C'mon, Professors, Assign the Hard Reading

"At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading. Or at least their teachers stopped asking them to read the way they once did. We live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt. And even in old-fashioned literature classes, assignments have been abbreviated so dramatically that high-school English teachers are, according to one recent survey, assigning fewer than three books a year."

"I've seen the effects of this change up close, having taught English in college classrooms since 2007, and I've witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren't possible to teach, we are told, because students won't (or can't) read them."

"When I walked into my American-literature class at Case Western Reserve University last fall, I looked at 32 college students, mostly science majors, and expected an uphill battle. As my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, "Many students no longer arrive at college-even at highly selective, elite colleges-prepared to read books." One-third of the high-school seniors tested in 2024 were found not to have basic reading skills."

Children and students have shifted toward short-form media, reducing engagement with long-form texts. High-school English assignments have been greatly abbreviated; many teachers now assign fewer than three books a year. Technology provides constant distraction—computers, phones, and artificial intelligence—contributing to eroded attention and reading skills. Standardized testing found one-third of high-school seniors lacked basic reading skills in 2024. Despite low preparation, diverse college students, including many science majors, can read and respond to whole novels when assigned. Assigning entire books can rebuild attention and deep reading; literature classrooms can remain sites of serious engagement rather than despair.

Read at The Atlantic