Generations of Educators Have Called Active Reading a GOOD THING and Passive Reading a BAD THING. Are They Right?

This little essay appears as a postscript to the recently-published How to Read: A Twenty-First-Century Guide.

The preface to this book mentions Mortimer Adler, an American thinker whose How to Read a Book has been for the better part of a century the most successful book on the topic. Adler was a great categorizer and systematizer (he identified four stages of reading readiness, four stages of actual reading, five steps in synoptical reading, and so on), but he was also given to broad generalizations. One of those generalizations has remained extraordinarily influential in education at all levels: that one should aim to become an active reader. Adler declared there to be “one simple prescription for active reading”—that you should “ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.” By the 1970s and 1980s educators had incorporated Adler’s “active reading” into the broader principle of “active learning,” which became universally regarded as a Good Thing, while its opposite, “passive learning,” came to be universally regarded as a Bad Thing. There is a good deal of sense in much of what educators have said along these lines, but in its more simplistic formulations the distinction between active and passive learning suggests a false dichotomy. The contrast between students who take in knowledge in a purely passive fashion, unquestioning, and students who think for themselves, always questioning, always constructing knowledge for themselves, is one that misrepresents the messy process of acquiring knowledge and of thinking critically. Is “active reading” in fact always a Good Thing? It’s easy to think of exceptions. One form of “active reading” that is facilitated by today’s technology but that is usually a Bad Thing is the sort that fixes on a tiny detail, prompts a question such as what’s that little thing about?, and leads to a twenty-minute pursuit of a faintly interesting but irrelevant tangent through the labyrinthine pathways of the internet.

And is “passive reading” always a Bad Thing? As we have touched on more than once in these pages, an essential prerequisite for being able to read and think critically in an effective fashion is acquiring a body of general knowledge—which is fundamentally a passive process. One doesn’t construct for oneself in dynamic fashion one’s knowledge that World War II ended in 1945 or one’s knowledge that a line of poetry written in regular iambic pentameter will have ten syllables. One typically acts as a largely passive receptacle when one learns facts of this sort. Such passive learning should not be disparaged—and nor should the facts themselves be disparaged as “mere” facts; that’s a truth that should surely have been brought home to us more powerfully that ever in an era during which the world’s most powerful leaders are given to making up their own facts about history, about science, about almost anything.

But learning—like reading—is often a complicated process; many different things can happen at the same time in the human brain. At the same time as we passively acquire information and learn facts, we may sometimes be actively asking questions. A large part of learning to be a sophisticated reader and a sophisticated learner is developing good judgement as to when facts should be accepted as facts (yes, World War Two really did end in 1945; yes, Joseph Biden really did win the 2020 election), and when the supposed facts truly don’t stand up to scrutiny.

That sort of judgement is never easy to acquire—and the task is not made easier by the conditions in which we live today. Throughout this book we have looked at the ways in which the digital age—the internet, smart phones, generative AI, all of it—has made it more difficult to concentrate, more difficult to engage in deep reading and deep thinking, more difficult to remember what we have read, and more difficult to be confident as to the truth or falsehood of what we have read. We have touched again and again on the temptations of endless scrolling, of always giving in to generative AI’s seductive invitations to help—and on the importance of struggling stubbornly against these temptations. It’s vitally important that we don’t allow our own reading to be reduced to reading text messages and scrolling, even as we tell our young children how important reading is. What’s true for our children remains true for ourselves—especially in the digital age, especially in an age of misinformation.

The concept of active reading may still have much to be said for it, but there’s no question that it needs updating in the twenty-first century—updating to reflect the messiness of the mental processes involved in reading a well as to reflect the disruptiveness of the digital age. Perhaps a term that suits our own time better is engaged reading. That need not be entirely “active”; we may be engaged in “passive” reading that will expand our fund of general knowledge just as much as we may be engaged in reading critically and in reading analytically. At a not-always-conscious level, we should be engaged almost constantly as we read in the minutiae of reading—picking up cues as to where an argument is headed, for example, and deciding when we can infer the meaning of a word of phrase from its context, and when we are better advised to look it up. And we should be always looking to engage ourselves in non-fiction reading that expands our horizons, that offers practical benefits, and that can better equip us to act as responsible citizens.

In the decades since Adler’s How to Read a Book was first published, very few full books on the topic have appeared, but dozens of books on writing have devoted at least a chapter to reading techniques. Such treatments have tended to be heavy on schemes and systems, and light on real-world examples discussed in detail. This book has taken the opposite approach—light on schemes and systems, but heavy on examples that—we hope at least—will help to illuminate how reading happens, with all its problems and with all its messiness, as readers engage with text in the real world.