Why literacy is important when it comes to our democracy - Matt Bromley
Democracy depends on more than decoding words; it requires the ability to comprehend, question and read between them. Accordingly, one of the most important defences of democracy is sitting on your bookshelf.
The National Literacy Trust's latest research offers hope. After reaching a 20-year low in 2025, children's enjoyment of reading rose in 2026, with 36.1 per cent of 8 to 18-year-olds saying they enjoy reading in their free time. Daily reading also edged up to 20.3 per cent. But those figures are still far lower than a decade ago and the disadvantage gap has widened.
So, let us celebrate a small recovery but worry about the bigger picture. Because here is the paradox: thanks to our phones, we may be surrounded by more words than ever but reading critically is becoming harder than ever.
Reading on phones encourages a more fragmented, surface-level engagement with information because the next distraction is always one tap away. The written word, meanwhile, possesses a quality our scrolling culture does not: permanence.
A written argument can be reread, challenged and reconsidered. Writing slows thought down, too. It gives ideas somewhere to sit while we examine them. The danger with doomscrolling is not that we become unable to read words; it’s that we become less able – or less willing – to wrestle with what those words might mean, and whether they’re objectively true.
That’s why Singapore is paying its citizens to read a book for fifteen minutes a day. They hope it will improve concentration and critical thinking skills, and it might just work because books are a workout for the attention span. The more we read, the more readily we can sustain concentration, follow complexity, and build knowledge; stop exercising those muscles and the effort becomes harder.
The problem isn't TikTok per se. Nor is it that everyone who uses social media is gullible. But misinformation doesn't always look like a lie. Bias can be a careful selection of facts, a photo without context, a statistic stripped of its denominator, or a genuine video clipped to conceal what happened before or after. Britain's increasingly febrile politics provides fertile ground for this. Recent anti-immigration protests, including the Dover blockade by Patriot Platform, are amplified through social media by activists like Tommy Robinson and Danny Tommo, neither of which is their real name and both of whom are convicted criminals. Not everyone who watches such material will believe it, but messages that arrive directly, repeatedly, and emotionally on a phone can make the familiar feel factual.
And that is where literacy becomes a democratic issue. A literate citizen doesn't simply read words, they read power. They ask: Who wrote this? What evidence supports it? What has been omitted? Is this news, opinion, propaganda, or satire? Does another credible source tell the same story? These aren't academic questions; they’re the foundations of democratic citizenship. Give a child a book and you give them a story. Teach them to read critically, and you give them something just as precious: the means to decide whether that story is true.
Matt Bromley is CEO of bee and chair of the Building Equity in Education campaign. He is the author of numerous books on education. Find out more at http://bee-online.uk