And what might be done about it.
And what might be done about it.
T he Atlantic’s November cover story, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” is a chronicle of generational wreckage: “Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books,” Rose Horowitch reports. She means whole books, cover to cover. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.”
Expectations that were once routine — that students could competently and sympathetically read and discuss whole volumes, from Pride and Prejudice to Crime and Punishment — are now unsustainable. Many students no longer command the powers of concentration, or possess the linguistic skills, to engage the standard texts. Professors, yielding to the situation, are shrinking and cutting assignments.
Horowitch notes, correctly, that the problem begins long before college. “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Reading for pleasure is even seen as a niche interest: “A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records — something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”
No single cause is behind such a trend, but it is not hard to see that nearly every aspect of our educational culture discourages patient, attentive reading. High schools and middle schools have spent years phasing out books, often in response to the imposition of standardized testing. (As one teacher tells Horowitch: “There’s no testing skill that can be related to . . . Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?”) This trend is abetted by the widely adopted “college- and career-ready” educational program that has left many students prepared for neither.
Among students headed to elite colleges, there are additional pressures. Ferocious competition for acceptance to prestigious institutions, driven by a sense that long-term success is impossible without an Ivy League degree, promotes GPA obsession. For the same reason, students are subjected, often beginning in elementary school, to a punishing regime of extracurricular activities in the attempt to compose a résumé that can survive the gimlet eye of the nation’s last true gatekeepers: admissions counselors.
And then there are the phones.
Where is the place in all of this for Moby-Dick or The Canterbury Tales? What use is thoughtful, imaginative reading to the student running this gauntlet?
Reading, a bit like faith, admits of many justifications — it increases empathy, enhances imagination, provides pleasure — but none of them is especially compelling to the nonreader. Yet we tend to take seriously what we see the people we love or respect taking seriously. Which is why Horowitch’s article is not primarily a story about kids but about adults. The observation that students, even at elite institutions, are struggling to read books implicates not just a few schools or school systems but an entire educational culture, along with families and parenting practices that, albeit well meaning, have trained students in a narrow, instrumentalist view of education.
The students Horowitch writes about are not failed learners. On the contrary: They have learned exactly what they were taught. Children are growing up, perhaps more than ever before, in environments where reading books is simply not a priority. At school, their teachers assign only excerpts from books and of necessity “teach to the test.” Children come home to parents who spend much of their leisure time responding to after-hours emails, scrolling their phones, or watching television. Their own leisure — what little they have after clubs, practices, rehearsals, volunteering, tutoring, and the rest — is easily co-opted by the distractions and addictions of TikTok and YouTube.
We prioritize what we see being prioritized. And for many, that is the grinding labor of getting ahead. Where thoughtful, attentive reading cannot be bent to this task, it goes by the wayside. But estrangement from that kind of reading makes it even more difficult to see that this all-consuming economy of achievement is ultimately intolerable to the soul, which exists in a different economy altogether.
Anxieties about the future now extend beyond college. I have heard excellent Ivy League students express worries about finding secure jobs after graduation. They tend to plan — their coursework and their internships and their Saturday afternoons — accordingly.
Reading literature is one point of entry to a world not judged by test scores and résumé items. But teachers and parents and mentors must be the ones to make that invitation attractive. We can say to students, “Tolle, lege!” But we have to do it ourselves, first.