Parents used to have to go to extraordinary measures to put their kids ahead in life. Now they can do it by simply giving the gift of reading books, and there is no better time to start!
By John M. Grondelski
American Thinker
December 18, 2025
The New York Times ran a December 12 feature whose thesis is depressingly simple: American elementary and secondary students no longer read full-length books. The title says it all: "Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class." "Rarely" now means perhaps one or two books a year-four at most. And even those few tend to come from a narrowing, predictable list: To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth. Even Shakespeare often gets reduced to the balcony scene.
There are plenty of causes for this collapse. The Times wants to blame standardized testing: schools "teach to the test," not to the soul, so curricula flatten and homogenize. That's certainly part of it. Another culprit is the ever-growing presence of technology in the classroom. I've witnessed it personally: across my three children's schooling, I've watched the textbook all but disappear. "It's online!"-which too often means it's nowhere. Social media trains young people to compress thoughts into 140-280 characters, so it is no surprise that they no longer develop the stamina for deep reading. Mark Bauerlein wasn't exaggerating when he warned we were raising "the dumbest generation," their intellectual deformation tracking almost perfectly with the arrival of screens in schools.
Notice something else: among the few books that "survive" on school reading lists, none is older than the 20th century. Young Americans are being systematically amputated from their own cultural heritage. Don't assign Moby-Dick-too long. Don't hand them The Scarlet Letter-they'll need a dictionary ten times before finishing the first paragraph. I ran Hawthorne's famous opening through a readability engine: I was told it was "too difficult," overly long, too much passive voice, sentences over twenty words (the horror!), and a terrifying 150-word paragraph. It scored 46.5 on the Flesch scale, deemed suitable for a college graduate. Even Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow-once considered children's reading-now scores at modern "college level."
So what can parents do?
Get your kids to read-from early on.
Put some books under the Christmas tree. There are plenty of solid Catholic choices-from saints' biographies to the enduring charm of Narnia. But don't imagine that simply handing a child a book finishes your job. Read to them. Then read with them. I started mine on Classics Illustrated so they'd at least know the plots and themes. Abridged Robinson Crusoe worked; the full, undiluted text likely would have sunk them at the outset.
My mistake was not transitioning them sooner to the real texts. But, to be fair, there wasn't much help from the schools. My older two attended American schools overseas and at least encountered mythology; their U.S. exposure amounted to making posters and acting out skits.
Christmas gives parents a rare gift: a week or two at home with a captive audience. Use it. Read Dickens' A Christmas Carol-the original. Its opening scores around 69 on readability scales: perfect for early teens through high school. Spread it across twelve nights. If you finish early, Dickens wrote four other Christmas "ghost stories" and several shorter Yuletide pieces. Add Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" ("'Twas the night before Christmas...") for good measure.
Then keep going. Choose other books to read and discuss together. Introduce real poetry-poetry with meter, discipline, and meaning. John Greenleaf Whittier's Snow-Bound makes a wonderful snow-day meditation on what life was like before plows and convenience stores, though young readers will need help with the vocabulary.
And don't overlook the Bible.
Beyond the countless biblical allusions embedded in Western culture, Scripture's language is steady, elevated, and dignified-decidedly not in the "see Dick run" register of many contemporary liturgical texts. Get your kids accustomed to the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, so they don't arrive at a Catholic college asking-as a young woman once asked me-"What's a chapter and verse?"
A joke illustrates the point: Why do kids from Catholic environments often have stronger vocabularies ? Consider two cheerleaders shouting out their school's name.
"Give me a C ! Give me an E ! Give me an N!... What's it spell?" Central!
Now try doing that with Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Christians-like Jews-are people of the Book. Our faith, our culture, even our liturgy presuppose literacy. Let's not squander that heritage while an impoverished pedagogy congratulates itself for requiring students to read two modern books a year.
This Christmas, give your children a better gift: a love of reading-and the world that opens before them.
This article was originally published on American Thinker.
John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views expressed herein are his own.