"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 āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 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 āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
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 assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā 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 Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā 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 Japanās 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 ākept losing trackā 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 āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā 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 āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā 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 ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās 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 studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā 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 Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā 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 āfinding the main ideaā 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 āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā 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 ādeep workā 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 sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā 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.
Iām afraid I donāt 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? Kā12 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 āstudents will adapt.ā 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 studentsā sentences before theyāve 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."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
if by "exact match" you mean "100% of the letters in this post match 100% of an organism's entire genome," then the chances of that happening by pure accident are so ridiculously small, you'd have better odds buying 100 lottery tickets and winning all of them!
one of the cool reasons this blog works in any capacity is because genomes are so ridiculously big that the chances of a random string of letters accidentally matching part of one is very high. the human genome is ~3,200,000,000 base pairs (or "letters") long. that's about 1,000 times the length of the entire bible. pretty long for a tumblr post!
but even in the case of the smallest possible genomes, such as bacterial endosymbionts (famous for having tiny genomes) with only 100,000 base pairs, it'd still be practically impossible. you'd need to accidentally type the letters a, t, c, and g in the correct sequence 100,000 times to get a perfect match. imagine flipping 100,000 coins and getting heads on all of them. ok now imagine a cat named big boobs
they need to come up with more words like necrosis and miasma and mausoleum and cadaver and morose and decrepit and stuff like that just so metal bands can expand their vocabulary
My most diagnosable take is that honestly. As much as people in social justicey spaces talk about exercising your empathy ... there's also value in being able to turn it off so you're not extremely susceptible to emotional manipulation. Sometimes you have to be able to recognize "oh, this is bullshit propaganda trying to tug at my heartstrings" and stop giving a fuck about like. Colonizer feelings or whatever. Vibes can't override your principles
Like idk being niceys is a good start but your politics can't begin and end with š kindness š or you're gonna get taken advantage of. The worst people on earth will be like "but what if........ I have a sob story about it š„ŗ" & you Need to be able to tell them to Fuck Completely Off
There's a certain strain of ... Everyone Is Valid šø style pseudo leftism that ime invariably caters to whoever throws the biggest tantrum. And this is a Problem interpersonally & it's especially bad if you let these people dictate your opinions. Not everyone is valid some of you are racist
Erid is a very big planet, very very very big planet, twice the size of earth in fact- and divided by oceans, perfect conditions for populations to remain and develop separately and for long enough to create diferent species. So, unlike us, Eridians are a Polytypic genus: there's more than one species of sapient eridian, All of them sharing a common ancestor in the form of a small, 5 legged ambush-hunter land carnivore, all share common traits taking only slightly different evolutionary paths
Divers- get their name from living in semi-flooded caves, their high small vents allow them to be partially submerged without drowning and their long arms allow them to grip things easily underwater, similar to a sea-horse tail
Climbers- similarly, they get their name from their living enviroment, living in very high caves, their long thin arms allow them to grip and climb very steep rock walls, kinda like goats in a way
Drills and Stompers get their name from the shape of their arms, they both developed closer to the surface compared to the others, their arms are like that for dealing with sandstorms, while Drills "drill" themselfs in place, Stompers use their body weight to keep themselfs down
Blocks are very similar to Stompers, but they live in caves much deeper down, so they're quite compact
Common traits between all species: all Eridians can thrum, all Eridians organize in "colonies" like ants or termites (tho the specifics of how each colony works varies), all Eridians are True Carnivores(can only eat meat) and all Eridians are unisex
In theory any one eridian can procreate with any other eridian, between the 5 species there are 4 fertile hybrids and 3 infertile hybrids posible
note: tho each species has a more broad vague shared culture between themselves, none of them are a monolith, all of them have vastly different culture, language, texture, practices and even phenotypes between different colonies around the world
note 2: the fact humans are a monotypic species (there is only one in our genus) is really fucking weird to them
do u ever think about corn sweat; and the fact that a large percent of corn grown in Illinois, iowa, etc is grown for ethanol and biofuel; and how solar power would be so many times more effective per acre than this; and how like 90+% of so many rare ecosystems in those states was drained for farm and suburbs (in many cases previously farms).
Friendly reminder this Moon Landing Day that this website exists, where you can drop yourself at any point in the mission where the crew are awake and they'll probably be bantering with Houston.
A real-time interactive journey through the first landing on the Moon. Relive every moment as it occurred in 1969.
I'm actually scheduling this for a week early - the site lets you watch the whole mission if you want to, and the shuttle took off 5 days before they got to the moon!
romaincrisis
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jacobvanloon
