Children never forgot how to read. They simply stopped needing to read for very long.

By the 2030s, synthetic tutors are transforming education. Every child can receive patient, personalised instruction. Difficult passages can be explained instantly. Lessons adapt to individual ability. Teacher shortages become easier to manage, struggling pupils receive unprecedented support, and educational inequality appears finally to be narrowing.

Then something quieter begins to change.

Textbooks give way to adaptive knowledge systems. Homework becomes a conversation. Examinations reward understanding without requiring prolonged reading. Books remain everywhere, yet fewer children finish them. By 2049, a generation capable of processing enormous quantities of information is struggling with something once considered ordinary: remaining alone with a difficult text long enough for its meaning to unfold.

The Year Children Stopped Reading is a speculative future history of how beneficial technologies, reasonable educational reforms and understandable demands for efficiency could gradually transform childhood attention. Written as an authoritative account of a future that never happened, it explores what society might gain from synthetic education—and what could become unexpectedly valuable once deep reading is no longer necessary.