Rose Horowitz

I spoke with 33 professors, and the majority of them said that they noticed a clear change in their students in the last 10 years. This is Atlantic assistant editor Rose Horowitz. A Columbia professor said that his students are overwhelmed at the thought of reading multiple books a semester, that they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

A professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students shut down when they're confronted with ideas they don't understand. And the chair of Georgetown's English department said that his students' struggle to focus comes up even when they're reading a 14-line sonnet.

You know, students are really arriving in college struggling to read books in a way that they were not a decade ago.

That was what the professors were saying, that it really showed up when they were asking their students to kind of attend to something longer and that it just seemed like something that, you know, they were unaccustomed to.

Well, I spoke with one professor who used to teach a survey course on American literature, and then now he teaches short works of American prose. That's very specific.

And he did see some advantages to that. He was talking about how it is nice sometimes to really go deeper into a shorter text, but he was also talking about how you do have to change with the times and with what your students are showing up able to do.

Well, definitely smartphones and social media and the fact that people's attention is just constantly pulled in many different directions. So they just don't get the practice or kind of accustomed to focusing on smartphones. Thank you so much for having me.

I spoke with some education experts who study high school and then with some high school teachers themselves, and they were talking about how educational initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Common Core really emphasized informational texts and standardized tests.

And so in response, teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages to kind of mimic the format of reading comprehension tests. And that has left less time for teaching books and just made it harder for students to read books because they just have less experience doing it. So the root is what happens in high school. Yes.

It's that when these students arrive at college, nobody's ever asked them to do anything of the magnitude that, you know, a college syllabus is.

Yes. So it's sort of the change in the preparation that's leading to this problem.

Yes, that was something that came up in my reporting a lot. It was, you know, it's not just, you know, oh, students today are lazy. It actually seems like students today are busier than they ever were before. And, you know, teachers were saying they can't believe, you know, what's on these students' schedules.

But there's just, you know, because of grade inflation and also the pressure to kind of get into a top school, you know, Students really have to differentiate themselves outside of the classroom, and that just takes an exceptional amount of time.

You don't have the time in the day maybe to just sit down and read a long novel or finish all your class reading because you do need to also be doing extracurriculars or getting a job or starting a charity or something that just makes it really challenging to find the time to read. Yeah.

Yeah, I think you would have to be very courageous to do that because, you know, probably most students are going to get A's anyways. And so the colleges can't really tell, you know, who actually did the reading or not. And so, you know, you really have to be different outside of the classroom in a way that leaves you much less time for reading.

Yeah, I think one thing that came up is sort of that it might not be a shift in skills, but just a shift in values, and young people are responding to that. What do you mean by a shift in values? Like, we are sort of not valuing young people reading, even if we kind of think that we do, and we lament the loss of it, that, you know, we aren't actually—

setting up kind of schooling and admissions in a way that shows that we actually do value just reading for reading's sake.

Absolutely. Yes. So we're sort of telling them, you know, do everything you can to get into a competitive school and then get a prestigious job. And, you know, I spoke with professors who were saying their students say that they love their humanities courses, but they need to major in something that is going to be more useful to a future career.

And that's a real difference in the way that we conceive of, like, what college is for.

I think that students sort of aren't getting the message as to why reading is important necessarily. They're kind of instead being told that they need to be using high school to prepare for college and college to prepare for a job and kind of not that they need to be using all of these times to sort of just prepare to live.

By reading about someone else or something else, I think it helps you reflect on yourself and sort of become – like, more human and sort of figure out who you are, you end up learning the kind of life that you want to lead.

Yeah. And it's, I mean, I had that with Anna Karenina. I think the first time I kind of, like, idolized Anna. And then as I read it again, which I know is probably not how you're supposed to respond to the book, but as I read it again, I sort of was much more interested in Levin and Kitty and the other characters.

And, you know, I had a professor who talked about how you read books to notice new things in them and also... to see the way that you yourself have changed and the way that you sort of come at it differently.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm super excited to hear what people sent in.