My personal theory is main reason is that we don't practice reading as much in this era. Some claim it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at skill. Dumping that many hours alone doesn't get you there though. Just like a weight lifter you need to keep pushing your limit by adding a bit of weight to the bar from time to time to gain muscle rather the just retain what you currently have.

Between Steam, Netflix, and your pick of social media there are no end of ways to keep yourself busy in more immediately gratifying ways. Getting in the hours and stretching that mental muscle a bit in book form no longer happens naturally. To be as literate as the generation before you you almost have to consciously choose to put in an equal effort since boredom is not as plentiful as it once was.

That said there are is no lack of other contributing factors as well, but reduced experience as the reason in my opinion seems to best explain why the average dips without the the whole curve dipping.

Reading a book doesnt necessarily exercise the mind. The vast majority of books are total junk. And, unlike weights, it is possible to become dumber by reading the wrong books. Spend four hours a day reading vanity press tripe and you would be better off spending those hours with netflix.

I have had students ask me how to improve thier english, how to sound smart. I tell them to stop watching american TV. Watch blackadder or upstart crow. Listen to people who are masters of the spoken word. Want to improve your writing? Stick to the classics. Dont touch JK Rowling until you are done with plato and shakespeare.

(Ive been watching a zew zealand series lately, learning all sorts of slang i didnt know.)

This resonates but I think there's a framing issue. From building educational coding tools for kids, what I've observed is that the volume of textual engagement hasn't necessarily dropped — it's migrated to different forms.

An 11-year-old debugging a Python script is doing intense, sustained reading. Parsing error messages, reading documentation, tracing logic through nested conditionals. A kid building in Roblox Studio is reading and writing Lua. These are literacy acts — just not the kind that show up on NAEP scores or novel-reading surveys.

The real gap isn't hours logged. It's transfer. The kid who can read 200 lines of GDScript to debug why their character won't jump doesn't automatically transfer that stamina to reading a history textbook. The cognitive muscles are being built, but they're specialized.

From what I've seen, when you meet kids where they are — letting them read and write code to solve problems they care about — they'll happily put in hours of focused textual work. The appetite is there. We're measuring the wrong meal.