"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I wasn’t going to derail the disability pride month post for people with peanut allergies but in relation to that topic
I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.
Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.
Also other parents in the classroom are guilty too. The “not my child not my problem” brain rot means that those lunchboxes are like bombs for airborne exposure allergies
A 22-year-old woman said Lufthansa staffers were not sympathetic to her condition when she tried to explain her life-threatening peanut alle
I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.
This woman was laughed at for asking for allergy accommodations at multiple points in her trip, and was denied to the point that she was practically told she’d be refused care in the event of anaphylaxis.
I work in healthcare. I cannot get my coworkers to consistently change their gloves after handling a PBJ. They literally do not think of it, and I don’t understand why. I also don’t know how to make it stick in their brains that this is a thing they need to do.
I grew up in the early 2000s with severe allergies to not just peanuts, but ALL nuts as well as beef, pork, shelfish, seeds, kiwi, and some food dyes. The resistance that my family faced from educators in the early 2000s is frankly bananas, not to mention the shit other parents and kids got up to.
When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.
Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)
Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.
College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.
Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:
FOOD ALLERGY IS A DISABILITY FOR WHICH EVERYONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO ACCESS ACCOMMODATIONS AND HAVE THEM TAKEN SERIOUSLY.
So this story is less about me and more about an acquaintance of mine. About a year ago some classmates and I were privileged enough to go visit Germany for 3 weeks as a school trip. My acquaintance, who for the sake of her privacy we will call Amy, had a deadly allergy to sunflower seeds and certain other grains. I do not know for certain if the flight attendants were made aware of this fact.
When on the flight Amy was fed bread that contained multiple things she was allergic to. The packaging was completely unlabled and she was never offered an allergy warning before or during the 13 hour flight. She had an allergic reaction and had a very hard time breathing and had to take the ONE epipen she had access to for this whole trip that day. She would not be able to get a new one. The flight attendants did not give a singular fuck about what happened to her and the position she was put in because of their carelessness.
Fast forward to the end of the trip. Luckily Amy had no further incidents during the trip. We get on the plane for the flight home and Amy asks about the food for the flight and if she can have the ingredients list. She also makes it clear to the flight attendants that this is really important because she has already had an incident and no longer has her epipen.
Do you want to know what the flight attendants did?
They kicked her off the plane. They kicked a seventeen year old off a plane and left her behind in an unfamiliar city because they would rather not deal with her disability. She delayed the flight for several minutes begging and crying for them to not leave her there. She told them she had no way of accessing a new epipen here, but they said she couldn’t fly without it. Me and my friend who were sitting next to her held her and argued with the flight attendant to keep her on the plane. She sobbed as she said she could just not eat anything, or that she could eat what she brought aboard. They still kicked her off. Bless the chaperone that chose to stay behind with her so she wouldn’t be alone.
You want to know the most fucked up part after that? The flight attendant who kicked her off was amused about the whole thing like it was some funny joke. Another one complained that “In all his years of working this job he had never been so disrespected.”
Amy and the chaperone ended up sleeping at that airport over night before they could get on another flight. I don’t remember if she was able to get another epipen for the flight home but I think she was.
Case in point, allergies are a serious disability that NEED to be treated with more respect and severity. Regardless of what they are. Someone’s life could be at stake. When someone has a disability they need to be accommodated. Don’t give them a hard time or make jokes at their expense. So what if you have to give up a thing or two to make sure they don’t die. You’ll survive not eating that specific thing for a bit. And as someone who grew up with someone with a serious allergy, I promise you it is not that hard to give something up for the safety of others.
it fucking sucks being a disabled person who can't work and having to see these fuckass posts where someone's like "ahaha jobless people have no life and that's why everyone shitty online has No Job" and everyone and their mother reblogs it joyfully onto my dash for me to see. yes unemployed and unemployable people are truly without exception dogshit people with no hobbies and no redeeming qualities. you're so right. anyway if you'll excuse me i have to start my shift at the I'll Never Be Employed Because Of Permanent Disability And I Love Knowing How You Really See Me store
btw this isn't solely a disability rights issue or an issue about people who are entirely unable to work. you should also be thinking about the people who are regarded as unhireable. transfems are hugely discriminated against in this way, people of color are passed over for less qualified white people, anyone who has any difficulty playing the interview game is less hireable... frankly anyone who made the mistake of pursuing the things they love and now has a degree for a niche field. if you still joke about Jobless People it's because you've fundamentally connected the worth of people to their labor, and specific labor, work that you see as valuable. and while i'm at it stop making fun of people who still live with their parents. asshole.
I do think you lose your right to medical privacy when you decide to become a politician and it is mad fucked up that these people hold our lives in their hands and are allowed to disappear for months on end with no explanation. You need a doctor’s note to miss school for a cold but we have no clue if Mitch McConnell is dead or alive and Tom Kean was allowed to fuck off for 4 months without telling the public why. I don’t give a fuck about your privacy, you’re not protecting my privacy, if you’re leeching tax dollars and partying it up in a rich person rehab resort somewhere while your constituents vote against our access to healthcare, we should be allowed to know. Fuck you. I say this as a disabled person, I’m always having to explain the nature of my disability and the details of my health but we’re not allowed to know what the fuck is going on with these people.
Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do
I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you
hey now that it’s disability pride month can you please remember to include people with Down syndrome and other chromosomal defects into your activism. they’re so often left behind. I literally never see anyone spreading Down syndrome awareness that isn’t close family of someone with Down syndrome. They exist and they’re living breathing humans who deserve just as much activism as every other disabled person
All these tourists having a great time at the World Cup isn't surprising b/c the first rule of America is that this place rules if you have money to blow and it's a nightmare if you don't. The prohibitively high cost of attending the World Cup filtered out all the ppl who don't have money so all the people who actually made it to the U.S. are basically guaranteed to have fun
Listen I get it but you CANNOT use "sensory nightmare" as an excuse to avoid essential things. You HAVE to find a way to make it work, such as finding effective alternatives. But you can't just avoid it.
You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.
You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.
You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.
I just saw someone make the assertion that “everyone on booktok has low literacy, and romantasy books are bad because they’re catering to those people”
And this was meant to be a BAD thing. A problem. But if you actually believed that a massive population of low-literacy adults were buying books, becoming obsessed with them, and discussing them at length… wouldn’t that be a great thing? That’s how one moves from low literacy to high literacy: by practicing reading
Unless you think low literacy is an immutable quality reflective of poor character, in which case YOU are actually the problem
actually I think you should be normal about ordinary citizens of authoritarian countries and yes that applies even to that country you're thinking of right now
"but they support [dictator] and [violent action]!" okay is it possible that a combination of propaganda, election rigging, and authoritarian crackdowns on dissent could lead a population to look like it supports something most people would find distasteful under more reasonable circumstances
can we stop with the "epstein class" bullshit. if you mean billionaires say billionaires. if you mean child predators say child predators. if you mean corrupt men in power say corrupt men in power. you sound like an edgy 13yo who just discovered communism trying to sound more politically educated than they actually are
while i don't believe in an afterlife or souls and do accept that a corpse is an empty space where something once was, i also think that if we give a body which cannot advocate for itself that meaning and personhood, then we cannot simply disregard it as it suits the living to do so without any consideration for the consequences of that, especially when we will all one day be in the same position regardless of our consent in the matter. unlike abortion, where you're advocating for a hypothetical person that doesn't exist yet, a corpse is what remains of someone who did and had a material impact on the world. the dead aren't due any more dignity or respect than the living, but they also aren't due any less for the same reasons, and how much someone values the lives of others among them inevitably reflects how they treat their dead.
perhaps it'd clarify my position to say that, yes, a corpse is an object and an empty space which cannot feel or react, but a body is how we connect and interact with each other and the world, and a corpse is also, unavoidably, a body, however vacant, and you cannot treat a body as you would an object if you want to claim to uphold human rights, because that's a dangerous road with a steep drop
death doesn't deliver you from judgement by the people whose lives you've touched - it'll be a cold and empty day in hell before i tell anyone to stop laughing about what happened to charlie kirk, for instance, or call it in poor taste to express your desire to piss on the grave of a politician whose career was defined by cruelty and dehumanisation for personal gain - but your body is as much a body as any other. and nobody is entitled to anyone else's body.
What is up with lefty types pushing to learn practical skills (sewing/gardening/etc whatever) as like "you'll need to know this after The Revolution:tm:" and not, like, "this is a useful skill to help yourself & others in your communities Right Now". You all sound like doomsday preppers and it's weirding me out. We don't have to prep for communist rapture maybe thee revolution starts with helping your neighbors
WAIT HOLD ON I cannot fucking believe when I was like four years old my parents were cajoling me to walk with the family and trying to get me to keep up even though I kept insisting that I was "tired" until they took me to a doctor and found out my LUNGS DIDN'T WORK. how insane that we live in a world where reasonably loving parents think their FOUR YEAR OLD is trying to be LAZY. like they were mortified to be clear. adults are just so trained to ignore children's complaints as untrustworthy, kids just need discipline, they can't possibly speak for themselves. what the fuuuuck.
YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE BTW you should always be trying to take children seriously, especially very little ones but definitely all of them. the most disempowered class basically legally defined as property and most people are like "yeah that's good actually I hate when they Loiter lol they're stupid and loud and i actually think children should stop existing. restrict their personhood more actually"
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