This is one of the more depressing articles I’ve read lately. And yet nothing in it is a real surprise. The trends have been going on for many decades, and although the piece emphasizes the pernicious influence of cellphones and AI, it started long before those things were commonly available.
For example, during the 1980s my then-husband was a college professor at a fairly decent state university. He would periodically assign short essays on exams, and noted to me how many of the students could not write at all coherently. It’s not just that they weren’t reading the material, although that was often the case as well. But they didn’t seem to know anything about sentence structure, punctuation, or even logical thought.
It was profoundly disturbing. At the time, my husband and I weren’t all that far removed from being students ourselves. And yet as students we’d not seen anything like what he was seeing just a few short years later. Granted, we hadn’t been teachers or engaged in grading papers while we were students (he was a teaching assistant as a grad student, but had only graded objective exams). But still, it was a shock to see work from university students that would have gotten a poor grade from my 5th grade teacher in a New York public school.
This is what it’s come down to these days:
I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top. …
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” …
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish.
Has reading an entire book ever even been asked of them? We read Dostoevsky and Melville in my high school, but then again I was in an honors class. I get the impression that, somewhere long the line, such classes were banned in many schools as elitist and discriminatory.
More:
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.
Even I, once a voracious book reader, find that I no longer have the patience for an entire book except for a few exceptions. I am indeed more impatient than I used to be; much more. Is due to my age? Is it due to my getting used to the shorter offerings online? Then again, I preferred short stories to novels even in pre-internet days, although I made an exception for a few novels such as Crime and Punishment, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Moby Dick. But in high school I could barely slog through The Scarlet Letter for example, although it was useful for vocabulary expansion (Hawthorne used a lot of words I found obscure at the time, despite the fact that I already had a good vocabulary).
And if we couldn’t or wouldn’t write coherently about those books we weren’t going to pass those courses. And this was in a NYC high school that catered mainly to working-class students in a non-affluent area – although, as I said, I was in the honors classes. I very much doubt the “regular” English classes had a similar reading list.
But more about today’s students:
They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok. …
Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
That last paragraph represents something with a long history – something I believe Holden Caulfield referred to as “slinging the old bull” (Kamala Harris was a master at the practice, too). But Holden never had access to AI:
I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.
When the author gets around to trying to explain some of this, he lists the following, among other things:
Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. …
Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. …
They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones.
I must admit something, which is that I have a fair amount of identification with those students. I was an excellent student with fabulous grades. However, I almost always experienced school as a hateful and intensely boring experience. The times I had an interesting teacher were few and far between, and I can count about only about six or seven teachers and/or professors in my entire career that I would describe that way. I also have little patience for auditory learning, and lectures were a big snooze and made me physically restless, although I had no cellphone or other distractions and did not suffer from ADD. What I remember of school, almost from the start, is the nearly-painful experience of intense boredom and restlessness.
In college, because we were allowed to smoke in class (!), I sat way in the back in large lecture halls and chain-smoked, trying to blow the perfect smoke ring in order to amuse myself (and no, I never inhaled; couldn’t stand it). I also created elaborate doodles, took desultory notes, and often cut classes and/or “disappeared” for most of the term, only to re-surface for the exam. Nevertheless, I was big reader – and certainly read the assigned novels, although not always the other texts except for skimming. Nevertheless, for the most part I did very well in school.
Am I proud of my relative non-participation? No, most definitely not. I wish I had been more engaged; I think I could have gotten a great deal more out of my education if I had been. But I was always interested in learning itself, and did quite a bit of it outside class. But my experience means that I can identify with what is being described in terms of the behavior of today’s students. I’m very glad there was no internet and no social media when I was growing up; both probably would have had a bad effect on me. I’m also glad that my son was in grad school before cellphones started to become ubiquitous.
I worry about my grandchildren, of course. They are very young now and don’t even have cellphones. But at some point those things will intrude, and I just have to hope that they will grow up with good values and strong abilities despite the temptations.