Recently, professors at elite colleges told Atlantic writer Rose Horowitch that their students don’t read whole books anymore. They blamed cell phones, standardized tests, and extracurriculars, and they mostly agreed that the shift began in high school. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we make the case for reading books, one memory at a time. We talk to Horowitch, and we hear from several Atlantic writers about the books they read in high school that stuck with them, and how their views of these books and the characters in them changed over time. Read Horowitch’s reporting here: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” Share understanding this holiday season. For less than $2 a week, give a year-long Atlantic subscription to someone special. They’ll get unlimited access to Atlantic journalism, including magazine issues, narrated articles, puzzles, and more. Give today at TheAtlantic.com/podgift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What does reading mean to our humanity?
Reading is just so central to my mind to what it means to be human.
Chapter 2: How do novels build empathy?
Whatever you do when you read fiction is commit a small act of empathy. You know, you think about situations that are not like your own. You think about people whose lives are not like your own.
You know, of course, there are ways to build empathy and curiosity about the world that aren't sitting down and reading a full-fledged novel. But the novel's proven to be a pretty reliable way of building up the brain and building up, you know, the ability to think about a world outside of your own. So it would be sad if that went away forever.
I just think what a magical time your teenage years are. to form those kinds of impressions and books have been the reliable way to do that. So it's like, it's alarming to me that kids would be cut off from that voluntarily or through some other force.
I can't imagine having lived through adolescence without that as part of my life. I can't imagine life without having had these different worlds in which I could lose myself and feel like I was learning all about how human beings work, how society works, and what's possible to do with words, which in the end proved really important to me.
It may not be surprising that Atlantic writers and editors grew up with a deep connection to books. But American students today might not get to have that experience.
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.
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Chapter 3: What changes have professors noticed in reading habits?
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.
Rose wrote about this for the magazine, and what she found comes down to one basic point.
You know, students are really arriving in college struggling to read books in a way that they were not a decade ago.
I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, the strange disappearance of the book-reading American student, what's causing it, and what we lose throughout our lives when we don't read books as teenagers. So is the idea like a book itself seems overwhelming?
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.
What were some examples they gave you? Because I'm sure they're adjusting, like how they used to assign. Because when I was in college, I was assigned many, many, many books per class versus how they're assigning now.
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.
I'll just call the course short works of American prose. Yeah.
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.
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Chapter 4: Why are students struggling to read books today?
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.
Right. So you can't go from reading portions of books to suddenly reading like, you know, 20 novels for a course. That just doesn't make any sense.
Yes. So it's sort of the change in the preparation that's leading to this problem.
Yeah. One thing that you're reporting evoked for me is, you know, not just like kids today, they don't read, but but a feeling of empathy for how much kids have to do, say, in high school to get into college and how much pressure there is on kids that I almost felt like, oh, telling them to read a novel.
You know, it's a luxury to read a novel when you've got a you know, you could also be like on the swim team or writing for the school newspaper or whatever. What do you think about that?
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Chapter 5: What role do smartphones play in reading habits?
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.
Chapter 6: How have educational initiatives affected book reading?
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.
Right. Like you can imagine if a high school kid were to say, I actually don't want an internship this summer. I don't want to go to any camps. I don't want to work. I would like to spend my summer reading novels. It would almost land as an act of rebellion, you know, and people might question that. It wouldn't be seen as like an inherently valuable thing. It would make people nervous. Right.
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.
Right. And that might be considered lazy. Like, oh, you're just sitting around reading books all summer.
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.
Right. We all say we want people to read, but in fact, the message we're actually conveying is you need to have skills.
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.
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Chapter 7: Is there a shift in values regarding reading?
Chapter 8: What do students prioritize over reading?
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.
Right. So it's like you're in that tender moment in your life where you're just starting to realize... Like there's a bigger world outside my family, outside my school. And who am I in that world? And basically what's out there? And this is your first guide. Like a book is your first guide. And I think that's why so many people remember the books they read in high school.
Because that's why they make such a lasting impression and stay with you. Much more than, in a very different way than books you read later in life. So if you love the book enough, it moves along with you.
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.
Yeah, and there's only a handful of books you read like that where you read them. I mean, I only, you know, I have like a dozen where I read them over and over again, and they're different always. Rose, I wanted to thank you for having this conversation with me because it actually gave us the idea to have a bigger conversation about books. And
mostly about what you lose basically throughout your whole life when you don't read books as a young person, when you don't have books that you carry with you throughout your life. So we asked a lot of people around the Atlantic and also listeners to share books that were most important for them at that age, which is what we're going to hear next.
So very grateful to you for having this idea and letting us, like, being the muse for this episode.
Well, thank you. Yeah, I'm super excited to hear what people sent in.
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