You may remember this article two months ago from The Atlantic (archive version): https://archive.ph/6trlz
“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Excerpt:
“Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.”
Well, I imagine that none of us were all that challenged with this phenom — I mean, I know I’m not alone in having educated myself as much from unassigned books read under the desk during slow boring classes… hundreds of them each year (9 school months @ 2/day minimum, while captive). But then, we’re writers: we have to have been readers first.
I hadn’t realized, however, before this article, that college age students weren’t reading any complete works before college (one wonders how they could even get in).
If true, that’s an existential cultural threat. How can you maintain Western Civ if you don’t personally know (a lot of) what’s in it, whether via direct instruction or at second hand from its stories?
I had always thought that using accompanying fiction to “teach” (embody) history (e.g., covering the same period via Ivanhoe & actual history) fails as an option if they don’t read even fiction in high school.
Can we no longer count on story as a primordial hominin tool? How did we become tribes if we weren’t sharing stories about our heroes, our beliefs, and our goals… all of our culture? Can you have a civilization if its members can’t tell its formative stories?
Our own compulsive reading audience has always been a bit specialized, but as fewer and fewer people are compulsive (or even competent) readers of long form, a lot of accompanying disaster is likely to ensue. Yes, you can still get “story” from other media, but the internal visualization of the written word is a civilizational skill — we lose it at our peril.
What’s your take on the problem of ease and competence for reading by younger folk? Do you believe it? Can it be changed? Does it matter? Will the seductive powers of other entertainment media relegate it to a minor channel, and if so, what will be the consequences of that?
Mad Genius Club 
36 responses to “What if students just don’t read anymore?”
It’s changed, so it can change again. But I think there is not nearly as much emphasis on reading full books now as there has been in the past. My daughter, 14 years old in 8th grade, is doing “Battle of the Books” with her friends this year. And it has changed in just the last few years, or maybe it’s because she’s in middle school, not sure. But this year they compete as a teams rather than individuals. She’s sure they’re going to lose because most of her teammates have only read one or two of the books on the list (she’s read six IIRC). She’s also not impressed with the selections this year. She’s only liked one of them, and when she complained about how slow the pacing was in <i>The Red Badge of Courage</i> one of her teachers admitted that he just skimmed it for class and never read the whole thing himself. BTW, that’s the only classic book on the list, and the only one not written in the 21st century. I think she’s going to try to listen to the audioBooks of some on the list so that they at least have all the books covered.
“BTW, that’s the only classic book on the list, and the only one not written in the 21st century.”
Is your daughter’s school trying to lock its students into the eternal now?
“BTW, that’s the only classic book on the list, and the only one not written in the 21st century.”
Is your daughter’s school trying to lock its students into the eternal now?
Oh, yes. It’s amazing how time-locked “diversity” readings are, in particular.
This is such a pet peeve of mine that I have written about it several times. I have at least two separate parts to my annoyance. Part One is that kids don’t understand their own history, which could be fixed by reading books that aren’t difficult. I had a 7th grade student who was a struggling reader, but when I proposed that he try the Little House books, especially The Long Winter which features a heroic boy, the librarian said it was too young for him. Grrrr. No. The theme of the book is quite grownup, but the writing was at his level. It really gave me a distaste for the way librarians think.
Part Two is that kids can’t follow written directions. And by kids I mean, I have also failed at this. This is probably even worse for civilization since books are an incredible resource that isn’t dependent on electricity. If we can read we could fix things that get broken… I hope one link is okay. I’ve never done it before. https://catholicfictioncatholicscience.com/2024/12/20/making-mistakes-and-fixing-them/
It was in 7th grade that I made a deal with my classroom teachers in my girls’ school — If they would stop giving me grief over reading more or less covertly under the desk in their classes (out of intolerable boredom) as long as I maintained my A’s, I would stop making sarcastic remarks about errors of logic or fact in what they were teaching.
It was a great deal. We expanded it in Math classes to my just doing all the exercises in the book ahead of the teacher and going on to the next (grade) level book when I ran out. This resulted in my moving on to local college level stuff while still in high school. (The joke’s on me — I went to college as a Math major and didn’t make it through the first semester of advanced levels. On the other hand, I was happy with my resultant dead languages and oh so much more in the course offerings.)
I never overheard candid discussions from my middle school teachers, but I was apparently something of a legacy of accommodation — when I was 12 and the outgoing headmistress was showing her replacement around the classes, they managed to come into a classroom while I was reading something really good, and it wasn’t until I realized the class had gone very quiet that I looked up from the book in my lap to find them both standing behind me looking over my shoulder.
I looked up. Mrs. Green looked down. “Good book, Karen?” she said. “Very good book,” I replied, deadpan. No other remark was made. (I was more than a little startled that she knew my name.)
We need more of this sort of accommodation (high and low in skills) in our schools.
And librarians deciding what a kid can or cannot read is a major problem, in my book. Sure, if it is a book with questionable content, maybe clear it with the parents before you let the kid have it. But declaring something is either “too young” or “too advanced” for a kid is rank garbage.
(I am 45 years old. I still read the Little House books on occasion. Although I surely wish I could get my hands on Laura Wilder’s REAL, unkidified memoirs–apparently they are some dark and fascinating reading. I still read many of the “kids” books that I loved as a kid, and which are still damn good books now.)
Children’s books in particular are written to appeal to children’s librarians and have almost nothing in common with what appeals to children. I don’t want to speculate on the motives of those librarians, but I will say that if they were trying to turn kids off of reading, they could hardly do better.
(If I had a dollar for every time a librarian recommended that a kid who loves fantasy ought to read Bridge to Terabithia, I would have enough money to put all of those librarians on a one-way flight to a deserted island!)
Ugh. Are they STILL pushing Terabithia? Fortunately, my mother warned me about that one before I made the mistake of reading it!
Yes, let’s tell kids that a freaking depressing story where one of the main characters dies is something they’ll just *love*.
Kind of like me assuming that The Red Pony by Steinbeck was going to be a nice, kid-friendly horse book. (And that, ladies and gents, is why I hate John Steinbeck. It was cemented when they forced us to read Grapes of Wrath in high school.)
You read The Grapes of Wrath in your high school? In mine the English teacher had us watching it on VCR, along with Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird. I came out of it loathing all three.
Both read, and I want to say we also watched the film thereof.
I don’t think my class (AP English) did Of Mice and Men, but other English classes did. I liked my freshman year best: the Hobbit was on the list, but since I’d first read that when I was six, I persuaded the teacher to let me read Lord of the Rings instead (which I had also read before, but I do prefer the trilogy to the Hobbit.)
Worst was the “Modern Fiction” class I took. They made us read Beloved (awful book), and The Right Stuff (nope, didn’t like it any better) among other things. Oh, and The Shipping News, which we all hated…but at the end of the book went “Actually, that one was kind of good…”
(but also keep in mind, this was 1994-1998. Lot fewer alternative media options then, other than the books.)
Amen.
In grade school, they required you to read all the skill levels before you could advance to the next.
Once that road block was forcibly removed, I was reading all kinds of stuff.
I think the one or two teachers/librarians who tried that on me got the sharp edge of my mother’s tongue (if I hadn’t already done something like, oh, tell them how to spell “paleontologist”…) Much of my early elementary years were them leaving me alone and letting me read what I liked. (In fact, I recall frequently being allowed to leave class and go hang out in the school library…)
Do we know if they can read fluently in the first place? Apparently schools are back. To teaching guess-words where you try to guess what word is written down based on the rest of the sentence, which you are also guessing at.
As near as I can tell it produces people who can only fake reading well enough to pass, but not actually read.
The linguist John McWhorter describes all too clearly how devastating that “whole word” stuff was for black men in particular. There’s a generation of urban men who are functionally illiterate to the point that they can’t read street signs, because they don’t know how to sound out words. Which exacerbates a lot of other social and cultural problems.
Seems like something you could fix with a YouTube channel and a little bit of salesmanship. It’s way easier to learn this stuff in private on your own than ask someone for help. Plus you have a built-in sales pitch: It’s literally “secret” knowledge that everyone else knows and is using to get ahead.
Are they prone to watch You-Tube?
I’m not sure what the specific age range is, so…maybe? The pros are that it would be (1) private/shame-free, (2) targeted, (3) effective, and (4) spreadable through quiet word-of-mouth or well-chosen endorsement (e.g., a stand-up comic ranting about education). This is all contingent on people wanting to learn, of course, along with a half-decent curriculum.
You know, a well meaning philanthropist could put some how-to-read classes online, supported by out-of-copyright books. With an initial getting-started intro from a parent or teacher, if a student had access to a computer for the class, there would be classic book content, too. Once the work had been set up, the thing could run for peanuts.
Sounds like an ideal pro-bono project for one of the Online Curriculum vendors to make a big marketing deal out of, and maybe spread to free online access locations (e.g., libraries). Maybe one of the home-school specialists…
Such a vendor could accommodate the slow tech-current nature of keeping the online product offerings alive while the actual content would be pretty static, thus minimal update expense. You could charge one subscription price for solvent customers, and a pro-bono price for others or for the use of schools generally.
I would think this would be terrific publicity. Might be hard to monetize, but surely better than the current classroom ineptitude.
I have friends who teach English-as-a-Second-Language, and while those are mostly adult and don’t need help with general reading, they are often computer-illiterate and need guidance to break into that process to get started.
Utopian?
I … would like to say a lot, but for various reasons, it wouldn’t be wise. I will say that the ease of finding answers to book-related questions on line, and the way younger students are taught to use online resources, doesn’t make things easier for encouraging whole-book reading. If a computer can pop up an acceptable-to-teacher answer in an instant, leaving you free to do other homework, or pursue other interests, why bother to read the book? Especially if it is full of cultural references you don’t get?
Don’t worry about it. We are talking about students at elite schools. You know – drones. Doesn’t matter if they read or not.
In the real world (AKA Flyover Country) young people still read, including young people. You will find young readers in surprising places. My nephew’s wife is from Honduras and has family in town, also immigrants. I feed her nephews books all the time. They love reading – just not a school.
Similarly my granddaughters are readers – those too young to read love listening to books being read to them.
I suspect this is a problem mainly among the self-appointed elite. When I give away books (have to or they will outnumber me. They seem to be eagerly accepted regardless of age.
I wonder how much disinclination there is for reading entire books is because the books themselves are downright repulsive and/or uninteresting to kid readers, unless they are themselves kind of oddball. There’s been nothing much which grabbed kid, tween and teen readers since the Harry Potter series. The stuff on the market seems to mostly be what Sarah calls ‘grey goo’ — impenetrable pools of dysfunction/racism/sexual abuse/et cetera. If you are a kid with a fairly happy and functional family, do you really need to wallow in that? And if you are a kid with an unhappy and dysfunctional family — again, do you really need the reminders of it?
The canon is full of great adventure stories in historical fiction. Many generations have thrived on those, in both genders. Personally, I don’t care if kids don’t read contemporary books or literary books. I want them to read civilizational books: adventure, history, drama, romance… The “Matter of the West” (in the same sense as “The Matter of Britain” or “The Matter of France” in Medieval terms).
You don’t need the external background setting knowledge for all of them — that’s just icing on the cake and can come later. Do you have to know about the crusades in any detail to enjoy Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood? No — he’s a “culture hero”, one of the stories of our civilization. We can fill in more background over time. We call these books “classics” for a reason.
If you didn’t buy a book for reading pleasure for your kids published after 1950, you wouldn’t be doing them any harm until they’re old enough to buy their own books. Make them crave the next great adventure, not something you hope to be currently relevant so that it will maybe go down easier.
Don’t you want them doing play sword fights instead of play drug dealing?
A LOT of the disinclination for reading comes from what they force the kids to read. I was already reading at a high school senior level when I started kindergarten, and already loved to read, so despite their best efforts school did NOT kill my love of reading. (Though I surely hated a lot of the modern crap they made us read in high school.) And this was in the 90s. Most of my siblings–well they really liked reading Harry Potter, but what they were forced to read at school, as well as a distinct lack of anything as interesting to read on their own (most of YA fiction having been grey goo for almost 2 decades now, and them being disinclined to read “old” books), means that they…just don’t read.
Remember the often all too apt slur: “Those who can’t… teach.”
There should be absolutely nothing contemporary or controversial about books which are meant to encourage reading — pedagogically, what would be the point? Ease of reading is built on unchallenging (easy to absorb) topics/stories, so that the focus can be on the comprehension barriers of text, and the rules-of-thumb workarounds for interpretation. If they can’t read the words and make sense of them in order to master fluency, no one cares what the subject is… so make the subject easy to absorb.
On the other hand, wouldn’t you have loved to have, for your first European or American history classes (when you didn’t know much about any historic periods anywhere), an accompanying book of terrific classic fiction that grounds some of the period in a vivid fashion?
17th century France with The Three Musketeers?
Richard the Lionheart with Ivanhoe?
Victorian England with A Christmas Carol?
… it’s an endless list, and there are good match-ups for just about any pre-collegiate curriculum historic topic.
Can’t do that with contemporary-setting fiction. I’d rule out (as official topics) anything pre-1950 as subject matter until much later in high school. Civilizational Foundations first. Current Events can wait for post-adolescence.
The Hunger Games also caught on pretty nicely, IIRC, but not to the level of Harry Potter (and frankly, I don’t think we’re ever going to see a phenomenon like that again.)
As someone else alluded to, however, most children’s literature isn’t written to appeal to children–it’s written to appeal to the people who are buying the books for the children, and unfortunately, most of the people buying books for the children are more anxious to instill Proper Morals than they are in seeing to it that the kids get a cracking good yarn, forgetting that kids don’t like to be preached to any more than adults do.
The Hunger Games also caught on pretty well, as did the Percy Jackson series.
A big part of the problem, as someone alluded to above, is that children’s books are often not written to appeal to kids, but to the people buying books for the kids, many if not most of whom are more interested in instilling Proper Morals than they are in the kids actually enjoying what they’re reading, forgetting that kids don’t like to be preached to any more than adults do.
Wings of fire, too.
Which hit the next issue– that when things get big, they get taken over. Several series my kids have gotten into suddenly flipped objectionable.
Several years ago, Dave Freer had a post here about being in a YA discussion board, and watching people on the board (adults) saying that YA books needed more … well … smut and “adult themes”. Because adults were reading the books, and thinking about themselves, not about actual teen and tween readers. They liked the higher quality or writing in the YA books, and wanted to keep that, but make the books “adult.”
Ick.
I know some decades back, they noticed that YA sold better. Was not too long before “YA” shifted to describing the character’s age, not the audience.
Still annoys me they haven’tfigured out the monkey buttons. “I can get a big reaction with these two things, I don’t have to write well!”
“Gosh, why is this writing bad?”
Usually, it means the books that they pick really suck, and that it’s dangerous to apply techniques to a book. You give the teacher the wrong answer, they’ll destroy you.
(That might be my bias showing. I’m still peeved at the teacher who went “oh, you like fantasy, right? You’re going to love ‘Bridge to Terabithia’!” Yeah, sure I’ll adore reading about how someone like me has a mildly pleasant summer and then dies Because Life Sucks. Are you HIGH!??)
I ran into one teacher on twitter that was explaining that kids were reading the books wrong, which is what she meant by “didn’t know how to read.”
Actually, ran into two of them, one corrected it by showing the kids how she wanted them to engage the text, a manner she called “paranoid reading,” and another that was moaning about how she couldn’t turn the correct type of reading off, and then posted examples…which looked like a 16 year old who was very, very sure she was clever trying to throw enough mud at the wall to make it stick. It wasn’t even free form association, it was free form scattershot.
************
My kids are homeschooled, and thus kind of odd, and their friends are also kind of odd, but every single kid in the youth group D&D group had a favorite book series to recommend, and they’re all different.
I’d guess that intelligent students don’t tell the teacher “here, this is what I care about. Please, use it to hurt me.” Genre, romance, adventure, eeew that’s actually enjoyable. (Been watching this on Twitter, too. They flip from “you don’t read” to “you don’t read the right things” so fast it makes your head spin. It’s also “interesting” how James Bond type behavior, with a gender flip and only one target, is suddenly pr0n and proof the entire female sex is terrible, and should be reading stuff that the nasty twits think is beneficial.)
In my high school they didn’t encourage us to read ‘Terabithia’. They encouraged us, or at least me, to read books about the Impending Black Uprising, or the Impending Latino Uprising, or the Impending Uprising by whoever was the oppressed group of the week. Constant lectures about the my evil white devil nature and how we all deserved to suffer for it. Really rather bizarre given that I went to a school that was roughly 95+% white.
Really between that and the bullying I got from about 2nd grade on for my “Nazi” ancestry from kids who would immediately turn around and start in on the nastiest racist cracks imaginable, I sometimes wonder how I ever gained any fond memories of my school years.
My kids read Larry Correia, Rick Riordan and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many more. What other people’s kids do, I have no idea.
I do know that there are many homes one goes into where there are no books present at all, so that appears to be a thing.
I personally tutored a college student who could not read a textbook. His -reading- was acceptable, but he could not identify the usable information in the book and retain it for later. He was trying to memorize the entire book, and of course failing. This would have been in the 1990s, so it isn’t a new thing.
Given the types of Woke Trash being foisted on high school students by their incompetent teachers these days, I do understand why the kids would resist. I won’t read that either.
On the one hand, this is a disaster. An entire generation gaslit into ignoring the written word and watching memes on their phones instead.
On the other hand, this in an opportunity. The wisdom of the ages is there for a clever writer to pilfer from, as the audience has never heard of ANY of it.
The successful writer will present the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin and a host of others in a bite-sized, palatable form, and prosper.
It may be that the SHORT story as a gateway drug will be what saves civilization.
Jolie LaChance KG7IQC unstagehand@yahoo.com
Yeah, this sounds like an education thing. The kids who love to read are going to read unless it’s beaten out of them. The kids who have the capacity to read but don’t love it are going to do so as long as it’s encouraged. And there have always been kids who struggle with it.
I suspect what we’re seeing is modern teaching practices screwing over the latter two categories. If the techniques you’ve been taught are trash (whole-word reading) and your teachers don’t reward you for reading the full book, why go to the trouble?
You can get along just fine without it, and you won’t know what you’re missing unless you decide to swim against the current for a few months/years. I can’t blame the kids for responding to incentives.