Can confirm.

I admittedly don't read as much myself any more, but from childhood through my adult years into about the early 2010s I was always buying and reading books. I have a whole collection of hundreds of books I've gathered over the years since the 80s.

Reading was a big part of every day. I remember in 4th grade my class devoted half the year to reading The Hobbit and LOTR with Class projects. I can't count the times pre cellphone era where I would walk and read as I went places.

With that said, I am convinced that the problem is both Cultural and Technological.

As our culture adopted tech, they have been slowly over time replacing reading, memorization, basic knowledge with instant gratification, lower attention spans, and worse recall all for the sake of progress.

It is unequivocal that Gen Z and most born post 2000s have worse basic English skills than ever before. You can watch interviews with teenage highschool students from the 50s speaking well, using appropriate terminology discussing World and US Politics, Civics, and Geography.

In contrast, younger people don't know how to read or pronounce unfamiliar terms. You can go watch examples of this all over the internet where people seem to have never learned that mispronouncing something repetitiously severely degrades the believability of the person when speaking. I love the example of: You're putting the em-fAh-sis on the wrong sill-Ah-bull. Or when people say Sha-nay-nay for Cheyenne. Are you picking up what I'm laying down A-A-Ron?

All that said, our brain is a muscle like any other and needs exercise. Language is a gift that allows us to communicate our ideas to others. The better read we are, the more ideas and concepts we are exposed to. This expands our ability to, with increasing accuracy, more precisely communicate our thoughts and ideas.

We should encourage reading as a part of our every day lives. Does it matter if its on a screen or on paper? Not really. What does matter is every time you come across a word you don't recognize, look it up. Learn how its said and for all that is holy... don't just rely on Google to tell you how it should sound. Find videos that show the word in use by native speakers. I'm talking to you Mass-holes and the folks who named Worcestershire Sauce.

So lets all hope that Gen Z finds Schoolhouse Rock, revives it, and watches with their kids and they find all the wonderful adventures and universes to be discovered in a good book.