Young people now encounter more words than perhaps any generation before them. They read captions, messages, subtitles, slides, search results, prompts, summaries and AI-generated explanations throughout the day. In one sense, they are reading all the time. What is less clear is whether this constant exposure to language is making them better readers. It may instead be competing with the kind of reading that forms attention most deeply, a trade-off against sustained and uninterrupted encounters with books, long-form essays, and texts that do not immediately yield their meaning. Laying the Groundwork for Long-Term Growth
Globally, the data is sobering. According to the National Literacy Trust’s 2025 Annual Literacy Survey, only 1 in 3 children aged 8 to 18 say they enjoy reading, a 36% drop since 2005. Daily reading has fallen to a record low, with just 18.7% reading in their free time. In the U.S., leisure reading has declined by roughly 40% since the early 2000s.
Singapore’s picture is more nuanced. The National Reading Habits Study 2024 shows that eight in ten teens still read regularly. But frequency and depth are not the same. A student may read often and still relate to language in a largely transactional way: looking for the main point, the useful quote, the summary, or the answer required of them.
Reading the Words, Missing the Meaning
Animal Farm, a fairly common text for lower secondary students in Singapore, is one of the clearest examples of the difference between reading the words and reading the meaning. On the surface, it is a simple story to recount. The animals overthrow Mr Jones, take over the farm, establish commandments, and eventually find themselves ruled by pigs who become almost indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. Most Secondary One or Two students can follow this. They can identify Napoleon as the tyrant, Boxer as the loyal worker, and the changing commandments as evidence of hypocrisy.
But the real force of the novel lies elsewhere. Orwell is not only showing us that power corrupts. He is showing us how power corrupts language first. The animals are not defeated only by violence; they are defeated by slogans, revisions, euphemisms and the slow rearrangement of meaning. By the end, what is most frightening is not simply that the pigs have become cruel, but that the other animals no longer possess the language, memory or confidence to say clearly what has happened to them.
This is why surface comprehension is not enough. A student may know the plot and still miss the warning. They may know what happened and still miss how the text teaches us to distrust language when it becomes too neat, too repetitive, or too convenient for those in power.
The same habit matters beyond Literature. A doctor listens to a patient’s account and has to hear not only the words, but the fear, uncertainty or omission beneath them. An artist reads gesture, image, silence and cultural mood, often finding meaning in what others pass over too quickly. An investor reads a pitch deck or market commentary and has to ask what assumptions are hidden beneath the confident growth story. In each case, the skill is not merely the ability to process information. It is the ability to interpret language, context and implication when the meaning is not immediately obvious.
That is the distinction that matters in classrooms. Students can often recount what happened in a passage. They can summarise events, identify arguments and reproduce content with reasonable accuracy. These are important skills, but they are not the whole of reading. The harder task is interpretation: recognising tone, questioning assumptions, noticing what is implied but not said, and understanding how language shapes a reader’s response.
An Environment Optimised for Speed
The challenge is not a decline in ability, but a change in the conditions of attention. Students today are neither less capable nor less hardworking. Many are industrious, responsive and under a degree of academic and social pressure that one should not underestimate. But they have grown up in an environment that trains for speed over depth. They are immersed in summaries, short clips, quick answers and constant interruption. When they encounter a difficult text that unfolds slowly, it can feel demanding, simply because sustained attention is a skill that has to be practised.
The National Literacy Trust’s research captures this AI dimension directly. Nearly half of older teens, 45.5 per cent of 16- to 18-year-olds, are already using AI to summarise texts, and 1 in 4 young people admit to simply copying AI outputs when completing homework, up from 1 in 5 the year before. At the same time, only 1 in 6 feel more independent when using AI for reading or writing, suggesting greater reliance rather than greater capability.
Workarounds to reading have always existed: Cliff’s Notes, study guides, film adaptations. But as one researcher noted, generative AI takes this to new levels of convenience. A student may now know the conclusion of an argument without having lived through the reasoning that leads to it. They know the outline, but they have not really done the reading. Without the reading, the texture of the original is gone, from the language and the pacing, to the tensions and the evidence. Both the content and the process of thinking are lost in the solution.
Why This Matters Beyond the Classroom
At first glance, this may seem like an English or Literature concern. It is certainly that, but it is also larger than that. As AI makes language generation faster, cheaper and increasingly fluent, the value of education cannot lie only in producing polished language. Machines can already summarise, rephrase and generate competent paragraphs. Yet even as these tools become more capable, we would still want human beings to retain the judgment to evaluate claims and decide on their own courses of action. That requires the ability to assess whether something is well-argued or merely stylistically adept, whether it is rigorous or simply persuasive, and whether a confident voice is supported by evidence.
This matters because public life is increasingly mediated by language that is immediate, abundant and persuasive. News, commentary, advertising, political messaging, institutional statements, corporate communication and social media posts all compete for attention. Much of this language is designed to be consumed quickly. Some of it informs; some of it persuades; some of it simplifies; some of it conceals.
A society that reads widely but not deeply may remain informed in a surface sense, but not necessarily discerning. It may become comfortable with summaries, slogans and confident explanations, while losing patience for complexity, qualification and contradiction. This is not only an academic concern. It affects how people understand institutions, evaluate claims, respond to disagreement, and decide whom or what to trust.
Deep reading is one of the ways this discernment is developed. It trains students to question assumptions, detect inconsistencies and engage with complexity. It builds the intellectual patience required to hold competing ideas in tension and arrive at a considered view.
These are not decorative academic skills. They matter in any society that depends on citizens being able to evaluate information, weigh evidence and resist manipulation. A person who reads carefully is less likely to be impressed by language simply because it is smooth, confident or convenient. They are more likely to ask what is being assumed, what is being left out, and whether the conclusion holds true. These are skills that are foundational to decision-making, leadership, and governance.
The Risk of Shallow Fluency
The risk, then, is not that young people are incapable of careful thought. Many students today are articulate, responsive and impressively able to navigate large amounts of information. The concern is that fluency can develop faster than judgment when students are not given enough opportunities to slow down, interpret and sit with complexity
In Singapore, where students are often diligent, exam-aware and quick to recognise what a task requires, this distinction is worth keeping in view. Structure and technique are useful; they help students organise their thinking and communicate with clarity. But they work best when supported by the slower habits of deep reading: noticing tone, weighing evidence, questioning assumptions and understanding how language shapes meaning.
This is why reading cannot be treated only as a matter of habit or volume. It has to be understood as part of intellectual formation. Through sustained reading, students learn that language is not a simple one-to-one relationship between words and meanings. Words carry context, intention, bias, implication and history. As tools increase in sophistication and abundance, students will need the ability to know when language is precise, evasive, persuasive, humane, manipulative, or merely fluent.
Reframing the Conversation
Singapore has long taken reading seriously as a national priority. Campaigns such as the National Reading Movement have successfully encouraged volume and access. The next phase of the conversation is about depth. Reading more still matters, and reading better matters just as much.
For parents asking what they can do at home, I would begin with something simple: make reading feel normal. A home where reading has a place, where there is time set aside for reading, where books, essays or articles are within reach, and where conversation is not driven by screens, sends a signal. Children notice what a household values.
Practically, starting small and keeping it regular works better than trying to carve out large, irregular blocks of time. A short stretch of daily reading beats an occasional long session. It also helps to make reading slightly harder to escape from: put devices away, revisit difficult passages, and talk about what you have read. Summaries can be a useful entry point, picking something from a list that genuinely sounds interesting, but they should be a doorway into the text, not a substitute for it.
For many teenagers, reading has become almost entirely school-based: a Literature text, an assignment, a project, an exam. One of the most valuable things families can do is help restore reading to the realm of leisure, reflection, and personal curiosity, where interest drives the choice, and there is no grade at the end.
The Skill That Endures
Deep reading develops capacities that do not become obsolete: attention, judgment, clarity, and empathy. These are precisely the capabilities that matter most in a world where information is abundant, but reliability is uneven, and language is ubiquitous, but not always trustworthy.
AI will continue to shape how students learn and how adults work. The question is not whether young people will use these tools; they will. Nor is it whether new technologies will help us read, think and decide. Increasingly, they will do all three.
The more important question is which decisions young people will keep within their own domain, and how carefully they will learn to evaluate them. One hopes that judgment will be formed by habits built slowly, one careful read at a time.
About the author
Jovin Loh is the Chief Executive Officer at Academia, the tuition centre he co-founded with his brother Johann in 2013. While Johann focuses on curriculum and pedagogy, Jovin drives operations, staffing, and long-term strategy. Before dedicating himself full-time to Academia, Jovin spent six years as Chief Investment Officer at Nair Pte Ltd, a single-family office investing in public equities, derivatives, early-stage companies, and private placements. Earlier in his career, he gained experience across sectors through internships at Asia Philanthropy Circle, Frost & Sullivan’s Healthcare Consulting Division, and EasyCopay, where he developed insights into philanthropy, consulting, and business development.
