It Appears That Children Were Left Behind

This week, the girlies are armed with their No. 2 pencils to ask: what’s the current state of literacy, how did we get here, and are the kids okay??? They unpack how we went from clay tablets to BookTok fairy smut and trace how phonics, poverty, and the policy failures of the Bush administration shaped how we learn to read. Digressions include Zohran Mamdani socialist prom, the power of drawing portals, and empathy for Travis Kelce. This episode was produced by Julia Hava and Eliza McLamb and edited by Allison Hagan. Research assistance from Kylie Finnigan. We’re going on tour!!!! Find tickets at https://linktr.ee/binchtopia SOURCES: A Brief History of Summer Reading  A Chapter a Day – Association of Book Reading with Longevity A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel  American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows  America’s literacy crisis isn’t what you think  Ancient customer-feedback technology lasts millennia Are men’s reading habits truly a national crisis?  BookTok: A new era in the history of reading  BookTok Statistics  BookTok: The Dark Horse of the Economy Can Reading Make You Happier? Children and young people's reading in 2025  Exploring BookTok’s impact on literature   How BookTok is Reviving the Era of Physical Bookselling  How is the popularity of BookTok impacting the publishing industry?  How Literacy Became a Powerful Weapon in the Fight to End Slavery  How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis  How the Second World War Made America Literate  How TikTok Became a Best-Seller Machine  Introduction to the Original Edition Literacy and History   Illiteracy: “Another form of slavery”  Literacy Rate in the US 2025: Top Picks National Reading Panel - Teaching Children to Read  No Child Left Behind Act of 2001  No Child Left Behind: An Overview   Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty  PEDAGOGY of the OPPRESSED by Paolo Freire  Report finds ‘shocking and dispiriting’ fall in children reading for pleasure  Share of TikTok users reading more books because of #BookTok in the United States as of May 2023, by state  School Summer Reading Lists: A Brief and Nerdy History  Sold a Story Soldiers Literacy Training Collection  The History of Summer Reading  The Influence of BookTok on Literary Criticisms and Diversity  The Invention of Summer Reading and the Birth of the Beach Read  The Literacy Crisis in the U.S. is Deeply Concerning—and Totally Preventable  The Nation's Report Card  The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy  The Subversive Joy of BookTok  This is how much the global literacy rate grew over 200 years  Why I Won’t Quit BookTok