When Rose Horowitch sat down for an interview in September with Nicholas Dames, a professor at Columbia, she had no idea what she was getting into. One day early into the fall 2022 semester, a student showed up at Dames’ office hours to explain she was having difficulty in his class.
It wasn’t because she couldn’t understand the book or the material was too dense. It was that she had never been assigned an entire book before.
Dames was shocked, like many other educators across the United States.
Adam Kotsko wrote for Slate Magazine that students in his humanities classes are now “intimidated by anything over ten pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.”
By age 15, only 14% of U.S. children excel at reading, and nearly 20% fail to read at a baseline proficiency. Teachers nationwide have noticed that their students’ attention spans and reading stamina have taken a sharp nosedive since 2019.
Nationwide, both teachers and students are struggling to understand what is happening in their schools. One has to wonder, what is going on?
The kids can’t read. Illustration courtesy of Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva at The Atlantic
Here Comes AI, All Dressed In White
One of the obvious answers to this question is the rise in technology use over the last twenty years. Students born within the last seventeen years have never known a world without the iPhone, and three years from now, kindergarten-age children won’t know one without artificial intelligence.
The average attention span in 2004 was 150 seconds, or two and a half minutes. By 2013, this statistic had halved; by 2023, it had fallen to 47 seconds — barely enough to read a page.
The average teenager picks up their phone 100 times a day. Today’s students are so distracted by the glowing screens in their pockets that, honestly, why would they bother to put them down? We have a national crisis on our hands, and yet teachers across the country are assigning less than ever.
Professors like Theresa MacPhail have had to assign fewer and fewer readings per semester to keep up with the steady decline of students who complete her assignments.
When Dames’ student approached him that fateful afternoon during office hours, she explained that she had only read poetry, news articles, and book excerpts in high school.
An entire book? Out of the question.
COVID Chaos
During the COVID-19 pandemic, educators struggled to teach the educational curriculum that had only been given in person. Meanwhile, students struggled to keep up.
Susan Engel, a senior lecturer at Williams College, put it bluntly: teachers have had to focus primarily on phonics to solve the learning loss caused by COVID-19. When teachers focus solely on the structure and pronunciation of a word, they lose sight of other factors that contribute to reading ability, like textual analysis.
Because teachers have not been able to connect one-on-one with students in a classroom setting, they lost an aspect of teaching accessible only in person. Teachers could not support children when they fell behind. This gap only became apparent when schools returned in person in the fall of 2021.
They’re Banning The Books!
As of August 31st, 2024, over 414 attempts have been made to ban books in 2024. The state with the most banned or challenged books was Texas, with over 1,120 unique titles challenged, the most popular being The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Texas is also 46th out of 50 states for adult literacy. The adult literacy rate is 81%, with 19% of adults lacking literacy skills.
Would it be a far stretch to correlate the lack of access to classics with low literacy rates? The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, sheds light on several critical issues facing American society, including reproductive rights, sexual abuse, and the feminist movement. When children are denied access to literary texts that have taught their relatives for decades, they stand at a loss.
School, Job, Another Job, Another Job, No Sleep
Today’s students are taught college is primarily about career readiness. If your professors have only ever told you that your degree is only worth as much as an entry point into the workforce, then why would you spend any actual time sitting down and analyzing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?
Students are less likely to care about an English general education class than they are about their career prospects. And why would they? Modern society doesn’t promote reading for pleasure.
College is also becoming less and less about personal development. Over 50 years ago, 37% of students said that they attended a high institution to earn financial stability, compared to 73% who wanted to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life.” Those statistics nearly reversed by 2015, with 82% of students in college for monetary reasons, and 47% focused on emotional maturity.
Students read less as they age, from 70% of readers-for-fun among 6–8-year-olds vs. 46% among 12–17-year-olds. As they progress through the traditional public school system, reading a book becomes a chore and not something they want to do on their own time.
Game Your Life
You could argue that the popularity of #booktok, a growing movement on TikTok to show off your “current reads,” and Goodreads, a platform dedicated to logging and reviewing books, have only increased interest in reading amongst younger generations.
As much as the general public wishes this were the case, it is not. These internet companies promote the gamification of reading, meaning the mere act of picking up a book must be commodified and shown off on social media.
When was the last time you heard of someone sitting down and reading? They didn’t post the book to their Instagram Stories with a cup of tea next to them, and they certainly didn’t brag the next day about how many pages they read.
Gamification is prevalent in a variety of other sectors, most notably Letterboxd, an app dedicated to logging movies and TV shows. Instead of encouraging the proper digestion and time to absorb a book, meal, or film, these platforms prioritize quantity and hierarchy.
How many books did you read this year? Last year? Did you read more than your friend? Your neighbor? Oh my goodness, you’ve read over 100 books this year; you’ve won! But there is no winning.
Companies like Goodreads, Letterboxd, and Beli (reserved for restaurants and cafes) know that they are primarily selling social status, and not promoting individual hobbies. While joining a platform like Goodreads may help teenagers pick up a book, it’s harmful in the long run, because they’re not reading for themselves.
This issue became even more concerning when former president and president-elect Donald Trump announced that he plans to close the Department of Education, which provides $878.2 billion to elementary, middle, and high schools.
Reducing federal funding to public schools will force administrators to cut down on programs essential to well-educated children. How will children even begin to enjoy reading if their school is poorly funded?
Screens, the pandemic, and book bans are eroding the value of reading. To empower the next generation and make sure that Dames’ future students can read a whole book, we must invest in childhood literacy and the joy of a good book.