New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's recent ban on generative AI use in public schools for children up to age 14 has drawn praise as a symbolic stand against the commodification of children's attention, but education scholars warn it treats symptoms rather than root causes of a worsening global reading crisis. The latest PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results show continued declines in student reading performance, prompting alarm from ministers in France and Spain, yet analysts argue the crisis reflects a fundamental societal shift — from a literary culture built on fixed, scarce text to a "post-literary" digital orality in which AI-generated content is fluid, abundant, and interactive. Drawing on mid-twentieth-century media theorists Eric Havelock and Walter J. Ong, researchers suggest that students may be intuitively responding to a profound change in how knowledge is produced and shared, meaning that effective policy must reckon with this broader technological transformation rather than simply restricting AI tools in classrooms.