The End of Reading, The Beginning of Formation
Rose Horowitch has written the diagnosis. Here is the treatment plan an RSL hall and 2,500 discarded workers taught me.
By Kevin J. Barrett — The Creatrepreneur Chronicles
Newcastle, New South Wales. 1992.
Winter in July, which still felt like a trick the Southern Hemisphere was playing on me.
The RSL club had given us their conference room — beer soaked into the carpet from a thousand Friday nights, honour boards on the wall with the names of local men who'd gone to wars, a tea urn in the corner that took twenty minutes to boil and nobody minded.
Twenty chairs. We never ran more than twenty.
Skills-based training dies in big rooms; you need to be close enough to see every face change.
Nineteen of the chairs were filled with men and women the economy had just finished using. The banks were technically insolvent — I knew this from the inside, through connections most of the room would never have believed I had. The steelworks and the plants were shedding people the way a ship in trouble sheds cargo.
Not because the cargo failed.
Because someone above deck decided what was worth keeping.
He sat in the second row, on the aisle. Late forties. Hands that told you everything before he said a word — knuckles thickened from twenty-some years of work that mattered, work you could stand back and look at when the shift ended.
In front of him sat the retraining manual we'd handed out that morning. Maybe ninety pages.
He hadn't opened it.
Not wouldn't. Hadn't.
There's a difference, and if you've stood in front of enough rooms, you learn to read it. Refusal has a posture — arms crossed, chin up, daring you. This was something else. He sat with his hands flat on the cover the way you'd rest your hands on something you were guarding.
Or something you were afraid of.
At the first break, I made my way over. Not to check on him. Just to stand near the tea urn, be a human in his vicinity. That's an old sales instinct and an older coaching one: nobody reveals anything to someone walking toward them with a clipboard.
He spoke first. Quietly, without looking up.
"Twenty-six years I ran that line. Never made a scrap rate over two percent. You know what that means?"
I told him I did. I'd spent years inside 3M plants. I'd studied under a man named Deming who would have shaken his hand for a number like that.
"Then you tell me," he said, and now he looked at me, "why I can't get past page four of this thing."
There it was.
Not resistance. Shame.
The kind a man carries when he's been made to believe the deficit is in him — when nobody ever told him that the system he gave twenty-six years to never once asked him to read ninety pages of anything. It asked him for his hands, his back, his judgment at the machine, his loyalty. It got all four. It formed exactly the capacities it required and not one capacity more.
And then it let him go, and handed him a manual.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this a story about one man's limitation, and it is the opposite.
He was not unintelligent. Twenty minutes of conversation told me he could diagnose a failing production line by sound. He held systems in his head that the manual's authors couldn't have followed.
What he lacked was not capacity. It was formation — the deliberate cultivation of a faculty his world had never required and had therefore never built.
The deficit was never in the man.
The deficit was in the design.
We had 2,500 people like him coming through that program, twenty at a time. The easy read — the one plenty of officials made — was that these were the leftovers, the ones who couldn't adapt. And if we had done what most retraining programs did, handed them thick manuals and thin encouragement, we would have proven the officials right, one dropout at a time.
A system perfectly designed to confirm its own contempt.
I'll tell you now what took me weeks to learn: I had come to teach skills. That's what the program said on paper, and that's what I believed I was there to do.
But skills weren't the first domino.
The men and women in those twenty chairs didn't first need to learn something new. They needed to become someone who could learn something new — someone whose story hadn't ended the day the gate closed.
I didn't have language for it yet. A Viennese psychiatrist who survived the camps had written the language decades earlier; I just hadn't understood, until that winter, that he belonged in a retraining course in New South Wales.
But that comes later in this story.
For now, hold the image: a capable man, hands flat on a closed book, ashamed of a wound the system gave him and then blamed him for.
Thirty-four years later, The Atlantic put that man on its cover.
They just didn't know his name.
This August, The Atlantic gave its print cover to a piece by staff writer Rose Horowitch. The title does not hedge: "The End of Reading Is Here."
Neither does the evidence.
The share of Americans who read a book — or even an article — on any given day has fallen by roughly forty percent in two decades. Gambling now outranks reading as a leisure activity. In the most recent national assessment, only about a third of high-school seniors could do the things reading was always ultimately for — analyze a complex theme, weigh whether an author's argument actually holds.
One researcher tracked the average attention span on a screen: two and a half minutes in 2004. Seventy-five seconds by 2012.
You can guess the direction since.
And then the detail that stopped me cold. A support director at Harvard — Harvard — described a student who fed a challenging novel into an AI chatbot and asked it to translate the book into easier language. The student called the original "Old English."
It was published in 1962.
I read that anecdote three times. Not because it shocked me. Because I had seen it before — in a second-row aisle seat in Newcastle, in 1992. A person of real intelligence, facing a text, and finding the door locked.
The Harvard student and the steelworker are the same story separated by thirty-four years and one crucial difference: the steelworker felt shame, because his world still told him the deficit was his. The student felt nothing, because his world handed him a workaround and called it a tool.
I don't say that to sneer at the student.
Hold him gently; we made his world, not he.
Horowitch's deepest point is not about books as objects. She is precise about this, and she deserves credit for it: what is being lost is not a pastime but a set of load-bearing faculties — sustained comprehension, synthesis, the capacity to hold a long argument in the mind and test it.
The things a self-governing person runs on.
The things, I would add, a self-governing nation runs on.
Reading was never the point. Reading was the gymnasium where those muscles got built, and we are quietly closing the gymnasiums and wondering why the muscles are gone.
Now, the wrestle — because there is one, and pretending otherwise would be beneath both of us.
The critics have a point worth taking seriously. This alarm has sounded before. Sixty years ago, television was going to be the end of critical intelligence. Before that, radio. Before that — and I enjoy this one — Socrates worried that writing itself would rot memory and produce the appearance of wisdom without the substance.
Every generation believes the barbarians have finally breached the gate, and every generation has so far been wrong. When some reviewers call Horowitch's piece recycled moral panic, they are not being lazy.
They are citing precedent.
Here is where I part company with them, and I part on Deming's ground, not on nostalgia's.
Deming taught me to stop asking whether people are getting worse and start asking what the system is currently designed to produce.
Ask that question, and the "we've heard this before" defense collapses — because the system has changed in kind, not degree. Television interrupted attention a few hours a night, from a box across the room, broadcasting the same thing to everyone. The device in the pocket is engineered, adaptive, and personal. It runs the most sophisticated behavioral science in human history, tuned to each individual nervous system, twenty-four hours a day, with one commercial objective: harvest attention and sell it.
Television competed with reading.
The scroll economy strip-mines the faculty reading is built from.
This is what I have called the Scrolling Deficit, and it is not a moral panic. It is a business model.
And it compounds with something older and quieter, which I've named the Appreciation Deficit: a culture that stopped honoring formation — of teachers, of craft, of the slow building of a person — will not notice when formation stops happening.
You cannot lose what you no longer value enough to count.
So the statistics are him. All of them.
The sixty-five percent of seniors who can't evaluate an argument — I have stood in a room with them, and I promise you some of them can diagnose a failing production line by sound. The seventy-five-second attention span — that is a closed manual on a table, multiplied by a nation.
The wound I saw in one man in Newcastle has been industrialized, and this time the system doesn't even bother with the shame.
It sells the anesthetic in the same pocket as the injury.
Horowitch ends her piece where journalism ends: at the honest edge of the diagnosis. She suggests we may be drifting back toward something like the oral cultures that came before the written word — and she means it as an elegy.
I read that line differently.
Because I have been to the place she's describing.
And there is gold in that crack.
In Japan, when a treasured bowl breaks, there is a tradition of repairing it with lacquer dusted in gold. Kintsugi. The repair does not hide the break. It honors it — and the bowl becomes more valuable than it was before it cracked, because now it carries its history in gold.
I have written about this before, and I return to it now because Horowitch has, without meaning to, handed us the bowl.
Her elegy — that we are drifting back toward the oral cultures that came before the written word — is the crack.
Everyone reads that line as decline.
Read it again.
The oral cultures that came before writing were not unformed cultures. That is the assumption hiding inside the word "post-literate," and it does not survive contact with the evidence.
Pre-literate societies ran formation technologies of staggering power: apprenticeship, where capability passed hand to hand under a master's eye. Story, which carried a people's entire moral architecture in a form a child could hold. Rhythm and song, which welded knowledge to memory so firmly that epics survived a thousand years without a single page. Call-and-response, mentorship, initiation — an entire curriculum for building persons, run without ink.
When Georgi Lozanov developed what the world came to call accelerated learning — the music, the suggestion, the deliberate management of state and belonging — he was not inventing something new.
He was recovering something old.
He was reverse-engineering the formation technologies of the oral world and smuggling them back into the classroom. I know, because I ran his methods in those halls in New South Wales, and I watched them open doors that no manual could.
So here is the first strand of the answer: the Oral Tradition, recovered.
Not as nostalgia — as technology. If the age of the page is receding, then the formation arts that predate the page are not obsolete.
They are due.
But hold on — because if I stop there, I have argued myself into surrender, and I will not.
A shrug that says "reading had a good run, the campfire is back" abandons exactly what Horowitch is right to grieve: the faculties of sustained comprehension and synthesis that the page, uniquely, trains. Video will not train them; she is correct about that, and honest about the paradox — video carries more information than text and produces less thought, because it floods the gates that reading teaches a mind to hold.
So the second strand: Reading, re-birthed.
Not reading as decoding. Not reading as compliance, the worksheet and the quiz — that version deserved to die.
Reading re-founded as what it always secretly was: strength training for the sovereign mind. The deliberate formation of attention that can hold, comprehension that can follow, judgment that can weigh an argument and find it wanting.
In those rooms we did not lower the manual to meet the man. We formed the man until he could meet the manual — and then he did.
The Harvard student deserves nothing less.
Simplify the world for a mind, and you have decided that mind's ceiling.
Form the mind, and it decides its own.
Two strands. How we form — the recovered oral arts. What we form — the critical faculties, with the page as their gymnasium.
And still the braid is incomplete, because the hardest question is still standing, and I can hear a nineteen-year-old asking it:
Formed for what?
In a world where a machine can summarize any book, draft any memo, answer any exam — why build these faculties at all? If the purpose of formation is consumption, even excellent consumption, then the machines have won the argument, and the student with his AI translation was simply early.
The purpose of formation was never consumption.
Here is the third strand, and it is the one I have carried the longest: Creation.
The capacity to see across the silos — to stand where the specialist cannot, holding the factory floor and the psychology text and the wheat field and the balance sheet in one mind, and to notice what none of them can see alone: the connection.
And then — this is the part no machine performs and no summary contains — to build the connection into something that did not exist before. A product. A service. A method. A business.
New value, brought across the threshold from idea into the world.
That faculty has a prerequisite, and the prerequisite is everything this piece has been about. Synthesis across domains requires a mind that has been in domains — deeply, slowly, with the sustained attention that only formation builds.
You cannot connect what you have only scrolled past.
The seventy-five-second attention span does not merely read less; it creates less, because creation is the child of depth, and depth is exactly what the extraction economy strip-mines. This is the true cost hiding inside Horowitch's statistics, the one no one is counting: not the decline of a pastime, but the quiet foreclosure of a people's creative capacity.
A nation that cannot read deeply becomes a nation that cannot connect widely, and a nation that cannot connect widely becomes a customer for other people's creations.
Extraction, all the way down.
In 1996 I published a name for the alternative: the Creation Society. A society whose center of gravity is not what its people consume but what they create — and whose institutions are therefore judged by one standard: do they form creators?
In those New South Wales rooms, years before I published the term, I watched it prove itself twenty chairs at a time. The men and women who walked back into employment — better than ninety in a hundred of them — did not succeed because we filled them with content.
They succeeded because the sequence restored them as makers of their next chapter rather than casualties of their last one.
And the sequence had an order, which brings me to the name I promised.
Viktor Frankl.
The Viennese psychiatrist who survived the camps and emerged with the most durable finding in the history of psychology: that a human being can endure nearly any how if there is a why.
I had read Frankl years before Australia. I want to be honest about that, because the difference matters — it may be the most important difference in this whole piece.
I had read him. I could have passed an exam on him.
Knowing a book and being formed by it are not the same event, and they can be separated by a decade and an ocean.
In those first weeks at Coffs Harbour, when I began training the unemployed, I picked him up again. And this time a passage stopped me cold — I must have read it three, four times, and I will give it to you as my memory holds it rather than pretend to quote:
The closest thing Frankl said he had encountered in his clinical work — the nearest analogue to what he had lived through in the concentration camps — was the plight of the unemployed.
I put the book down.
My first reaction was not insight. It was offense.
How can you compare unemployment to the Holocaust?
The man had lost his family to the camps. He had stood in the roll-call yards. Who was I to receive that sentence — and who was he to write it?
And then the next morning came, and I walked back into that hall, and looked at the circle of faces.
That was when it began to make sense — not as a comparison of suffering, which it never was, but as a diagnosis of the same wound at different depths.
Frankl had watched, in Vienna in the 1930s before the war ever reached him, what happens to a person whose entire worth has been wrapped around a job when the job is taken away. He gave it a clinical name and a clinical finding that should be carved over the door of every retraining program on earth: the despair of the unemployed was not, at its root, about money. He observed that when men without work took on meaningful activity — unpaid, mattering to someone — the darkness lifted even though the poverty remained.
The wound was never economic.
The wound was identity.
When your reason for being is your position, then the letter that ends the position ends the reason — and when the reason goes, hope does not walk out slowly.
It leaves with the same envelope.
That was the man I would meet, weeks later, in the second row at Newcastle. Twenty-six years, scrap rate under two percent — that number wasn't a statistic to him; it was his name, the truest sentence he knew how to say about himself, which is why it was the first thing he said to me.
The gate hadn't just closed on his employment. It had closed on his identity, and the manual on the table was asking a man who no longer knew who he was to become someone new.
Page four is a long way in, when you're reading as no one.
So I stopped teaching skills first. Frankl — whom I had known for years and understood for about a week — reordered everything.
Meaning. Then state. Then skill.
Meaning restores the why: you are not what the gate closed on; your worth was never the position's to give, so it was never the position's to take; your story is unfinished and its next chapter is yours to author.
State restores the conditions — Lozanov's recovered oral arts: attention, calm, music, belonging, the room itself telling every nervous system in it that it is safe to learn again.
And then, only then, the skill: the manual, the page, the gymnasium of the sovereign mind.
Run the sequence in that order and the book opens.
Run it backwards — skill first, meaning never — and you get the world Horowitch is describing: a civilization of closed manuals, and everyone blaming the hands resting on the covers.
Three strands, one braid. The Oral Tradition recovered — how we form. Reading re-birthed — what we form. Creation — why we form.
Braided, they are what I have long called a SOULution: an answer that refuses the false choice, that serves the Best for All Concerned — the man in the second row, the student at Harvard, the teacher, the employer, the nation — because it does not ask which of them must lose.
Which means the divide of our moment is not the one on the magazine cover.
The divide is not literate versus post-literate.
It is formed versus extracted — and formation has never depended on which door it enters through. Voice or page, campfire or library, it depends on one thing only: whether anyone is standing at the door to open it.
I know, because I stood at one.
And I watched what walked through.
I need to tell you what happened to me between those rooms, before I tell you what happened to him. Frankl would insist on the order — and so would honesty, because I have told this story for years as if I were only the trainer, and that is not the whole truth.
When I accepted those first weeks at Coffs Harbour, I was still a real estate man. I had a commercial and industrial firm in Sydney, tens of millions in listings a collapsed market would not move, and one live transaction that mattered — a joint venture I had structured with a partner firm, a genuine win/win, the kind of deal I still believed business was supposed to be.
An American-led company needed out of an old sawtooth-roofed factory and into a modern one; I had found the path; the venture would complete it while I was away, and I held it together by phone between sessions — teaching a circle to read aloud in the mornings, negotiating by trunk call in the evenings, one foot in the world I was leaving and one in the world I hadn't yet chosen.
We got the deal done.
Three weeks later I discovered the deal had been done, in the other sense.
My partner had cut me out of the transaction entirely. The income I had been counting on did not exist.
And it was not the first time — it was the latest in a pattern I had watched metastasize through that industry for years: banks, developers, conjoined agencies refusing to pay what was owed, and doing it proudly, as though welching were a philosophy. Extraction to the limit had become the culture, and men quoted its gospels to your face.
The next program was already booked. Newcastle.
I did not skip a beat — I want to say that plainly, because it sounds like resilience and it was nothing so composed.
It was a man driving the Pacific Highway with the wreckage of one livelihood behind him and twenty chairs waiting ahead, running Frankl's proposition on himself at a hundred kilometres an hour: your worth was never the position's to give, so it was never the position's to take.
I had spent three weeks saying it to others.
Now the road wanted to know if I meant it.
So understand what actually walked into that RSL hall in Newcastle, past the honour boards, to stand in front of a man with his hands flat on a closed manual.
Not a successful man donating his surplus wisdom to the unfortunate.
A member of his cohort, days into the same wound, with better luggage.
When he told me his scrap rate — his name, the truest sentence he knew about himself — I understood him at a depth no training manual could have taught me, because an industry had just told me my own truest sentences were worth nothing.
The choice I made on that drive had a shape by the time I arrived: I washed my hands of real estate.
Not because I had failed at it — because I finally admitted that what it had become was irreconcilable with what 3M and Deming had built into me. Integrity was not a policy there; it was the operating system. An industry that had made betrayal a best practice could keep its commissions.
I made the training of the unemployed my prime mover — my work, in Frankl's exact sense: the place where my meaning would be made.
It was the least secure decision available to me, and the only one I have never regretted.
I tell you this because the piece would be dishonest without it. The sequence I have been describing — meaning first, then state, then skill — was not administered to wounded people from a safe distance. It was run first, at highway speed, on the man doing the administering.
The door I stood at, I had just walked through.
There is a road between Coffs Harbour and Newcastle, and I can tell you exactly where it happened.
The week I had re-read that passage at Coffs Harbour, I wrote a sentence in the margin of my own thinking that I have never said in public — and I read it now not as a trainer reading about his students, but as a man who was days from joining them.
I will say it, and then I will do to it what thirty-four years have taught me to do.
If what Dr. Frankl is saying is true — and I have no doubt it is — then Australia is experiencing a holocaust.
I tremble at that sentence today, and I want you to see me trembling.
A young man reached for the largest word he knew, and it was the wrong word — nothing that happened in those towns belongs in the same sentence as the camps, and Frankl, of all men, is owed better than a loose analogy from a trainer in a beer-scented conference room.
So let me keep the fire and correct the terms, because underneath the wrong word was a right perception, and the right perception changed my life:
What was happening in Australia — what is happening in America now — was a mass destruction of identity and meaning, at national scale, that everyone insisted on treating as an economics problem.
Tens of thousands of people whose worth had been wrapped around their work, unwrapped in a single generation, handed a cheque and a manual, and told the deficit was theirs. Frankl had named the wound one person at a time. I was standing in a country that had industrialized it.
Nobody had died. But something in tens of thousands of people was dying, and the official instruments couldn't even measure it, because the official instruments counted dollars and the wound was made of meaning.
And here is where Frankl closed his own loop on me.
He taught that meaning is not found; it is made — in work, in love, in the stance you take toward what you cannot change. I could not change the closures. I could not reopen the gates.
What I could do — what became, on that highway and in those halls, the reason for my own being — was stand on the other side of the wound and help people create their way out of it.
Not cope. Not adjust. Create.
New skills, yes — but before that, new stories; and after that, new work, new enterprises, new value that did not exist until someone formed enough to see a connection built it.
I needed a word for the kind of person that process produces — someone who creates their next chapter rather than waiting for an economy to hand them one.
The word that came was Creatrepreneur.
I have used it in every program I have run since. Years later I would publish the larger frame — the Creation Society, a society judged by what its people create rather than what they consume — but the word was not born at a desk.
It was born in rooms like those, twenty chairs at a time, watching people the country had written off become authors again.
Which brings me back to the second row.
We reordered everything, that season. Meaning first: before any manual was opened, the work was identity — Frankl's question, put plainly to every cohort: the gate closed on your job; did it close on you?
Then state: Lozanov's recovered arts — the music, the calm, the belonging, a room whose every signal said it is safe to learn here — the oral tradition doing what it had done for ten thousand years before anyone printed a page.
And then, only then, the skill.
Let me show you what the sequence looked like in practice, because it was humbler than the theory sounds — and because it was born in the first of those rooms, at Coffs Harbour, weeks before I understood what I had built.
I carried with me a very small book — James Allen's As a Man Thinketh, a hundred years old even then, short enough to hide in a jacket pocket and heavy enough to change a life.
Each morning we would sit in a circle, and the book would travel around it. Each person read a passage aloud — a paragraph, a page, whatever they could carry — and passed it to the next pair of hands.
By the end of a single day, the whole book had been read, out loud, by everyone, to everyone.
I want you to see how many things that one exercise was doing at once, because I designed it deliberately and it still took me years to understand everything it did.
A person reading aloud to a circle is practicing the page — comprehension, fluency, the eye learning to hold a line.
A person reading aloud to a circle is also practicing the oldest technology we have — the voice, the listening faces, the belonging that comes from carrying your piece of something shared.
The fear of speaking in front of others, which had kept half that room silent in every meeting they'd ever attended, dissolved not through confrontation but through contribution: you were not performing, you were passing the fire.
And the words themselves were doing the third work, the deepest one, because Allen's whole thesis — that a person is made, literally constructed, by what they habitually think — is Frankl's finding in Victorian clothes.
Meaning, state, and skill, in one circle, with a book small enough to underestimate.
The page and the voice were never enemies.
We only ever needed both hands.
And the manual came last — and because it came last, it came easily.
I watched him open it.
Not the first week. Identity work is slow, and his had twenty-six years of compression behind it.
But there was a morning — tea urn going, honour boards looking down, the names of formed men watching a room full of extracted ones take themselves back — when I passed his row and the manual was open, well past page four, and his finger was moving under the lines the way we do when the words have started speaking.
He never made a ceremony of it. Men like him don't.
But at the break he found me by the urn, tapped the open page once with the back of his hand, and said, "It's not so bad once you're into it."
I should tell you plainly: I have given you one man in a second row, and he is real the way a river is real. Twenty faces at a time, two and a half thousand seats, men and women both — steel and timber, shopfront and dockside. I have let one stand for all of them, because that is what memory does with a season that changes your life.
The wound is not composite. The wound I watched heal in every one of those rooms.
Twenty-six years, scrap rate under two percent. He was never the problem. He was never the deficit.
He was a formed man whose formation had been declared obsolete, and all he needed — all the sixty-five percent need, all the seventy-five-second nation needs — was for someone to run the sequence in the right order and stand at the door.
Better than ninety in a hundred of them walked back into work.
But I have come to believe the employment figures were the smallest thing we produced in those rooms. What we actually produced was proof — proof I have carried through every factory floor, boardroom, and classroom since:
Formation is not lost. It is only unpracticed.
The faculties Rose Horowitch rightly grieves — the sustained attention, the comprehension, the synthesis — are not gone from our people. They are unformed, in the precise sense: waiting on a sequence nobody is running and a door nobody is standing at.
So let the diagnosis stand; she has written it well, and I have spent this whole piece agreeing with her evidence.
The age of reading may indeed be ending — reading as we institutionalized it, reading as decoding and compliance, reading as the thing the worksheet checked.
I will not mourn that version.
But the age of formation is not a trend line. It is a choice.
A scientist who won the Nobel Prize for studying how systems transform taught us that when an old order dissolves, the future is decided not by the size of the collapse but by the smallest structures present at the branching point.
A circle of twenty chairs is a small structure.
So is a door with someone standing at it.
Formation has always entered through whatever door was open. Voice, once. Page, for five centuries. Voice and page braided together, if we are wise, in whatever comes next.
The Creatrepreneur's wager, the one I made on a highway between two towns and have never once had reason to withdraw, is that people are not degrading.
They are being extracted — and extraction reverses the moment formation resumes.
A capable man, hands flat on a closed book, ashamed of a wound the system gave him.
A capable nation, thumbs moving on a lit screen, medicated against a wound it has not yet named.
The book is not finished.
It is only closed.
And somewhere, someone is standing at the door.
— Kevin J. Barrett, The Creatrepreneur Chronicles
This edition draws on The Gold in the Crack, The Appreciation Deficit, The Soil Remembers, and The Missing Character on Maple Street.
https://thecreatrepreneur.com/the-gold-in-the-crack/
https://thecreatrepreneur.com/the-appreciation-deficit/
https://thecreatrepreneur.com/the-soil-remembers/
https://thecreatrepreneur.com/the-missing-character-on-maple-street/