The elite college students who can’t read books

When I was a student (which wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things), at the beginning of each year I would have to buy a stack of eight-or-so novels that we would be expected to read for that year. The novels were to be read almost entirely outside of class, with class time being dedicated to activities/discussions/writing about them.

I can't tell you a lot about my specific English classes as the details of them are lost to time, but I can still remember a lot of those novels that I had to read.

In my school now, as a teacher, our curriculum has students reading only two full novels each year. These novels are read entirely inside the classroom.

The "why?" of this change is hard to pin down. I don't think it's one thing. I think it's a constellation of many things:

Editor's note (it's me, I'm the editor): after writing all of these I'm going to number them to help with organization and readability since there's a lot here, but please don't look at this list as hierarchical or prescriptive.

One: The most obvious is that reading is competing with screens and videogames and social media for kids' attention. We read the novels in-class because we can control the environment for the students and create one that is conducive to reading. We know that, for most students, that simply won't happen outside of school. Even if a student sits down in a quiet space to read a book, it's essentially a given that they will be interrupted by notifications on their phone. If a parent takes the phone away to get the student to focus, it's almost a given that the student will be anxiously thinking about what they're missing on their phone right now, rather than focusing on the text they're supposed to be reading.

Two: Another reason is brought up in the article. New standards, and the standardized testing that goes along with them, emphasize informational texts, as well as looking at multiple texts and synthesizing information from them. These are good in theory, but in order to fit those skills in (along with many others), you can't spend all of your time reading full novels.

Three: Furthermore, reading is an "invisible" activity. It happens entirely inside the child's head. This doesn't jive well with testing and accountability culture, which like things to be measureable. As such, you get more bang for your buck in doing measureable activities than you do in doing just letting students do plain old reading, even though doing just plain old reading is the exact skill we want them to have and the best way to build that skill in them.

Four: Additionally, the educational culture has shifted from something that students are responsible for to something that teachers are responsible for providing. When I was in school, I was expected to read multiple novels outside of school, and if I didn't, that was considered my fault. Now, teachers have to create the conditions under which kids read, because if we don't, that's our fault. The expectation that students read outside of school is unenforceable and is seen as an overreach on our part rather than a necessary part of the child's education.

Four-point-one/Five: Even asking parents to buy books, as my parents were expected to do when I was a student, is completely out of vogue. Now, schools should be the ones to provide the books, and we of course don't have the money to drop on large class sets of modern novels, nor the continued funding to do the sort of upkeep to keep those titles current.

Six: Another big part is an arrested development from the learning-to-read to reading-to-learn stage. The standard path for a student is that they develop reading skills and gain automaticity, such that they no longer have to expend metacognitive effort on what they're reading. This allows them to shift into the "reading to learn" phase because they can grapple with complex texts and new vocabulary. Students who never make it out of the "learning to read" phase, however, find reading unnecessarily laborious and challenging. Their reading is not automatic, and their comprehension suffers greatly because of that.

Seven: A big part of this has been a failure to apply sound practices to teaching reading. I highly recommend the podcast Sold a Story as a primer. My district is one of the districts that used one of the programs mentioned in the podcast which encouraged students not to sound out words according to phonics rules but literally guess at words based on their understanding of the passage (called "cueing"). I understand how absurd this sounds, but I promise you this isn't a fringe practice and was (probably still is) widely practiced in American education.

Eight: The above dovetails with another issue: the broad painting of American education as consistently failing. NCLB and standardized testing ushered in the idea that education was terrible in this country and we needed the strong stick of accountability to whip us into shape. In practice, what ended up happening is that harsh measures were applied to failing schools, and companies sold "solutions" that schools were encouraged to buy to get themselves back in good graces. At best these were well-intentioned, and at worst they were predatory. The lack of accountability applied to them, however, makes it hard to tell the difference.

Eight-point-one: The reading program I mentioned above was considered a best-in-class curriculum that made its publishers millions (possibly billions) of dollars. New York City alone paid tens of millions of dollars for it. Did New York get its money back after the reading program failed to work? Of course not. Did those schools get punished for their reading scores, however? Of course.

Eight-point-two: Ignoring the scores though and zooming in on the real issue: those kids were not properly taught to read. They got stuck in the learning-to-read phase and thus never reached the reading-to-learn phase, much less the reading-for-fun phase. When this happens, students get into a conflicted state where they eventually age out of the books they can read (which are meant for younger audiences) and they're unable to comfortably read the books that would interest them (stuff for young adults and teens). We have specific books called "hi-los" (as in "high-lows") which are high-interest but low-reading-level books for older readers -- they have topics a high school student might be interested in, but they're written at a much lower level. These are useful, but they're also a crutch.

Nine: Speaking of crutches, we also see them with the proliferation of graphic novels and audiobooks. Don't get me wrong, I love both of those, and I think they're valuable and worthwhile and love that kids have access to them, but students tend to use them in place of reading rather than as a way of developing reading. They'll listen to an audiobook because it's easier than reading, but then their brain isn't practicing their reading skills so they don't develop them. They'll use a graphic novel because it has pictures, but then their brain isn't practicing its visualization skills, so those atrophy. They can "stall out" as readers on these media and never really move past them. It's less popular now, but a few years ago we regularly talked about the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid rut" that students would get in and refuse to leave. We had late high school students wanting to read those books, despite them being meant for kids half their age.

Ten: We can also add in the cultural climate to all of this. Reading books, and particularly teaching books, has never been as controversial in my lifetime as it is right now. For any book we do teach, we have to weigh its potential blowback. Excerpts are a lot easier to vet and a lot less controversial, because even if they come from a controversial book overall, a small snippet is less likely to offend. Of course, that's not always the case: a teacher at my school got lit up by a parent one time because he assigned a David Sedaris essay in which Sedaris casually made an off-hand mention of a boyfriend.

Eleven: We can also toss in a dash of social promotion and grade inflation. Because of the aformentioned shift in education that made schools responsible for providing it rather than students responsible for engaging with it, students now can't really fail or be held back. Refuse to do your work? You still pass. Refuse to read? You're going on to the next grade anyway. There are some merits to this process, but in the schools I've worked in, it's been policy to an outright fault. It ends up pushing students whose skills haven't developed into settings in which they literally cannot meet the curricular demands they're supposed to. It doesn't surprise me that many of the students in college can't/won't read long texts, because for the many preceding years of their educational careers, they probably learned that even if they couldn't/wouldn't do an assignment, there wasn't any actual penalty or blowback from that.

Twelve: Finally, I think there's a big elephant in the room with regards to adult reading. We can wring our hands about kids not reading, but how many adults don't read either? Are their parents reading? Do you regularly read? What about your peers and co-workers? (I mean this as a general "you" to all readers -- not you specifically, chocobean!) I feel like reading is becoming a lost art in general, and kids now are growing up underneath an adult canopy that also seems to be losing a love of reading. Whether that's because we're too busy, too tired, too distracted or whatnot really doesn't matter, because kids look to us as role models and emulate what they see. If the adults in their life don't seem to prioritize, enjoy, or engage in reading, what's the implicit lesson that kids are learning about reading?

Twelve-point-one: I feel this in myself. I used to be an avid reader, but now I genuinely have to force myself to do it. I still enjoy it, but it feels much more like an "eat your veggies because they're good for you" obligation rather than a "eat delicious food because it's a joy" treat. I struggle with keeping my attention focused and finding the time. And if it's that hard for me -- someone who's on the reading frontline with kids on a daily basis -- then there's almost certainly something bigger at play here.

In summary, I don't think there's a single "smoking gun" we can point to for why reading is the way that it is right now. I think trying to pin it on one thing oversimplifies a very complex issue. There's not a "north star" we can look to here. Instead we can simply gaze up at all of the different parts of the constellation, and even then I'm not sure we have the whole picture.