Cal Newport

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.

We saw something similar in physical health when we saw the real...

A real canary in a coal mine, a real warning sign, a real sort of point of break for a lot of medical professionals where the crisis alarms went off was seeing a sudden rise in type 2 diabetes among kids.

Kids didn't get type 2 diabetes.

It used to take a long time

through bad eating habits, et cetera, to sort of get the type two diabetes.

But we got so bad in our diet and we cut out so much physical activity that we began to see kids with it.

This is a trend that really picked up in the 21st century.

This is when the alarm sirens went off for a lot of physical health practitioners.

This is the equivalent, I think, for cognitive health.

College students.