One caveat on the Bleak House study. While we don’t know which universities these were, both the University of Kansas (KU, with a $2.5 billion endowment and 30,000 students) and Kansas State University (KSU, with an $850 million endowment and 20,000 students) are respected research institutions of a high caliber. (Please don’t use The Wizard of Oz as your primary source on Kansas! Ha!)
IF these were the two universities in the Bleak House study, and these were upper division undergraduate English majors at such universities, then yeah, it’s actually concerning. How broadly concerning is hard to tell, but it’s not a great look for sure.
As usual I will stand up for the philistines. Someone must!
That passage from Bleak House really is quite difficult and requires a fair amount of what is now somewhat obscure context to properly parse. Dickens is showing off!
The study indicates that English majors at those colleges (whichever they were) are not learning the things we would probably like them to. But beyond that, it tells us little to nothing about what they are actually learning.
My point was really directed towards the idea that these students could not possibly be representative of students as a whole because they go to universities in Kansas, which is not a fair point. They actually ARE probably representative of most “good” students, but that still doesn’t mean that the study itself is well designed.
I disagree with you about the Dickens passage. If you have your smart phone sitting there and you’re allowed to look up anything unfamiliar, and you are an English literature major and theoretically accustomed to reading literary passages, it should be discernible. Dickens is not where to start if you are just wanting to begin reading literary fiction, but if you are already used to reading the genre, it’s not overwhelmingly difficult. (I’m just a mom from Colorado, with no particular credentials, except I’ve been reading my whole life. I do not find the Bleak House passage that difficult.)
what I mean is that not knowing about the Lord Chancellor and Michelmas and all that stuff is perhaps so unusual in Kansas which is a world away from English culture. It wasn't so surprising to me that 18 yr olds from Kansas were confused by all that stuff. Why would they know it?
As to why they could theoretically know it, it would be the same way any American reader of any age might know it—from exposure to reading about it, and one might assume (perhaps incorrectly in this case) that a person pursuing a degree in literature had been doing some reading during the course of their degree.
HOWEVER I also think it’s likely and realistic to assume that they probably didn’t have time to read everything they were assigned and just doing their best and getting by. And therefore, honestly not as well-read as might be expected. I am actually not that invested in this study because it’s too small to really give meaningful information. But where I don’t think it’s fair to critique is imagining these were 18-year-old yokels fresh off a farm or something. That’s just stereotyping what one might imagine people from Kansas are like and it’s not necessarily correct.
I don’t mean to imply they are yokels and have no impression of Kansas really. (Have not seen wizard of oz). I’m just not surprised that non English students don’t know this stuff, nor that lit students are not well read. They are not brought up in the system he describes, that’s all. I also think it’s relevant that they are all in one place. Maybe Kansas had a bad class that year or something right? The headline is “students can’t read dickens” but the reality is “two dozen people in Kansas failed a test” that’s all I mean.
Agreed. Not enough information is known, and the reality is that “two dozen people failed a test”. No real conclusions can actually be drawn. I just see so much extrapolating about this…oh, it’s Kansas, oh they’re probably 18, oh they’re probably inexperienced, oh the universities must not be rigorous. We actually do NOT know most of that, because we don’t know what the universities were, we don’t know the demographics of the students beyond the fact that they are English literature majors in their final two years of their degrees. That’s it. It isn’t a meaningful study, and I agree.
I disagree that somehow Americans can’t understand cultural contexts outside their own, though. Humans have capacity for imagination anyplace. And a lot Americans are anglophiles. Lol
Well, again, just to be very specific, they were not 18. They were upper division students (junior and seniors, in their 3rd or 4th year of their English literature degrees, so they were probably in their early 20’s). They were told they could look up ANYTHING for context. I do not know what a Lord Chancellor is but I do know how to look it up. Michaelmas is mentioned in a lot of English literature (first page of Pride & Prejudice comes immediately to mind). And even if you don’t know what it means outright, you can probably look it up!
I’m not actually defending this study, but I do think that in criticizing it, it’s important to at least know what is being criticized. These were not 18-year-olds fresh out of high school, they were experienced university students pursuing literature degrees.
Your first point is extremely well taken. I agree that they may well be "representative" of the typical American university student.
But I dunno about the second part! Reading Dickens is not that much like reading a lot of other stuff people might be reading. And lots of people are very bad under pressure, and sitting there with someone staring at you and talking into a tape recorder is just a very weird and uncomfortable situation, and they may not have experienced anything like it in their classes (probably they should have!).
I think a lot of people who are comfortable and confident in themselves underestimate how little discomfort and unfamiliarity it takes to totally derail someone's cognitive faculties.
But anyway Henry is right that what we actually need is more information, and not to be reading the tea leaves of a single poorly-documented study from a decade ago and random social media posts.
Hard to say, though one could in principle try to get a sense for this with publically available data. I must warn you I have a statistician hat and I am not afraid to wear it!
The people who deny this trend are making even more sweeping generalizations, about generations and generations of students, on whom we have no data or even anecdotal experience.
I've worked as an English and Drama teacher for 30+ years in UK and international schools. I would say, it's complicated. I've taught in state and independent sector, day and boarding and context really matters. Family context, first of all. If there are books in the home, you can tell quite quickly which students have a reader-supportive environment and which come from homes where books are not opened from one year to the next. I would say this is the most fundamental area to address, because willy nilly, schools have to work with all students. Literacy and reading drives operate in any school that really cares about outcomes for children, because the evidence is there - the more a child reads for pleasure, the better they tend to do in their formal schooling.
Once you have established this baseline, you then have to work out how to bring on the students who have a deficit, and provide them with the space and time to catch up with peers whose reading is more embedded. BTW, this isn't about the financial status of families - I've taught children from exceptionally privileged backgrounds where reading just isn't a thing. And I would also say it isn't just about SEN - again, I've taught kids with quite extreme dyslexia who have been great readers.
And then you have to work on sharing with them classical literature where the textual complexity is high. I have taught Milton to 16 year olds and they have reached good knowledge and understanding of Books 1 and 4 of Paradise Lost. One did get so hooked he read the whole thing. This is where good teaching comes in - high expectations, high scaffolding and persistence. And this is the reason that GCSE Literature is a travesty. I have worked in systems where there is no GCSE, with the expectation of covering 5-6 texts in an academic year. I've taught Bronte and Dickens (full novels) to 12 and 13 year olds - this was around the time smart-phones were introduced. They kicked and yelled a bit initially, but once we were deep into the stories, and they had unlocked the key to the language and understood building their understanding of language context, these texts were perfectly accessible to them.
The problem is that schools have become increasingly rigid and limited in what they teach, often resorting to extracts rather than whole texts, and so when they reach university, the students do not have the experience to be able to replicate a class experience - exploring context, focusing on key literary elements, spending time doing close reading of certain passages. At university, lecturers are expected to do the work that school teachers used to have time for but we are so pressured to get results and do the admin that there is no space for us to teach with ambition and passion for our subject. Sorry to go on so long, it's something I care about deeply.
I teach college literature and I frequently assign long books. I do see all of the demands students have on their time- many are working multiple jobs and are generally stressed out by the state of the world. I also see them deeply engaging with the reading material in class discussion, turning in handwritten reflections, and doing well on reading quizzes. I think it is generally difficult to teach extremely long novels because I prefer not to spend weeks of class time on a single novel (my ideal is the 300 page range). We are just finishing up Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, clocking in at 641 pages. I also see students reading long novels for fun. I’m hosting an event tomorrow for students to bring books they are reading for pleasure and read together, so we will see if it is well-attended!
It might be possible that students interested in literature are reading a lot while others are reading less, affecting their ability to think critically and write clearly.
Earlier this year I was an adjunct and writing instructor for a legal history (land use) course in a graduate architecture/city planning program at a highly regarded state university. I was surprised and discouraged by the amount of work that students were willing to put in (this is a required course and known to be demanding). The work I graded seemed, in large part, to reflect an unwillingness to read and/or inability to understand complicated issues, and class participation/discussion was mostly disappointing, to the extent that it existed. Students seemed reluctant to answer questions but willing to confidently put forward political opinions.
I provided extensive feedback on writing assignments which seemed to be mostly disregarded. I made myself available to meet outside of class and was willing to rearrange my own schedule to accommodate such requests; there were few. When I did meet with them, they generally wanted answers to substantive questions in the assignments rather than guidance on writing. When we focused on the latter, if I provided encouragement that they were on the right track, they seemed to expect a perfect grade without doing what I consider obvious steps such as cleanup and proofreading. It seemed to me that their previous education, going back to primary school, had been substandard.
I was grateful for this opportunity, which fell into my lap, and enjoyed working with the lead instructor (who was very happy with my work). But it was so depressing and frustrating that I'm not sure I will repeat the experience.
As you say, so difficult to study and compare eras.
I'd be interested to hear whether academics in science subjects have seen any problems with students getting through textbooks in their subjects. If you are going to get a good degree in Chemistry, Engineering, Medicine and so on, you do have to get through some weighty tomes at various stages of your studies.
Agreed that the empirical basis for the widespread generalizations is wobbly, and even less is known about changes or trends in anything like Maryann Wolf's "deep reading" -- which is what really matters here (i.e. "depth" not quantity). That was only ever a minority pursuit anyway, and most undergraduates in humanities subjects probably managed to shirk it in the past as well; anyway, we can't go back and measure it now. It seems likely though that since there were so many more of them then, and they were asked to read more, that more of them at least got a taste or a sampling of what deep reading consists in, what it's like, what it can do for you, and so the total population of those who could potentially be drawn in was much larger. The worry is that this population will be confined now to those whose parents managed to pass this value on to their children, and even there it often fails -- it's very hard these days to get teenagers to read, even when they understand the value of it and WANT to read! The result will be that deep reading -- which no one who's studied this doubts is a key component of the human capital that gets well compensated in job markets -- becomes even much more of a minority capability than it already is, and inequality increases even more.
And impressions evidently vary. My own experience is that students read less; I've had to reduce my expectations, and I've not come across a single teacher of undergraduates on either side of the Atlantic in the past few years who hasn't had to reduce the page counts expected of students. What those students bring with them from high school has also dwindled, especially in the US (even at top universities); only a decade or two ago, one could expect at least a Shakespeare play and/or a Dickens novel -- not any more.
I think that the Bleak House reading test was designed to engineer failure and create panic (and was successful in achieving those objectives). The opening paragraphs of Bleak House aren't really amenable to sentence-by-sentence paraphrase; they suggest a mood, as the beginnings of most of Dickens's novels do. And the opening paragraphs consist mainly of sentence fragments, which makes the task of translating or paraphrasing on a sentence level particularly pointless.
To gauge the reasonableness of that study, think about whether it would be worthwhile to ask students to paraphrase the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities. What do YOU think it means, in detail? Does it have a single meaning that can be parsed and paraphrased?
A fairer test would be to present the students with the beginning of Jane Eyre or Barchester Towers. Or Chapter 3 of Bleak House. Or, as one would do in a real educational setting, provide some context to help them understand how to go about figuring out what it all means.
What's interesting about the current ferment concerning the Bleak House study is that the authors conducted the research in 2015 but didn't publish their results for nine years. I wonder what they were doing in the interim.
I think it makes sense to put the focus of this question a little further up stream - not whether students still read / can read / are literate, but whether their attention spans have been impaired by the technologies they use daily (hourly, minutely). Because that is really the most significant change between students in 2025 and students twenty or thirty years earlier. And it's a change that would obviously affect their ability to finish reading a novel.
And studies suggest that disordered screen use does affect attention and executive function. There's a meta analysis here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-023-09612-4. People with internet addiction also have less grey matter volume in certain parts of their brains according to this meta analysis: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11682-023-00762-w. From what I understand, the prefrontal cortex which helps with executive function is underactive in people with disordered screen use while the amygdala becomes overactive making the person more impulsive.
The studies mentioned above were focused on disordered screen use and internet addiction. But it doesn't feel like much of a leap to see that heavy screen use (which I think is not uncommon among students) even if not 'disordered' might still be affecting brains in those directions (impaired attention, executive function and impulse control).
Even just the fact that people check their phones on average 200 times a day (I think this stat is from USA) should give us pause. Having our attention drawn away by our phones and then having to draw it back to the task at hand uses resources in our brains; it tires them out.
I hear a lot of people dismissing the effects of screen use (eg "this is just another technology, people were worried about the printing press at one point") - but it's literally rewiring our brains.
I personally found I had to relearn to focus on reading when I decided to come back to it about 8 years ago after taking a long break (and getting pretty screen addicted in the meantime). So I think your point here is also an important one.
I find this positivity from academics really hmmm… suss? Lots of academics, especially at more prestigious institutions, are not exactly well connected with what their students are doing. If they hand in their work, show up to class with an ‘insightful’ comment or two, these teachers assume students are reading. (They’re just getting summaries on chat gpt) A lot of academics who have been in the job a long time don’t want to know what’s going on with AI, deliberately don’t report AI use to avoid more work, or pass on to their teaching graduate students to deal with. Also - students are working. Many have families. They may want to read, or have started the book in most cases, but they simply can’t dedicate the time needed for the syllabus. This is a structural problem rather than one of motivation. So again, academics who are positive, they aren’t exactly elucidating why students aren’t reading, and ignoring the fact that many students simply aren’t full time students these days. It’s practically impossible, they have to work.
I teach middle school & high school literature to homeschooled kids in a once a week enrichment program and I was thinking to myself just today that I have such an advantage in that I’ve been reading my whole life and have a wide variety of reading (and lived) experience to draw insights from, and I’ve devoted time to planning their classes and thinking about connections and themes ahead of time for them, whereas for them this is just one class in their life and they’re only 12 or 14 or 17 years old.
And then I was talking on the phone with my son who is in his first year of seminary (formation to be a Catholic priest) and he was saying how hard it is to keep up on ALL the reading he has to be doing and I was like, “Well, you just have to do the best you can. Each professor knows their subject inside and out and therefore knows how transformative it can be if you give it ALL the time, but you realistically can’t.”
Agree, there are students who have always worked. But the scale of work in ratio to study is far more now. Full time students used to be a thing 20 years ago. Also, a huge amount of students are required to undertake unpaid placements, hundreds of hours, while juggling paid work and study hours (and often family care). This was not standard 20 years ago. I am from humanities - I know med school etc maybe different.
I was somehow expecting more, like this is the first paragraph of a whole post you didn't bother to write. You could have saved yourself even more time by simply writing, "I don't know man..."
You were glib and dismissive about an issue that's very important to me, and I was annoyed. This is a public forum where comment is invited, so I commented. If you're feeling annoyed now, I guess we're even.
I assume you're the Adam Kotsko who is a theologian? I'd be curious to hear what your own students' reading habits look like. I'm assuming since they're in a Great Books program they're serious readers, but who knows? Also curious what you think "we" know about student reading across the board, since I'm of the same mind as Henry--that "we" know a whole lot less than the chattering classes seem to think. (I did go to your own substack to see if you've written about this topic there--it was a quick scroll, but I didn't see a post. Would be happy to read elsewhere if you don't want to reproduce here.)
My own current experience is that my students *want* to read books more than they do, and they feel the lack in their intellectual lives. But they also do read a lot online, and they are suspicious of what screen time is doing to their attention spans. In other words, they're book- and reading-curious.
I am indeed that Adam Kotsko. The students in my Great Books program are not necessarily stronger readers. We compete for majors in a larger institution with little ability to directly recruit, and many are drawn more to the ethos of discussion than reading as such.
Your use of the term “chattering class” continues the tone of glib dismissiveness I found annoying in the original post. Why do you not believe the near-unanimous testimony of every professor you come across? Aren’t the exceptions obviously in exceptional circumstances (e.g., elite schools)? What “data” would satisfy you that this trend is real? And what are the harms of overdiagnosing — oh no, we’re going to improve reading instruction too much!
I just started my Substack a week ago, so it is not representative. Here is an article I published, relatively early in the discussion of this issue:
Thanks for the link to the piece. I don't think we disagree as much as you seem to think. My own background is that I taught literature and literary theory for about 12 years at small, private (very good) liberal arts colleges where students were motivated, earnest and sincere and almost always did the readings and came to class with interesting things to say. I now primarily work as a FT staff member at an R1 and teach one writing class on the side, just for the pleasure of teaching. My students now are more career-focused, STEM-minded, and generally read less. They have a difficult time reading texts on a screen and retaining enough to have a good discussion, so I print copies of articles for them, and I've started instructing them in how to mark a reading copy and make annotations in texts. In general, has there been a shift in reading habits and abilities in the last five years? Yes. I think the pandemic had an adverse effect, as well as of course smartphones and the Google Chromebooks they all grew up using in HS (also, the idiotic trend now of public schools not assigning full novels or plays! insane). I've also noticed that my own reading endurance, as you note for yourself, has waned--this is distressing!
However, I also do not think that the hysterical think pieces and substacks I've read along the lines of O MY GOD THE KIDS AT HARVARD ARE ILLITERATE are true (and that's the kind of take I think Henry is contesting). This is 1) not an accurate picture of the kids at Harvard/elite institutions, and 2) it's not an accurate picture of my own current students. My Chinese engineering students, for example, regularly read poetry, contemporary science fiction, English classics (a lot of Dickens lovers), and modern Chinese writers just for pleasure. They're extremely well read. I also almost always have one Austen-loving young woman who can dish with me about the various BBC and Hollywood productions and who has usually read P&P and looks forward to reading the other five complete novels. Many others read romantasy--say what you will about that genre, it's at least a gateway to Tolkien. There are brights spots like these every semester, but most importantly, when I ask my students what they read, they almost always say that they like reading and want to read more, or that they wish they liked reading and do I have anything good to recommend? They are, as I said in my other comment, reading-curious. That is a good, good thing, and I build on that with recommendations, with enthusiasm about what they're already reading, with literary references in every class period (that I explain), and by passing along my own used copies of books to students who seem interested.
I'm not a Pollyanna about this--I do see the general trends of decreasing attention spans and less analytic ability in reading dense texts, but I'm also not in despair over students, about the prospects of the humanities, or about overall reading practices (which presumably will wax and wane over the course of literate human history). And now you've met at least one academic whose testimony is not unanimously grim.
(I'm curious what part of what I just wrote will annoy you next lol)
EDIT: I should add that I'm not teaching philosophy, and certainly not Derrida or Hegel. In that instance, I might well feel less sanguine.
I'm glad you have promising signs to point to -- I do, too. I've actually been building back up the reading load in my classes and trying to add in more explicit guidance (including about things like scanning and skimming, which many have never been taught). The very best students I get are as good as any students I've had, which shows me it's not just something in the water. But the overall downward trajectory seems undeniable and sad.
In terms of annoyance levels, it does feel like a bait-and-switch to say that he was objecting only to extreme and unreasonable versions of the thesis. But that kind of thing is a near-constant in online debates, so I'll let it slide.
Is romantasy REALLY a gateway to Tolkien? If you’re used to everything you read being “spicy” (to use their jargon), do you really want to read something that is not even spicy adjacent just because it is fantasy? Otherwise thanks for sharing, it’s nice to hear about your students.
One caveat on the Bleak House study. While we don’t know which universities these were, both the University of Kansas (KU, with a $2.5 billion endowment and 30,000 students) and Kansas State University (KSU, with an $850 million endowment and 20,000 students) are respected research institutions of a high caliber. (Please don’t use The Wizard of Oz as your primary source on Kansas! Ha!)
IF these were the two universities in the Bleak House study, and these were upper division undergraduate English majors at such universities, then yeah, it’s actually concerning. How broadly concerning is hard to tell, but it’s not a great look for sure.
oh that's useful corrective, thank you!
As usual I will stand up for the philistines. Someone must!
That passage from Bleak House really is quite difficult and requires a fair amount of what is now somewhat obscure context to properly parse. Dickens is showing off!
The study indicates that English majors at those colleges (whichever they were) are not learning the things we would probably like them to. But beyond that, it tells us little to nothing about what they are actually learning.
I dont disagree with most of this
Henry how do you generate engagement with this reasonable, even-keeled attitude of yours. The algorithm (I am lead to understand) demands blood!
I am training the algorithm to only bring me reasonable readers! (I mute the rest)
My point was really directed towards the idea that these students could not possibly be representative of students as a whole because they go to universities in Kansas, which is not a fair point. They actually ARE probably representative of most “good” students, but that still doesn’t mean that the study itself is well designed.
I disagree with you about the Dickens passage. If you have your smart phone sitting there and you’re allowed to look up anything unfamiliar, and you are an English literature major and theoretically accustomed to reading literary passages, it should be discernible. Dickens is not where to start if you are just wanting to begin reading literary fiction, but if you are already used to reading the genre, it’s not overwhelmingly difficult. (I’m just a mom from Colorado, with no particular credentials, except I’ve been reading my whole life. I do not find the Bleak House passage that difficult.)
what I mean is that not knowing about the Lord Chancellor and Michelmas and all that stuff is perhaps so unusual in Kansas which is a world away from English culture. It wasn't so surprising to me that 18 yr olds from Kansas were confused by all that stuff. Why would they know it?
As to why they could theoretically know it, it would be the same way any American reader of any age might know it—from exposure to reading about it, and one might assume (perhaps incorrectly in this case) that a person pursuing a degree in literature had been doing some reading during the course of their degree.
HOWEVER I also think it’s likely and realistic to assume that they probably didn’t have time to read everything they were assigned and just doing their best and getting by. And therefore, honestly not as well-read as might be expected. I am actually not that invested in this study because it’s too small to really give meaningful information. But where I don’t think it’s fair to critique is imagining these were 18-year-old yokels fresh off a farm or something. That’s just stereotyping what one might imagine people from Kansas are like and it’s not necessarily correct.
I don’t mean to imply they are yokels and have no impression of Kansas really. (Have not seen wizard of oz). I’m just not surprised that non English students don’t know this stuff, nor that lit students are not well read. They are not brought up in the system he describes, that’s all. I also think it’s relevant that they are all in one place. Maybe Kansas had a bad class that year or something right? The headline is “students can’t read dickens” but the reality is “two dozen people in Kansas failed a test” that’s all I mean.
Agreed. Not enough information is known, and the reality is that “two dozen people failed a test”. No real conclusions can actually be drawn. I just see so much extrapolating about this…oh, it’s Kansas, oh they’re probably 18, oh they’re probably inexperienced, oh the universities must not be rigorous. We actually do NOT know most of that, because we don’t know what the universities were, we don’t know the demographics of the students beyond the fact that they are English literature majors in their final two years of their degrees. That’s it. It isn’t a meaningful study, and I agree.
I disagree that somehow Americans can’t understand cultural contexts outside their own, though. Humans have capacity for imagination anyplace. And a lot Americans are anglophiles. Lol
Well, again, just to be very specific, they were not 18. They were upper division students (junior and seniors, in their 3rd or 4th year of their English literature degrees, so they were probably in their early 20’s). They were told they could look up ANYTHING for context. I do not know what a Lord Chancellor is but I do know how to look it up. Michaelmas is mentioned in a lot of English literature (first page of Pride & Prejudice comes immediately to mind). And even if you don’t know what it means outright, you can probably look it up!
I’m not actually defending this study, but I do think that in criticizing it, it’s important to at least know what is being criticized. These were not 18-year-olds fresh out of high school, they were experienced university students pursuing literature degrees.
Your first point is extremely well taken. I agree that they may well be "representative" of the typical American university student.
But I dunno about the second part! Reading Dickens is not that much like reading a lot of other stuff people might be reading. And lots of people are very bad under pressure, and sitting there with someone staring at you and talking into a tape recorder is just a very weird and uncomfortable situation, and they may not have experienced anything like it in their classes (probably they should have!).
I think a lot of people who are comfortable and confident in themselves underestimate how little discomfort and unfamiliarity it takes to totally derail someone's cognitive faculties.
But anyway Henry is right that what we actually need is more information, and not to be reading the tea leaves of a single poorly-documented study from a decade ago and random social media posts.
I think a small number of people in one place are never likely to be representative esp in such a large and diverse system as the US
Hard to say, though one could in principle try to get a sense for this with publically available data. I must warn you I have a statistician hat and I am not afraid to wear it!
Do it!!
Beware people making sweeping generalizations. Literature is not kind to them.
This is true!
All people who make generalizations are alike.
The people who deny this trend are making even more sweeping generalizations, about generations and generations of students, on whom we have no data or even anecdotal experience.
I explicitly didn't deny it
Great. You are not the only person ever to talk about this issue.
I've worked as an English and Drama teacher for 30+ years in UK and international schools. I would say, it's complicated. I've taught in state and independent sector, day and boarding and context really matters. Family context, first of all. If there are books in the home, you can tell quite quickly which students have a reader-supportive environment and which come from homes where books are not opened from one year to the next. I would say this is the most fundamental area to address, because willy nilly, schools have to work with all students. Literacy and reading drives operate in any school that really cares about outcomes for children, because the evidence is there - the more a child reads for pleasure, the better they tend to do in their formal schooling.
Once you have established this baseline, you then have to work out how to bring on the students who have a deficit, and provide them with the space and time to catch up with peers whose reading is more embedded. BTW, this isn't about the financial status of families - I've taught children from exceptionally privileged backgrounds where reading just isn't a thing. And I would also say it isn't just about SEN - again, I've taught kids with quite extreme dyslexia who have been great readers.
And then you have to work on sharing with them classical literature where the textual complexity is high. I have taught Milton to 16 year olds and they have reached good knowledge and understanding of Books 1 and 4 of Paradise Lost. One did get so hooked he read the whole thing. This is where good teaching comes in - high expectations, high scaffolding and persistence. And this is the reason that GCSE Literature is a travesty. I have worked in systems where there is no GCSE, with the expectation of covering 5-6 texts in an academic year. I've taught Bronte and Dickens (full novels) to 12 and 13 year olds - this was around the time smart-phones were introduced. They kicked and yelled a bit initially, but once we were deep into the stories, and they had unlocked the key to the language and understood building their understanding of language context, these texts were perfectly accessible to them.
The problem is that schools have become increasingly rigid and limited in what they teach, often resorting to extracts rather than whole texts, and so when they reach university, the students do not have the experience to be able to replicate a class experience - exploring context, focusing on key literary elements, spending time doing close reading of certain passages. At university, lecturers are expected to do the work that school teachers used to have time for but we are so pressured to get results and do the admin that there is no space for us to teach with ambition and passion for our subject. Sorry to go on so long, it's something I care about deeply.
Thank you for this meaningful comment, it offers A LOT of insight!
I teach college literature and I frequently assign long books. I do see all of the demands students have on their time- many are working multiple jobs and are generally stressed out by the state of the world. I also see them deeply engaging with the reading material in class discussion, turning in handwritten reflections, and doing well on reading quizzes. I think it is generally difficult to teach extremely long novels because I prefer not to spend weeks of class time on a single novel (my ideal is the 300 page range). We are just finishing up Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, clocking in at 641 pages. I also see students reading long novels for fun. I’m hosting an event tomorrow for students to bring books they are reading for pleasure and read together, so we will see if it is well-attended!
It might be possible that students interested in literature are reading a lot while others are reading less, affecting their ability to think critically and write clearly.
Earlier this year I was an adjunct and writing instructor for a legal history (land use) course in a graduate architecture/city planning program at a highly regarded state university. I was surprised and discouraged by the amount of work that students were willing to put in (this is a required course and known to be demanding). The work I graded seemed, in large part, to reflect an unwillingness to read and/or inability to understand complicated issues, and class participation/discussion was mostly disappointing, to the extent that it existed. Students seemed reluctant to answer questions but willing to confidently put forward political opinions.
I provided extensive feedback on writing assignments which seemed to be mostly disregarded. I made myself available to meet outside of class and was willing to rearrange my own schedule to accommodate such requests; there were few. When I did meet with them, they generally wanted answers to substantive questions in the assignments rather than guidance on writing. When we focused on the latter, if I provided encouragement that they were on the right track, they seemed to expect a perfect grade without doing what I consider obvious steps such as cleanup and proofreading. It seemed to me that their previous education, going back to primary school, had been substandard.
I was grateful for this opportunity, which fell into my lap, and enjoyed working with the lead instructor (who was very happy with my work). But it was so depressing and frustrating that I'm not sure I will repeat the experience.
As you say, so difficult to study and compare eras.
I'd be interested to hear whether academics in science subjects have seen any problems with students getting through textbooks in their subjects. If you are going to get a good degree in Chemistry, Engineering, Medicine and so on, you do have to get through some weighty tomes at various stages of your studies.
Agreed that the empirical basis for the widespread generalizations is wobbly, and even less is known about changes or trends in anything like Maryann Wolf's "deep reading" -- which is what really matters here (i.e. "depth" not quantity). That was only ever a minority pursuit anyway, and most undergraduates in humanities subjects probably managed to shirk it in the past as well; anyway, we can't go back and measure it now. It seems likely though that since there were so many more of them then, and they were asked to read more, that more of them at least got a taste or a sampling of what deep reading consists in, what it's like, what it can do for you, and so the total population of those who could potentially be drawn in was much larger. The worry is that this population will be confined now to those whose parents managed to pass this value on to their children, and even there it often fails -- it's very hard these days to get teenagers to read, even when they understand the value of it and WANT to read! The result will be that deep reading -- which no one who's studied this doubts is a key component of the human capital that gets well compensated in job markets -- becomes even much more of a minority capability than it already is, and inequality increases even more.
And impressions evidently vary. My own experience is that students read less; I've had to reduce my expectations, and I've not come across a single teacher of undergraduates on either side of the Atlantic in the past few years who hasn't had to reduce the page counts expected of students. What those students bring with them from high school has also dwindled, especially in the US (even at top universities); only a decade or two ago, one could expect at least a Shakespeare play and/or a Dickens novel -- not any more.
I think that the Bleak House reading test was designed to engineer failure and create panic (and was successful in achieving those objectives). The opening paragraphs of Bleak House aren't really amenable to sentence-by-sentence paraphrase; they suggest a mood, as the beginnings of most of Dickens's novels do. And the opening paragraphs consist mainly of sentence fragments, which makes the task of translating or paraphrasing on a sentence level particularly pointless.
To gauge the reasonableness of that study, think about whether it would be worthwhile to ask students to paraphrase the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities. What do YOU think it means, in detail? Does it have a single meaning that can be parsed and paraphrased?
A fairer test would be to present the students with the beginning of Jane Eyre or Barchester Towers. Or Chapter 3 of Bleak House. Or, as one would do in a real educational setting, provide some context to help them understand how to go about figuring out what it all means.
What's interesting about the current ferment concerning the Bleak House study is that the authors conducted the research in 2015 but didn't publish their results for nine years. I wonder what they were doing in the interim.
I think it makes sense to put the focus of this question a little further up stream - not whether students still read / can read / are literate, but whether their attention spans have been impaired by the technologies they use daily (hourly, minutely). Because that is really the most significant change between students in 2025 and students twenty or thirty years earlier. And it's a change that would obviously affect their ability to finish reading a novel.
And studies suggest that disordered screen use does affect attention and executive function. There's a meta analysis here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-023-09612-4. People with internet addiction also have less grey matter volume in certain parts of their brains according to this meta analysis: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11682-023-00762-w. From what I understand, the prefrontal cortex which helps with executive function is underactive in people with disordered screen use while the amygdala becomes overactive making the person more impulsive.
The studies mentioned above were focused on disordered screen use and internet addiction. But it doesn't feel like much of a leap to see that heavy screen use (which I think is not uncommon among students) even if not 'disordered' might still be affecting brains in those directions (impaired attention, executive function and impulse control).
Even just the fact that people check their phones on average 200 times a day (I think this stat is from USA) should give us pause. Having our attention drawn away by our phones and then having to draw it back to the task at hand uses resources in our brains; it tires them out.
I hear a lot of people dismissing the effects of screen use (eg "this is just another technology, people were worried about the printing press at one point") - but it's literally rewiring our brains.
* Getting down from soap box. Going about my day.
I personally found I had to relearn to focus on reading when I decided to come back to it about 8 years ago after taking a long break (and getting pretty screen addicted in the meantime). So I think your point here is also an important one.
It's been exactly the same for me!
Just wrote something in a similar vein:
https://clauswilke.substack.com/p/have-you-ever-seen-a-man-with-whiskers
Because he was lazy, I owe him my labor, to enhance the experience on his blog? Sorry, no.
I find this positivity from academics really hmmm… suss? Lots of academics, especially at more prestigious institutions, are not exactly well connected with what their students are doing. If they hand in their work, show up to class with an ‘insightful’ comment or two, these teachers assume students are reading. (They’re just getting summaries on chat gpt) A lot of academics who have been in the job a long time don’t want to know what’s going on with AI, deliberately don’t report AI use to avoid more work, or pass on to their teaching graduate students to deal with. Also - students are working. Many have families. They may want to read, or have started the book in most cases, but they simply can’t dedicate the time needed for the syllabus. This is a structural problem rather than one of motivation. So again, academics who are positive, they aren’t exactly elucidating why students aren’t reading, and ignoring the fact that many students simply aren’t full time students these days. It’s practically impossible, they have to work.
This is SUCH an important insight.
I teach middle school & high school literature to homeschooled kids in a once a week enrichment program and I was thinking to myself just today that I have such an advantage in that I’ve been reading my whole life and have a wide variety of reading (and lived) experience to draw insights from, and I’ve devoted time to planning their classes and thinking about connections and themes ahead of time for them, whereas for them this is just one class in their life and they’re only 12 or 14 or 17 years old.
And then I was talking on the phone with my son who is in his first year of seminary (formation to be a Catholic priest) and he was saying how hard it is to keep up on ALL the reading he has to be doing and I was like, “Well, you just have to do the best you can. Each professor knows their subject inside and out and therefore knows how transformative it can be if you give it ALL the time, but you realistically can’t.”
Students working isn't a new phenomenon? I worked my way through college 20 years ago.
Agree, there are students who have always worked. But the scale of work in ratio to study is far more now. Full time students used to be a thing 20 years ago. Also, a huge amount of students are required to undertake unpaid placements, hundreds of hours, while juggling paid work and study hours (and often family care). This was not standard 20 years ago. I am from humanities - I know med school etc maybe different.
I’d love to see data on this; anecdotes are nice but I’d be interested to see if there has actually been a widespread change in students working.
yup, same
Agree
I was somehow expecting more, like this is the first paragraph of a whole post you didn't bother to write. You could have saved yourself even more time by simply writing, "I don't know man..."
But the point isn't that Henry doesn't know (though he doesn't), it's that also nobody else knows! This is a subtle but frequently overlooked point.
Well, I strongly disagree with him on that and his frankly lazy post did not convince me he has thought seriously about this issue.
Just ignore it … what *is* the problem?
You were glib and dismissive about an issue that's very important to me, and I was annoyed. This is a public forum where comment is invited, so I commented. If you're feeling annoyed now, I guess we're even.
I assume you're the Adam Kotsko who is a theologian? I'd be curious to hear what your own students' reading habits look like. I'm assuming since they're in a Great Books program they're serious readers, but who knows? Also curious what you think "we" know about student reading across the board, since I'm of the same mind as Henry--that "we" know a whole lot less than the chattering classes seem to think. (I did go to your own substack to see if you've written about this topic there--it was a quick scroll, but I didn't see a post. Would be happy to read elsewhere if you don't want to reproduce here.)
My own current experience is that my students *want* to read books more than they do, and they feel the lack in their intellectual lives. But they also do read a lot online, and they are suspicious of what screen time is doing to their attention spans. In other words, they're book- and reading-curious.
I am indeed that Adam Kotsko. The students in my Great Books program are not necessarily stronger readers. We compete for majors in a larger institution with little ability to directly recruit, and many are drawn more to the ethos of discussion than reading as such.
Your use of the term “chattering class” continues the tone of glib dismissiveness I found annoying in the original post. Why do you not believe the near-unanimous testimony of every professor you come across? Aren’t the exceptions obviously in exceptional circumstances (e.g., elite schools)? What “data” would satisfy you that this trend is real? And what are the harms of overdiagnosing — oh no, we’re going to improve reading instruction too much!
I just started my Substack a week ago, so it is not representative. Here is an article I published, relatively early in the discussion of this issue:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html
Thanks for the link to the piece. I don't think we disagree as much as you seem to think. My own background is that I taught literature and literary theory for about 12 years at small, private (very good) liberal arts colleges where students were motivated, earnest and sincere and almost always did the readings and came to class with interesting things to say. I now primarily work as a FT staff member at an R1 and teach one writing class on the side, just for the pleasure of teaching. My students now are more career-focused, STEM-minded, and generally read less. They have a difficult time reading texts on a screen and retaining enough to have a good discussion, so I print copies of articles for them, and I've started instructing them in how to mark a reading copy and make annotations in texts. In general, has there been a shift in reading habits and abilities in the last five years? Yes. I think the pandemic had an adverse effect, as well as of course smartphones and the Google Chromebooks they all grew up using in HS (also, the idiotic trend now of public schools not assigning full novels or plays! insane). I've also noticed that my own reading endurance, as you note for yourself, has waned--this is distressing!
However, I also do not think that the hysterical think pieces and substacks I've read along the lines of O MY GOD THE KIDS AT HARVARD ARE ILLITERATE are true (and that's the kind of take I think Henry is contesting). This is 1) not an accurate picture of the kids at Harvard/elite institutions, and 2) it's not an accurate picture of my own current students. My Chinese engineering students, for example, regularly read poetry, contemporary science fiction, English classics (a lot of Dickens lovers), and modern Chinese writers just for pleasure. They're extremely well read. I also almost always have one Austen-loving young woman who can dish with me about the various BBC and Hollywood productions and who has usually read P&P and looks forward to reading the other five complete novels. Many others read romantasy--say what you will about that genre, it's at least a gateway to Tolkien. There are brights spots like these every semester, but most importantly, when I ask my students what they read, they almost always say that they like reading and want to read more, or that they wish they liked reading and do I have anything good to recommend? They are, as I said in my other comment, reading-curious. That is a good, good thing, and I build on that with recommendations, with enthusiasm about what they're already reading, with literary references in every class period (that I explain), and by passing along my own used copies of books to students who seem interested.
I'm not a Pollyanna about this--I do see the general trends of decreasing attention spans and less analytic ability in reading dense texts, but I'm also not in despair over students, about the prospects of the humanities, or about overall reading practices (which presumably will wax and wane over the course of literate human history). And now you've met at least one academic whose testimony is not unanimously grim.
(I'm curious what part of what I just wrote will annoy you next lol)
EDIT: I should add that I'm not teaching philosophy, and certainly not Derrida or Hegel. In that instance, I might well feel less sanguine.
I'm glad you have promising signs to point to -- I do, too. I've actually been building back up the reading load in my classes and trying to add in more explicit guidance (including about things like scanning and skimming, which many have never been taught). The very best students I get are as good as any students I've had, which shows me it's not just something in the water. But the overall downward trajectory seems undeniable and sad.
In terms of annoyance levels, it does feel like a bait-and-switch to say that he was objecting only to extreme and unreasonable versions of the thesis. But that kind of thing is a near-constant in online debates, so I'll let it slide.
Is romantasy REALLY a gateway to Tolkien? If you’re used to everything you read being “spicy” (to use their jargon), do you really want to read something that is not even spicy adjacent just because it is fantasy? Otherwise thanks for sharing, it’s nice to hear about your students.
Then his objections should be easy to rebut! Much engagement would be generated, and Henry would be so owned.
Have a look at "The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey," a research paper from 2025: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)01549-4
n = 236,270