Why turning on your subtitles might be more radical than you think

When was the last time you read a book? And I mean really read one, without scrolling through your phone, sharing the latest viral meme on Twitter X, or watching that Netflix show everyone is talking about. Chances are, it’s been a while, but you’re not alone. According to a YouGov survey, only 54% of adult Americans read a book in 2023. And the numbers are worse for children. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 43% of fourth graders scored at or above a proficient level of reading. Yikes!

So what’s the solution? Henry Warren, a specialist in education technology and a concerned father of three, wants children to … watch more TV? Well, sort of; he specifically wants children to watch any program or play video games with subtitles turned on. Together with entrepreneur Oli Barrett, he founded Turn on The Subtitles, a global initiative that aims to educate parents about the benefits of subtitles for improving children’s literacy.

In an extended conversation, DailyTech talked with Warren about the challenge of getting kids to read, why subtitles are an ideal way to bridge the gap between the printed page and purely visual mediums, and why stars like Jack Black are using their celebrity to showcase just how effective Turn on the Subtitles can be.

Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

DailyTech: How did the Turn on the Subtitles initiative come to be?

Henry Warren: Well, I’m a single dad with three kids. I have a 14-year-old son, a 12-year-old daughter, and another seven-year-old daughter. Like a lot of parents, they are pretty much addicted to their mobile phones, and trying to get them to pick up a book is really, really hard. Anyway, a friend sent me this Guardian article that cited some new research that showed that you could improve a child’s literacy if they watched TV with the subtitles on. One of the guys that was mentioned in it was a professor from Hawaii. I was reading it late at night here in the U.K., and I thought, well, it’s late here, but it’s a decent time in Hawaii. I’ll give him a call.

So, I just rang this dude, and ended up speaking to him for about an hour. And by the end of this call, … I was like, holy cow. If this is right, this could be absolutely huge. He sent over about 450 academic papers from around the world, and it turns out that academics have known about the benefits of subtitles to boost literacy for about 10 to 15 years, but it’s just never really got into the public consciousness. So cutting a very long story short, we thought what we would do to get started was to just tell a few friends. And from there, it snowballed. It caught on like crazy.

Stephen Fry, who’s a bit of a household legend here in the U.K., got wind of it, and then before we knew it, we had 37 million impressions on Twitter alone. And then gradually, TV companies started to get hold of this research and governments began to write the practice into law. For example, it’s now a law in India to have subtitles on some of its programming. By 2025, 50% of all linear broadcast content, what you think of as TV, will have subtitles.

It’s not just India, though. Here in the U.K., Sky, which is part of Comcast, created the Sky Q Literacy Zone with our help. So you can now watch SpongeBob SquarePants and Scooby Doo with subtitles available.

Turn on the Subtitles just launched a channel on YouTube with the wonderful people at Moonbug, which has accumulated over 5 billion views. It’s amazing how far we’ve come with this initiative. We started off just trying to get a few friends involved to help our kids read more, and it’s now helping around about 400 million children around the world.

In doing research for this interview, I discovered, and it wasn’t much of a surprise, that the main cause for the decline in literacy among children is a lack of access to reading material due to their economic situation. How does Turn on the Subtitles seek to overcome that hurdle?

Well, the sad fact is that you’re absolutely right. There is a direct correlation between poverty and low levels of literacy. Did you know that six out of 10 kids in the poor parts of the United States have no books at all, not a single book. And pretty much all of them have access to some form of screen or television. There’s almost not a single child in the U.S. who doesn’t watch some form of TV.

The average child in the U.K. watches about three hours and 16 minutes of TV every day. In the United States, it’s actually a little bit higher than that. But if they were to have the subtitles turned on when they are watching all that TV, they would read the same number of words that are in all of the Harry Potter books, the Narnia books, the Lord of the Rings books, and everything that Roald Dahl ever wrote combined. That’s amazing! It’s truly nuts.

Another factor contributing to child illiteracy is the dominance of technology in everyday life. We’re all attached to our phones.