Main Edition
US
FR
October 3, 2024 - 4:10pm
It’s become commonplace for conservatives to complain about the books assigned in schools and universities.
But according to a piece published by The Atlantic this week, the bigger issue isn’t which books are read by students, but instead whether they read them at all. Journalist Rose Horowitch spoke to 33 professors from leading US universities — and the picture she pieces together is a disturbing one. Students today are increasingly unable to manage entire books. In response, courses are cutting down on reading requirements and teaching through excerpts .
Is this a case of modern academia pandering to fragile — but very lucrative — students? Perhaps, but this isn’t just happening in the ivory towers.
According to America’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, there has been a long-term decline in the number of 13-year-olds reading for fun. In 2023, 14% reported doing so almost every day compared to the 27% recorded in 2012. Meanwhile, in the UK a study for the Reading Agency found that half of adults do not regularly read for pleasure — a total composed of 15% who never did and, more ominously, 35% who used to.
Or you can just look around the next time you’re on a train. How many of your fellow passengers are reading a book? Many fewer than in previous decades, despite the greatly reduced competition from newspapers.
The obvious explanation is the smartphone, and everything it plugs us into. It’s not that we don’t read anything anymore — in fact, we live in a world of continuous textual availability. However, this is the written word in fragments, bound up with broken images. As an informational landscape, it bears no relation to where we were a generation ago.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI read news on my phone and books on my tablet. I don’t actually read physical books any more. Not sure what this means.
It means that you read news which has been selected for you, although you would probably find that insulting.
If you shun social media, as I do, no one ever suggests what you should read. I got to sites that I trust and consume the content I choose.
I’m not on social media. I subscribe to publications like Unherd and The Free Press and read news aggregators like Real Clear Politics.
What news snobs who only read “the papers” miss is that in the time of newspapers all the news read was curated by the richest family in town.
All news is selected for you, however you read it.
Yes, but there are lots of different selections. The point is to be aware of how those selections are slanted. For example, I subscribe to both UnHerd and the New Statesman, and I’m reasonably aware of the different biases in each.
Paradoxically (in the context of this discussion), the internet has expanded the number of selections which are readily available.
The only way to avoid news which is selected for you is to seek out the news yourself, which of course is more or less impossible.
If you read books on a tablet, then you read books. This article was about young people who can’t read long stories and non-fiction anymore, because they can’t bear a text longer than two or three lines.
Books are a great refuge from screens. Not sure why anyone would subject themselves to yet more time staring at a glowing screen.
Kindle reading is great. The screen is totally different from the Smartphone one (no blue light), therefore good for your eyes. Adjusting font size and screen Illumination also helps. And let’s not forget the weight compared to a physical book. However, when it comes to non-fiction, I still want the physical book.
I also read books on Kindle app on phone, but -like you – read whole books. In our case it was a conscious decision. We no longer want to accumulate “stuff” (physical books in this context) which the next generation will have to clear out. We are in a post-acquisitve phase which has crept up on us. Every age appears to have its own rhythm. So in our case I suspect it just means we’re getting old!
Just to add to that, Susan, I’m digitizing a lot of my reading collection as not only will it become harder to physically manage as I get older, but also, as my partner pointed out, the threat to health from the mold and mildew that starts to grow in paper due to humidity in the air and where the books were kept. I’ve had discussions with an archivist on how to best do this. It has been worth the effort, as I’m able to call up works readily while on public transit. Ironically, to manage screen time, I end up prioritizing the allocation of my screen time to the printed word.
I do this too, `especiallly since developing macular degeneration . Because of the convenience of being able to carry a whole library wherever I go, I do more reading – and more long-form reading.- than ever.
Not just books, we will soon be a post-paper society. Where you can be erased in a heartbeat.
The trend with books has actually reversed. Paper books are quite a bit more popular than E-books. As rare as seeing someone with a book is, seeing someone with an E-reader is even rarer.
Students today are increasingly unable to manage entire books.
Well, no kidding. Every communication has been distilled to the lowest common denominator with the shortest attention span. Technology combines the need for instant gratification with the ability to replicate that outcome over and over throughout the day. It’s endless dopamine. There is even a phobia about being disconnected from the digital universe for anything longer than 15 minutes.
There’s nothing in this fine short article that isn’t 100% correct or of vital importance. I’d just add, that it’s not the “reading for pleasure” aspect that’s important but that it’s a means of then being able to “read for seriousness” and acquire the immense insights into human culture which flows from that.
The Comments which we read regularly from subscribers who’re immersed in reading books is testament to this.
“read for seriousness”
This makes it sound like a duty, rather than a pleasure – and that’s a hard sell. Perhaps the problem is that we’ve lost the ability to enjoy what is serious and important. Reading should be pleasurable, not onerous – have we reached a point where anything above flimflam, anything which takes effort, is just a turn off.
I’m a retired English teacher, and I saw this in my classes. When I polled my students , only about two students, out of classes of 40, said they read for pleasure.Some teachers only taught one novel a year. Our new (Common Core) textbooks only had excerpts and some seriously bad poems, apparently found on a website dedicated to awful poems. I refused to use the textbook for my seniors and taught my two novels and two nonfiction books. At least half of students in my junior class were functionally illiterate, and I struggled to get them to write a paragraph. I blame this on teachers in the lower grades who failed to teach longer narratives. Yesterday, I read an article in The Atlantic magazine that described how college students struggle to read books. Professors have resorted to assigning fewer books and excerpts. This is why half of adults read young adult fiction. One thing that really shocked me was that 79 percent of the grades at Harvard are in the A range. What a joke. I’ll finish with my cellphone rant. They are destroying student’s’ attention spans. At my school, nothing was done about cellphones in the classrooms, and they were the bane of my existence. Universities have the same problem. As one teacher on campus said, “We’re doomed.”
Doomed indeed. Slouching towards Idiocracy.
Some perspective. Hearing a parent berate their offspring for spending too much time on their phones an elderly lady of our village whispered to me that when she was young her parents berated her for wasting her time as she always had her head stuck in a book when she should be out running around in the fields. Seems each generation believes its pastimes are the right ones?
Each generation does indeed believe its pastimes are the right ones. However, one cannot get perspective from that observation alone, because different pastimes are categorically different in terms of their effects.
Going outside instead of reading books gets you invested in the world. Aside from personal experience, I’ve read so many biographies of people who as children were made to “go outside” and who became interested in bugs or trees or weather, or whatever, and ended up as leading scientific minds. My brother was mechanically inclined, so “going outside” for him was an excuse to work on various gizmos and motors.
But “the written word in fragments, bound up with broken images” is a categorically different pastime in terms of effects. It is the opposite of “going outside,” yet it is also not the “going-inside-in-order-to-go-outside” of novel-reading — as Peter Franklin put it, “stepping out of your consciousness and into someone else’s — and, for that matter, doing so in detail and for an extended period of time.”
Both going outdoors and extended-length book reading (or lingering attention to short-form stories and poems) take us out of ourselves. These pastimes expand our worlds. There is a give-and-take. Being glued to a screen does the opposite, it makes one more insular, more cut off from both the world and from one’s self. If I spend too much time online I feel this disengagement. When I have been immersed in a book and finally “surface,” I do feel that I have been somewhere else, that I have not stayed in present circumstances, but it is not the same as being disengaged. I have the sense that I have been somewhere specific — to an inhabited world — a world with a soul, if I am reading a good enough writer. It is the same being engaged in the external world. My brother had to “go outside,” and when he did he restored a 1956 Chevy. It had soul — his.
But the experience of being online for a long time is different. It feels like I have been nowhere. It is the strange experience of the uncanny: either something exists where it should not, or — in the online case — nothing exists where it should. Maybe this is partly why an online comments section, despite drawbacks, feels necessary.
This effect, by the way, is distilled to its essence in A.I. “creation,” where you may have, say, Dickens that seems like Dickens yet there is no Dickens, nor is there any intention behind the words. There is no soul in it.
I was outside playing seven days a week. When it was raining, I read. I fell asleep holding a book. I read even more as a teenager, but I swam and went horseback riding and went to the midnight movies to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Harold and Maude. I was active and read a lot. Reading on the phone or a pad (me), you don’t retain all the information and you will often skim while reading a book. Experts say phones cause a person to anticipate dings for their dopamine hit, if they don’t get many dings, they get anxious. Phones are anti-books.
Some truth in that, though it perhaps depends on your background. For some, reading was a sign of sickliness, and the term “bookworm” has never been entirely positive. I was a big reader, completely against the family grain.
Will engineers know how to build bridges, doctors to treat patients …?
We started on the road to perdition in the 1960s and 70s, when classics departments at universities were eliminated.
This eventually flowed down into secondary Ed – the student’s younger teenaged years to young adulthood.
I went to the same Jesuit school as my father. He had 4 years of Latin, and there were 17 Latin instructors at the school. When I attended in the late 1980s, there were two (one of them an elderly Jesuit who appeared to be near death.
I was later informed I was very lucky to have “a classical education.”
I was also shocked at how easy many of my undergraduate classes were, albeit at a university rated “best value in the Northeast.”
I would imagine few high schools today teach Beowulf or Homer. Honors kids study STEM, such as it is today, but read very little about western culture.
Undergrads can now major in English at many US colleges, without having read a word of Shakespeare.
Primary schools damage the love of reading by making children read boring books for homework. First they make it a chore and then they suck out any possible enjoyment by only allowing the book being read to be picked by them. I remember asking my daughter’s teacher if she could choose a book from home to use for her reading assignment and the answer was a straight no. The book school provided was dull. She neither wanted to read it nor write about it afterwards. Admittedly, I enjoy reading and so ensured that my children had access to exciting and enjoyable books. I pity those who don’t. Interestingly, my son taught himself to read with game strategy guides prior to starting school!
One of my sons, who wasn’t a reader, similarly taught himself to read and understand well, by digesting car and motorcycle manuals when attempting to repair and maintain clapped out old wrecks. Yes he was in his teens by then, but interest, in his case shaped by need, make the world of difference.
You need to read books to be able to step outside the regime Narrative. But I notice that most bookstores push regime narrative. You need to go to used bookstores like HalfPrice Books to get the off-narrative stuff.
Now, when I was a kid in Britland I read books like the Swallows and Amazons sailing books and the Biggles flying books. With Biggles, he was flying a different kind of airplane in every book. Very satisfying.
I was big on Conan books. Neither edifying or educational, but there was lots of sword fighting! Very entertaining.
Conan, by the Blood Drenched Gods of his people, had no regard for any regime narrative! Ha!! (Cue the screaming and bone-crunching audio)
By Crom, I loved Conan too. I recall those well-worn paperbacks with great fondness and a piercing nostalgia.
This development is scary. I’m still one of those people with their nose in a book on public transport, and proud of it! When I look around, I find I’m a rare breed. When I look over other passengers’ shoulders, they’re mostly watching TikTok videos or other such things that are destroying their ability to concentrate or think in a sustained, joined-up fashion.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will return to my current book, Ben MacIntyre’s “SAS”. (Very good, but I liked “Colditz” and “Agent Sonya” better.)
I go around with a shoulder bag containing at least half a dozen books so concerned am I that might find that I have a spare 5 minutes and no book to read.
Get an E-book and you can carry hundreds of books.
Get Kindle on your phone, no need for an ebook, or WiFi etc. Wherever I am I have 100s of books at my fingertips.
It is not the same
Okay! I’ll put my phone down now and dive back into Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It’s an abridged version I admit shamelessly.
I teach UG/PG students. Since Gen Z turned up 5 years ago, the textbook has gone into terminal decline. This generation prefer short tracts, preferably abstracts and, above all, video. They also like “what does good look like” exemplars for assignments and extensions to deadlines on their own terms. At £36k pa (overseas students), universities are disinclined to deny reasonable requests. “Reasonable” in this oontext covers an expanding and more lax set of guidelines (one would hesitate to call them rules). The step change was Covid – none of the pre-Covid discipline has been reinstated, lncluding attendance requirements. Lecture attendance for our faculty is 37% – we are a top 10 global university. Hybrid teaching and part-time attendance are the new norm, whilst someone somewhere is paying for The Full Monty. Interestingly these behavoours are the same, irrespective of the student’s home country. Against this backdrop, approximately 5% of Gen Z students are outstanding. When they are fully engaged, they are formidible and formidable (wonderful) and outshine their antecedent cohort.
I’m doing my best to pick up the slack, but there’s only so many books I can read in a week.
As inheritors of a civilisation built on books
Is this really true?
Maybe there’s just too many books today that are too boring or middle-of-the-road to bother with. Maybe some responsibility lies with publishers. University students; I don’t know. Once again stats and opinions. Just because someone writes an article about something doesn’t make it a thing. Writing for a magazine is business. And anyway, what’s the point; less reading? If so that’s the fact. Is a problem with university students the same as the general public? Who exactly is not reading? And who is still reading?
Good questions. Young people do seem to be able to read endless series of ‘novels’ in the fantasy genre etc. but is that so much better than watching similar videos? Maybe, at least when reading they’re exercising their imaginations.
I think the decline of reading is a bit similar with the experience of music – a couple of generations ago nearly all middle-class homes had a piano, and someone played it. Familiarity with great (tried and tested over time) music is a benefit, but so is the learning & practicing of it – somehow a different way of exercising the brain/intellect.
At work, when we sit around for a shared morning tea, everyone (except me) discusses in detail all the latest movies and TV programs. They know them all, they know the private lives of all the actors, so I guess that’s where their time is spent: entertainment. Some of my reading is entertainment, but I always alternate fiction with non-fiction, which is almost always history, as a way of not descending into complete mental torpor. (Similarly I still practice scales & arpeggios, well, almost every day)
Although old now, the best book on this is still Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman.
Perhaps not built on ‘books’ per se, but on the words that come down from the past (and ‘books’ contain the majority of those since Gutenberg). The past leave us landscapes, archeology(buildings & sites), artefacts and words. Whether is Marcus Aurelius, Plato or Jesus, Augustine or Adam Smith, reading their words is the only way to enter their heads, see what they saw, hear their voices. But perhaps as pernicious as screens and grazing can be, I wonder if the obsession with the new also weighs against reading books. A bookshop contains new books, publishing is a business, and writing is (potentially) a way of making a living. And yet, how much of the ‘new’ is worth reading, leave alone purchasing a copy of ? It was C.S.Lewis who advised his students to read one old book for every two or three new ones…. It might help if bookshops stocked books in a similar ratio.
Looking at the situation from an historical point of view, up until the 16th century only about 10% of the population could read, mostly the clergy, lawyers and some of the nobility, but from the Reformation onwards almost everyone would have grown up listening to the King James version of the Bible regularly, in church, at work (in service) and at home.
You could argue this immersion led to the reforms of the 19th century, by the end of which literacy in England was at over 90%. I would’nt mind betting though not many more than 10% had read the great novels that had appeared Austen,Thackery, Eliot etc. Dickens and Trollope were both serialised to some extent and Dickens wore himself out by doing public readings.
It is only in the 20th century that reading books became more popular and now in the 21st century the practice is dying, except for about 10%.
University education continues to decline as it was bound to do; from 7% of the population reaching university in the 1960s (when an ‘A’ level was more demanding than an undergraduate degree is today, in the Humanities at least) over 50% get in now.
I heard of a reading project recently, people were reading through all of Dickens’ books in chronological order.
I think there will always be committed readers of books out there, but only about 10% of us.
Last week I had possibly the most surreal argument with someone on Facebook over climate change and sea levels. In response to a post about the rate at which the Greenland ice sheet is melting, I recalled an interesting counter-intuitive fact I read in a book a while back and explained it in a one paragraph comment.
(The fact is this: you’d think, if the Greenland ice sheet melted, sea levels around Greenland would rise. In fact, although global average sea levels would of course rise, sea levels local to Greenland would fall. The reason is that the mass of the ice sheet is so large that it distorts the local gravitational field at the ocean surface and draws the sea level up by an amount that is greater than the raised average sea level if the water in the ice sheet was instead in the ocean).
When someone demanded a source for this I just said I read it in a book and since I read loads of books, including a great many about climate change, I couldn’t recall which one at the time. In response to this, the idiot googled what I’d said, provided a link that supported my point, and then told me I should be grateful to him for doing what he thought ought to be my job. The notion that someone could correctly advance an argument based upon correctly understanding and recalling something in a book, seemed to be an alien concept to him.
It was transparently obvious that the guy just wanted me to be wrong, and when I was right, this annoyed him so much that he had to find something else to pick a fight about. I realise of course that social media – which in my view really ought to be called social disintermedia given its at times spectacular capacity for separating people from any sort of accountability for their behaviour towards others – is the best place to find a reliable supply of morons, cranks and histrionically self-important arseholes, so perhaps this series-of-one experience of mine cant be treated as representative, but I think there’s something in it nonetheless.
The point I’m building up to here is that I suspect the instant availability of information through internet search utilities is, to a great extent, replacing not only the need to use our brains to remember lots of stuff, it is also replacing the need to understand the world in a coherent manner – or, to put it another way, to derive knowledge from information. Reading books is one of the most effective ways of turning information into knowledge. The internet allows people to access information but does not always aid the development of knowledge in doing so: in fact it seems much of the time to prevent this happening.
Perhaps this is how I turn into a fuddy-duddy who can no longer keep up with the modern world, but I personally would say that the knowledge I gained about something by reading a book on the subject and learning not just the facts but reaching an understanding of them in their proper context was not only why I was able to recall those facts correctly years later, but also why that knowledge trumps the ability of some clown to produce the results of a google search.
You might say to me that people of my generation laughed at our parents for saying they didn’t need calculators because they knew how to do maths with paper and pencil: I say this isn’t the same, because machine computation aided the process of thinking, while modern information available through web searches replaces the need to think. It is this that makes books so challenging for younger people: they haven’t had to work at the process of comprehension of the written word. We didn’t cancel PE classes just because nobody needed to be fit enough for manual labour in the fields any more, and we shouldn’t give up on the disciplines that build intellectual stamina either.
Absolutely right. And made even more sinister by the fact that when we “google” our information, we are getting biased, algorithmically curated answers, allowing the creators of search engines to determine how we see reality.
I’m not so sure this is a strict either/or between reading books and doing stuff on-line.
One of my great fascinations from books when younger was discovering all sorts of interesting lost things from the past (you read a German book from 150 years earlier and started wondering where places like Marienbad which seemed to have disappeared actually were). This then lead to other books trying to follow up all the loose ends …
So when the internet appeared, following up all these interesting detours (rabbit holes seems to be the current term) became much quicker and easier.
It is striking the right balance between some sort of structure and discipline and the easier short cuts to instant gratification that’s difficult.
Lest we think we’re really that much better than the youngsters, just remember how many of us skim the articles in UnHerd, pick out a few triggering items that offend us and head straight to the comments. Guilty as charged (speaking for myself).
I’m starting to recall that part of The Brothers Karamazov with the Grand Inquisitor where the discussion centres on whether people can be trusted with too much freedom …
Interesting article.
I work developing technical authoring software and there has been a recent trend in people new to the field not understanding how classic desktop applications work in favour of mobile phone UI (remember, this is technical authoring – as in writing maintenance guides for physical hardware).
Similarly, and perhaps a little closer to the point of the article, In dealing with recent graduates, I am starting to find certain odd trends. I can write an email explaining something in detail (I won’t claim perfection, naturally) and I will get a response asking for a meeting to show it, or a video. I have normally put this behaviour down to laziness (wanting other people to do your thinking) but the aversion to reading mentioned in the article and other BTL comments was something I had not given serious consideration to.
The trend seems to be part of a larger problem where increasingly, people cannot extract information from text, extrapolate it to the problems they face, or abstract it to broader concepts. These are all skills that are heavily influenced from reading comprehension skills.
So, going back to my first point, we have created a means of communication that is backed by small digestible packets of information that are served up on demand – the generation of the meme (disclaimer, I like a good meme).
And yet I find this all very strange. If I’m looking for information on programming – e.g. I am using a language I’ve not used and need the basics, I want text. Text can be searched on screen, tables of contents are great and indexes are better. The aversion of the written word has strangely pushed people to a format that is less flexible (video is good but it is definitely different and has different strengths and weaknesses).
You do begin to wonder if the increasing reliance on AI (artificial intelligence) is going to make a lot of people less intelligent (as well as a few more intelligent).
One of the advantages of well-structured information (like text, diagrams and tables) is that it is a format that is not only easy to comprehend, but that (if designed and formatted well) it’s relatively easy to check. Anyone who’s written software knows that it’s impossible to create anything significant right first time without bugs and that over a certain length of code, bugs are statistically inevitable. These days we are producing a massive amount of information in glossy formats (mainly video) that looks impressive and plausible, but can be hard to verify. Somewhere in all this, basic engineering disciplines are being lost.
Absolutely.
We’ve had some recent forays into augmented reality as an aid for maintenance procedures. The idea is that digital versions of a procedure (whether text, 3D illustrations/CAD or audio) can be overlaid onto the physical device the technician is working on. This can distill each individual step of the procedure in a format that requires little understanding.
This could effectively lower the skill requirements of the maintainer (legal requirements notwithstanding). Consider a scenario where a technician/engineer is refitting the landing gear of a plane; a highly skilled job that would require training in a variety of mechanical and electrical fields. The desire of course is to save money – a machine to do this would be too expensive right now, but using AR is a nice interim step.
This all creates a feedback loop. We no longer need to be intelligent – there’s almost a downshift in what is required – in my example, our engineers need only be skilled technicians, our technicians now unskilled workers. I’m sure this pattern could repeat in fields such as law and medicine.
I’ve remarked a few times that. H.G. Wells’ Eloi may be one of the more prescient visions of the future. I’m not sure whether the remaining intelligent people (or possibly the AI) become the Morlocks.
How long ago was it Phillip Larkin wrote A Study Of Reading Habits? If you haven’t read it look it up. It’s not a minute’s read but you’ll never forget it.
We aren’t losing civilization because we’re losing reading. We’re losing reading because we’ve already lost civilization – at least in the schools.
My husband told me that when we met and were ‘going out’ his mother had asked if I was a book reader.
He told her that I was and she allegedly said
“ you’ll never have a clean house then.”
How true this is. The fragmenting of the human mind is real.
At the risk of being accused of being a Pollyanna, it’s also likely that, thanks to cell phones, many more people are reading and writing who may not have done so at all 20 years ago. Texting requires at least the most basic ability to complete a sentence, an ability many lower-educated folks formerly abandoned after leaving school.
Dang, Franklin!! You really hit the nail on the head.
I’ve been struggling for years to finish something, anything longer than “The Old Man and the Sea”. Recently I succeeded; I read “The Hobbit” for like the sixth time.
Before 2010 or so I was a regular at the local library. And I had a great collection of found books. Now I take them down once a year. To dust them.
I used to draw all the time, too. But like so many other artists I know I’ve fallen out of that habit.
The internet, while very educational, has been literally stupefying for our society. We should all smoke opium instead; at least it’s kinda sexy.
I teach GCSE and A-level English Literature and English Language, and nearly all of the texts on both curricula are anti-British, if not anti-white.
Better to read no books, surely, than exclusively anti-historical, racist propaganda?
I walk into a library today and find few books worth reading. Good books come from good people. Today’s authors, I fear, are woke and – frankly – bad at their jobs. I look to the authors of yesteryear for books well-written.