Post Detail

Elite colleges shocked to discover students 'don't know how' to read books: 'My jaw dropped'

Columbia University humanities professor Nicholas Dames described feeling "bewildered" when a first-year student told him that she had never been required to read a full book at her public high school.

"My jaw dropped," Dames said.

Schools have reportedly been scaling back their curriculum.  (iStock )

Some professors do find a few students up to the task but described them as "now more exceptions" rather than the rule, with others "shutting down" when facing difficult texts.

"Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet," Horowitch wrote.

"It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading," she said. "It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to."

"Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen," Horowitch wrote.

Some schools previously expanded their reading list to include non-White authors. (Fox News | Respective authors)

In response, colleges have been reducing their reading load, albeit with some additions for diversity.

"The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by non-White authors were added.)," Horowitch wrote.

Psychologists told her they suspected the abundance of social media apps like TikTok and YouTube have overtaken recreational reading.

"It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention," Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, said. "Being bored has become unnatural." 

Another reason, Horowitch suggested, was the state of the economy with students more concerned over jobs rather than reading for fun.

"Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past," she wrote.

The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch reported how overall college students are reading less. (iStock)

"A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics," UC Berkeley English professor Victoria Kahn said. "Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies."