Confession: I’m a first-year English teacher who still thinks about that viral Atlantic article from October: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” In it, journalist Rose Horowitch sifts through a flurry of interviews with post-secondary instructors and, ultimately, generalizes today’s undergraduates as unpracticed in reading entire literary works from beginning to end.
The piece’s cited professors are not bemoaning the loss of literacy as a skill; they perceive students to be capable of the processes constitutive of “reading,” such as decoding and comprehending language. The worry, rather, is that today’s learners seem averse to reading long-form text. As Horowtich posits, “Students can still read books […] [T]hey’re just choosing not to.”
What gives? More broadly, what’s the value in engaging in a long-form, meditative activity like reading? And how ought schools — and the rest of us — evaluate and respond to its allegedly waning popularity?
First, let’s look at schools.
Educational policy, one of many influences on students, exists to support and raise the standard of academic achievement. For example, consider the popularly cited No Child Left Behind (2001) and Common Core (2009) legislation. Bipartisan they were enacted, and bipartisan they remain praised and critiqued, these policies remain steady shapers of 21st century American schooling, catapulting standardized testing — a projected $1.7 billion industry — into generation-defining prevalence.
These two programs sought to eliminate achievement gaps and synchronize learning goals across public schools in the United States. As measures of progression toward these ends, students take state and federal assessments multiple times in one school year. The tests in language arts, for example, ask students to read short-form passages and demonstrate comprehension by bubbling answers to multiple-choice questions.
Rather than stew over their empirical efficacy, let us mull over a particular implication: a test populated with short-form reading rewards analytical prowess (and test-taking deftness) over the gains of long-form reading of particular literary works. And if tests deprioritize the endurance required for novel-reading, then it is no wonder that a focus on lengthy text becomes academically disincentivized.
But is blame on testing disproportionately dealt? While a large sum, the $1.7 billion for testing rounds to just 0.003% of American K-12 education’s estimated overall $600 billion in annual spending. Furthermore, these reforms do not actually preclude teachers from assigning whole books. We do not, in fact, actually know how many primary and secondary teachers do (not) involve novel-reading in coursework — the piece expresses a shared sentiment rather than hard data. And it’s not as if we no longer wish for our students to be held to some kind of standard; perhaps there is room for favoring components standardization without fully endorsing today’s assessment methods.
And yet, school administrator Mike Szkolka’s words maintain a poignant tug: “There’s no [standardized] testing skill that can be related to […] Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?” But therein lies another query: In what sense do students actually need to?
Because for a number of learners, reading doesn’t hold perceptible value. “Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past,” Horowitch writes. “Every year, they tell [Professor] Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit[erature] Hum[anities], they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.”
Career-directedness seems to suggest a revaluation of education. School as a vehicle primarily for job acquisition implies that we most value what others value in us. We are reactive, not active, in seeking knowledge. In other words: it is a norm to prioritize flourishing within one’s outer rather than inner world. Do we want this to be the case? Ought employability be both the means for and end of one’s existence?
At face value, perhaps the asking of such questions appears — or are — inaccessible or elitist; the average person cannot afford to value character-cultivation at the expense of a paycheck. However, this mutual exclusivity might suggest a false dichotomy. While inaccurate to suggest all a student “needs” is a soul-stirring novel, it also seems corrupting to postulate that a human’s only purpose is survival. Isn’t it fishy to suggest that forgoing purposeful reflection is the price of work?
Students deserve more from us than a scarcity mindset. Surely, schooling has failed if both material and immaterial needs go unmet. In fact, books opportunize “deep reading — sustained immersion in a text — which stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.” Further, as the Atlantic piece suggests, sticking with one character “through their journey” produces benefits like an enlarged capacity for understanding others’ feelings. Bal and Veltkamp’s 2013 study, for instance, found that high narrative transportation — immersion — in fiction leads to higher empathy.
Even the most eager students, however, face an oft-spotlighted modern obstacle: shrinking attention spans.
In blame, it feels instinctive to point fingers at algorithm-propagated short-form entertainment. But to be charitable to today’s learners — who often face beration for addiction to the devices adults handed them — technological hyperfixation indicates not that adolescents are necessarily allergic to literature (they aren’t!). More so, it seems plausible that perpetual (short-lived) satisfaction just begets low tolerance for boredom. For instance, a personalized feed of sub-one-minute videos analyzing a book (with sound, color, and jump cuts) might more quickly deliver gratification than the quiet, meditative act of reading one.
Even still, maybe you’re tired of blaming phones. Perhaps the screens are mere scapegoats for our larger economic sway toward fast-paced, immediate meeting of needs. (Who needs patience when the internet can predict your next delivery?) If truth be told, then the introduction of any new media seems to prompt alarm — consider the frenzied responses to radio and television.
But a patterned emergence of new-media-induced perturbation doesn’t mean these panics are without reason; after all, it was social media, not the printing press, that’s been dubbed a “dopamine machine.” Exerting self-sufficient, methodical mental activity (e.g., reading) is a hard ask if our phones are already adept at tickling our brains for us. Still, this focus on distractibility might itself distract from the more pervasive force at this conundrum’s root: a cultural devaluation of reading. And if this is the case, then it is worth considering what it says about ourselves — and what we’re losing.
Devaluing reading implies a valuation of something — or things — else. The most salient indicators of our values are reflected in the means by and subjects to whom we give our attention; there is a real worry, it seems, about the next-steppage and “checking out” embedded in many of today’s minute-by-minute priorities of focus. Staring at one’s phone, staring at a multiple choice test, and staring at a resume are all — whether you like it or not — endorsements of those activities. And while such endorsements necessitate neither desire nor aspiration to pursue excellence in the activity, engagement nonetheless indicates and cultivates (unconscious) value and habit.
But the thoughtful engagement required to read or discuss a novel seems nearly as deliberate and life-affirming as laughing or taking a mindful stroll. Perhaps that is the wish for our kids — that they are educated in the contemplative, patient, and gracious habits of (re)grounding themselves in the reality we find ourselves too often evading, devaluing.
So for all of our sakes, throw a paperback in your tote the next time you leave. Read it. Talk about it. Normalize it. Allow the opportunity for a friend, colleague, or even a rogue middle schooler to catch the contagion themselves. The simplest act of resistance against a future we’d like to avoid is to be stewards — not mere pontificators — of the habits we hope the rest of the world might also cultivate.
