dearth of vocabulary at my students’ disposal, I began keeping a list of words that eluded them. They were nonplussed by catharsis, contemporary, and advisability; they confused contempt and contentment; and they were baffled by bleak—ironically, in the context of “a bleak future.”

I have been teaching high school juniors and seniors for over 25 years, and I can bear witness to a steady decline in the number of students who read and an accompanying decline in the vocabulary that they possess.

The lack of reading and ensuing limited vocabularies lead to a limited ability to interpret rightly and wrestle well with ambiguity. I find students more likely to categorize an author immediately as friend or foe. They quickly determine whether they are supposed to blindly agree with, or set themselves in opposition to, a given text, often as a result of the author’s known or assumed political or religious persuasion. This approach doesn’t require close reading skills; it just requires quick judgment.

As a result, sarcasm gets read as bitterness, and melancholy is interpreted as depression. Students can, when prompted, usually recognize a speaker’s diction as positive or negative, but often lack the ability to distinguish between nuances such as vengeful or forlorn.

I wonder if the polarization that is epidemic in our culture could be prevented by a more widely-read populace. When we lack the words to think about the gray areas that lie between extremes, we also lack the ability to conceive of the world as a place in which gray areas abound and compromise, and repeated reevaluation of our thinking and believing are essential.

My AP class will soon begin reading George Orwell’s 1984. The totalitarian government’s attempts to control the people and turn them into blind followers are most successfully achieved through their control of language. They alter dictionaries, excising all words deemed superfluous. By eliminating ambiguity, they attempt to create a people who don’t think and don’t need to think.

Weakened critical thinking skills not only keep students from rightly understanding another’s perspective, but they also make it difficult for them to holistically grasp and articulate their own. Paucity of language leads to the inhibition of imagination. Those who use language expansively push against the boundaries of what we can know, experience, and dream of. Perhaps they even transcend these boundaries.

In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, Neil Postman examined the impact of our transition from a text-based society to one heavily immersed in and influenced by images. He quotes television anchor Robert MacNeil, who charged television news with operating under the assumptions “that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism” (105). Ironically, television news, built on bite-sized snippets of information, slickly packaged for viewers to digest, seems intolerably dull and drawn out to today’s digital natives. Viewers now spend an average of three seconds watching an Instagram reel or TikTok video before moving on to the next. When information is gathered so quickly, it must just as quickly be deposited in a mental silo. There is no time to consider, only time to accept or reject.  The slower pace of reading, on the contrary, compels us to consider.

There is a wealth of information available to us, but the algorithms that deliver it to us and the tug of confirmation bias usually keep us from challenging what we believe. Those who don’t read widely from differing points of view risk becoming intellectually isolated and prey to conspiracy theorists. Reading, especially reading fiction, builds empathy and can compel us to be more culturally engaged.

For Christians, the inability to read well and an unwillingness to read much at all have an especially detrimental effect. Christians are people of the Book. People who profess to believe that God Himself communicates with them through a complex and multi-genre book. Those who don’t read it are more likely to conflate Christianity with nationalism. They are easily manipulated by those who proclaim a hateful and fear-fueled evangelicalism that has seemingly nothing to do with Good News.

All this is not to say that kids are getting worse. This is not a diatribe on the failings of kids these days. My students are considerate and generous – several of them know my order from our local coffee shop, and I’m often very pleasantly surprised with a gifted coffee at school. The thought that I should thank my teacher never crossed my mind when I was in high school, but my students regularly thank me for class on their way out the door. They thank me for teaching them! While many of my students would struggle to define the word polarization, one used it in a thought-provoking lunchtime conversation in my classroom this week.

When encouraged to read and provided with great writing, many of them (especially the ones who read on their own) respond favorably. The longing for purpose reflects an inherent human desire, and much great literature is a working out of that search. Good discussions about good writing serve to allow us to reflect on the commonality of this experience in the context of community.

All is not lost. The narrowing of the American mind and ensuing fear of and hatred for others can be allayed. Reading is an antidote. On the first day of AP English, I engage the students in a discussion about what they love about stories. They frequently refer to the feeling you get when someone expresses what you feel, and the enjoyment to be found in experiencing things you couldn’t otherwise experience. This year, I got an atypical response that made my heart sing and gave me hope. Ambiguity.

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Kari Cope

Kari Cope is the author of There’s Always Water in the Wilderness, which walks readers through a close textual analysis of the biblical motifs of wells and wilderness. As a teacher and writer, she is passionate about creating an environment where others feel comfortable exploring their doubts and testing their faith.

Kari lives in Southern California and enjoys time spent with family, conversation with good friends, travel, and watching her beloved Los Angeles Dodgers.

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• Reading Widely and Well - May 7, 2025