SURRENDERING WITH A SHRUG.

An Inside Higher Ed column asks, "How Much Do Students Really Read?"  As one might expect of a site that is fine with lowering standards, the answer is, "Not Much, Not That There's Anything Wrong With That."  No, seriously.

Ava Wherley likes to read—especially thrillers. She rarely reads nonfiction, but when she does, she prefers suspenseful tales of true crime.

Reading for school is another matter. Wherley, a sophomore biology major at the University of Florida, is assigned about 100 pages of reading a week for three classes—most of which she skips in favor of gleaning the information from YouTube videos.

“I’m someone that learns really well from videos and things being visually explained to me, which is something the textbook isn’t usually really good at,” she said, adding that academic texts tend to use overly complex language, which makes them harder to read.

It's possible that nobody taught her the art of close reading, or of having pencil and paper nearby to make marginal notes and jot down questions to bring up in class.  That requires the middle- and high-school teachers to be the demanding Mrs Stonebreaker rather than the friendly Miss Othmar.

Nowadays, many students rarely read full-length novels, reports AP's Sharon Lurye. Teachers assign excerpts, "a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world."

In a 2022 statement, the National Council of Teachers of English declared: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Instead, teachers are urged to focus on "media literacy" and short texts that students feel are "relevant."

Deep reading builds "critical thinking skills, background knowledge and, most of all, empathy," said UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf told Lurye. “We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are, not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others,” Wolf said.

"Only 14% of young teens say they read for fun daily, compared with 27% in 2012," according to federal data, Lurye reports. So, if students aren't asked to read books for school, most will not read at all.

Future social scientists might be able to trace some of the increasing gap between high earners and low earners precisely to that "decentering" of reading and writing in favor of the fun stuff.  Look, I was as guilty as anyone of being less than impressed with some of the stuff assigned in junior high and high school.  Some of it I went back to later and enjoyed it more; some of it was no less soporific than I found it at the time.

Moreover, that decentering enables either solipsism, reading only the stuff that reinforces your (adolescent) sense of the world, or laziness.

Some students can't read well enough to tackle books that used to be standard fare in middle and high school.

The few books that are assigned tend to be chosen to appeal to reluctant readers, writes Doug Lemov in Education Next. "They are less and less likely to be challenging or chosen for their literary merit."

Instruction focuses on teaching skills, he writes. Teachers give students a short passage that highlights the skill of the day. "Why have a student flip through a novel looking for a section that allows you to discuss supporting details when the teacher can present a passage that guarantees it?"

Letting every student choose their own book is a mistake, Lemov argues.Students don't know what books are out there. In addition, it denies them the chance to share the book with others. "In discussion with others, students hear and wrestle with different interpretations and reactions, and they grow intellectually. They also grow emotionally, because by reading together, they are connected by a common experience."

That's fine for programming morons, but the common schools will send Distressed Material incapable of handling the backstop technology on to college, and then the professors have to do the repair work.

Researchers have long observed that a small—and declining—number of students actually complete their assigned readings; a study of reading quizzes taken in a psychology class between 1981 and 1997 showed a decreasing number of students doing so even then. More recently, in a 2021 study of hospitality students, over 70 percent said they don’t read the texts their professors assign.

Few professors would argue with that data. Faculty frequently note how much less willing their Gen Z students are to read for class than earlier generations; in a discussion on X over the summer, faculty complained that students seem unequipped to read even 100 pages per week per class—which used to be the norm in many disciplines, especially the humanities.“Reading deeply and widely for many hours a day is the only way to become educated in an academic field. There are no shortcuts to this. If our students cannot read more than 100 pages per day or focus for more than 20 minutes at a time, they are never going to be educated,” wrote one X user, who self-identified as a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.

But explanations vary as to why students read less. And some academics argue that whatever the reason, the decline in reading is not worth the hand-wringing and despair it often provokes.

Everyone—especially Gen Zers, who were raised with constant access to social media—has a shorter attention span than they did before the internet. In addition, some endured ineffective reading instruction techniques or attended K-12 schools that de-emphasized reading full novels in favor of short excerpts like those that appear on standardized tests. Perhaps most significantly, many of today’s college students spent their pivotal school years learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, which stifled academic growth. A large number of students also hold jobs and participate in extracurricular activities while in college, reducing their bandwidth to do excessive amounts of homework.

Sure, let's decenter reading, let's grant the whingeing about "excessive" homework, let's pander and enable.

English departments in universities have long been destroying their discipline, and now, notes Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Greene, the rot has dripped down to the high schools.  "Longer attention spans are made, not born — and English teachers are supposed to help make them. Instead, they’re making excuses."