“Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. ”

That’s a bit from “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch, recently published in The Atlantic.

The article chronicles the general decrease in reading (of books, articles), the general decrease in sophistication of what people are reading, and the general decrease in literacy skills. People are “losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis” and in her view, “things are about to get worse, and fast.”

Kids watch more and more videos, and read less and less. While “video contains more information than text,” watching videos is “a more passive form of engagement than reading” and generally “does not stimulate deeper thinking.” Student reading and writing scores on standardized tests are “at their lowest level in more than three decades.”

What does that mean for instruction at the college level? One avenue is remedial: “When these students get to college, their professors find that they have to teach them how to comprehend a text.” But remedial education for reading skills makes sense only if students need those reading skills in order to graduate, and I worry that increasingly, they won’t. The consumer model of higher education paired with a highly instrumentalist picture of the value of education points to a further relaxation of literacy demands on students, not greater student preparation to meet existing or more stringent demands.

Along those lines, here is one of the more striking passages of Horowitch’s article:

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

A course’s being difficult will, more and more, be understood as a professor being “difficult”. When that is the prevailing interpretive framework, it is education that will be increasingly difficult.