Kids Today Can't Read - Even College Kids

The bite-sizing of books

I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that… I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

-Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of cryptocurrency company FTX

In “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted,” professor Adam Kotsko writes a firsthand account of the loss of literacy taking place in college classrooms:

I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting… Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

Kotsko adds that this is not unique to his campus - every professor is talking about the illiteracy of Gen Z and complaining of “what has been taken” from kids by smartphones. Reading, he posits, is based on concentration and attention. Engaging with literature is a skillset of “extended concentration” to develop and practice. A story necessarily requires us to deftly remember what happened in the beginning, middle, and end - the whole time! - to get the point of it.

Kids today can’t read, Kotsko explains, because they can’t concentrate.

For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

A generation who spends nine hours a day on their phones has no time for books. Who would, with such a demanding schedule of swiping?

Source: WordsRated

If Gen Z is already down to less than four books a year on average, it shouldn’t take more than five to ten more years for the average to go down to one book or less. Keep in mind this is the average number of books - more than 50% of trend-setting Americans are already not reading even one book a year.

This gives us two potential futures: a renaissance of literature or an extinction of it. Ask a writer or a regular reader and you’ll likely get reassurances that books will never go away. If that’s the case, show them the above chart, erase the labels, and ask them if this industry has a future based on this generational trend. In a worst case scenario, books will follow the pity market of poetry and short stories. More likely, they’ll become a specialty market like vinyl - something for obsessives.

If an anecdote is to be believed, the education system appears to be adapting to this refusal to read by giving up. Educators aren’t helping students rediscover the “more subtle pleasure of the pages.” They’re settling for the pleasure of a paragraph. One English teacher with thirty years of experience said that the number of novels taught in the classroom has gone from six to zero over the past few years.

In Litverse’s meditation on the death of the English major, we cited Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, who presents a similar hypothesis:

Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot… The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb… Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.

It might first seem strange that, in a culture that has replaced voices with text messages, we have no desire to read anything longer than a blog post. Literature has become bite-sized, but it’s not because we don’t like reading - it’s because the delivery of the lessons in books are inefficient in a holy hustle culture and, worse yet, can only be discovered alone in silence. Literature is quite possibly the last individual experience left. And if we can’t share it, did it even happen? Why must we keep moving so quickly? And will we ever have time to pick up a book again?

No.

I started Litverse for three reasons:

• to make up literary theories for fun about books, music, and culture

• to gamify reading with cool quotes

• to clickbait parts of books no one is going to read in the future

Think of it as a “digital remastering” of literature for a busy nation.

What if literature itself got digitally remastered, too?

Next week, we’ll tell a story about the merchandising of that meaning. And Litverse will introduce a new way to merchandise that meaning.