Cal Newport

Let me pull it up here.

The title is from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The title of the article, uh-oh, My Students Can't Read.

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent and likely to get worse.

Let's just read the intro to this, Jesse.

I'm sure this is going to get worse before it gets better.

Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article.

It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago.

Not one student finished it.

It's not positive.

When I asked why, a student answered, honestly, it was too long.

And she kept losing track of what the paper was about.

This was not a remedial class.

These are students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here.

Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read.

The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I'm seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch.

There is a measurable generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

All right, well, Rob, I'm glad you sent that along.

I mean, this is alarming.