Whose Frame of Reference?
A response to “The End of Reading is Here” by Rose Horowitch
This post is a reaction to the piece in The Atlantic, The End of Reading is Here by Rose Horowitch. Her article was interesting and important, but I feel she made some critical oversimplifications. Here I am going to discuss one of them, which she made about the thinking of pre-literate peoples.
I’ll start with an anecdote from my life that showed me how completely embedded I am in learning on paper (note, I grew up in the 70s and 80s mostly without computers throughout my early learning years). In 2009 in Namibia, I observed a basic education class for adults. The students were learning to read maps and had been given a map of Namibia. The teacher was asking them to identify towns in the north, but the students were looking confused. Fortunately, the teacher realized that the students were facing southwest and thus held the maps so that north on the map faced southwest, not north. She explained the issue to the students, and some of them turned, so the map would face north. I was blown away because I have no sense of direction. I barely know my left from right (yes, I have to make the L with my left hand every time to figure it out). The idea that, sitting in an indoor classroom, one would still be aware of north was completely outside my frame of reference, yet it was a basic fact for these students. If I had been teaching them, I would have thought they couldn’t read the map. I might have thought they were stupid and unable to reason well when, obviously, the problem was my own lack of spatial awareness.
Within that context, let’s look at Rose Horowitch’s description of pre-literacy and learning: “Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.” Or did going to school to learn to read teach people how to answer questions using the transitive property? Were the illiterate people being cautious about the whiteness of bears? Did they have a different conception of bear colors (Polar Bears are not really “white” and their skin is black)?
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Two other researchers, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, studied pre-literate people in Liberia and found that their reasoning was just as good, but they did not frame questions the way schools do. (Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.) Their explanation of the answers given by the pre-literate people in the Luria example would be that they reason empirically and locally rather than abstractly.
If, as Rose Horowitch seems to claim, we are moving into a post-literacy society, expanding the ways we understand the role reading plays in learning is important
“The End of Reading Is Here”
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic (August 2026)
