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I recognize I usually start with some kind of funny story or joke, but this is definitely not one. It's a simple question: Has any policy ever looked more politically dunderheaded in immediate hindsight than the Democratic Party's obsession with student loan forgiveness? With attempting to bestow a half-trillion-dollar benefit on people who attended – and often graduated from – college when a majority of Americans – and an overwhelming majority of voters who needed to be convinced that Democrats aren’t a bunch of elitist twits – did not? And without any track record on – or substantive new proposals for – alternatives to college like apprenticeships?
But I've talked about all this for years and don't want to dwell on the election. I want to talk about something I saw on a recent cross-country flight: a passenger across the aisle staring at the flight map for what seemed like the entire duration – no movie, phone, music, rest, snacks, or bathroom. I subsequently learned this wasn’t simply inertia or lack of imagination. It’s a new phenomenon called “rawdogging” where travelers – mostly young men – test their stamina for… nothing, then brag about it: “Just rawdogged a 7-hour flight (new personal best) no headphones, no movie, no water, nothing, The power of my mind knows no bounds.”
Aside from creating media opportunities for mindfulness coaches to comment and alarming New York Post headlines ( “Rawdogging a flight could kill you”), rawdogging seems to have attracted attention because it’s the polar opposite of how we live. Even in the few seconds on an elevator or in line to pay, we instinctively reach for our phones. But if the point is digital detox, those of us in the world of education must also wonder why anyone would rather do zilch than read a book.
I don’t mean this as a “get off my lawn” kind of thing, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a young man reading a book on a plane. One possibility is they can’t. Only 30% of eighth graders are capable of reading independently at grade level. The percentage of 13-year-olds who report reading for fun “almost every day” is only 14%, cut in half in a decade. And in 2022, only 11% of high school seniors said they read at least six books for fun in the past year. While pandemic school closures gave rise to falling literacy rates, the central culprit is decades of reading curricula that disregarded foundational reading skills.
This also isn’t a “Make Education Great Again” kind of thing, hearkening back to a mythical past when students did all their reading. They never have. A generation ago, one study reported only 20% of college students regularly completed assigned reading. And as Rose Horowitch noted in The Atlantic, twenty years before that, a literature professor wrote that every generation “discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.”
But since, presumably, most young adults flying coast-to-coast fall into the minority with requisite technical skills, something else is at play. In recent months, we’ve seen articles in Slate, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Atlantic full of faculty anecdotes about how students no longer know how to read books. Incoming college students are less likely to identify works of literature as favorite books, instead referencing young adult books like the Percy Jackson series. And when reading is assigned – even at highly selective institutions – the results are increasingly disappointing. One Columbia professor’s students “seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.” They tell him at the start of the course that “the reading load feels impossible.” Within this marsh of reading mopishness, the one story where a professor doesn’t have difficulty getting students to read assigned books involves a course on failure where the learning objective is to face problems rather than avoid them.
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The elephant in the (reading) room, of course, is social media. Although social media may not be harming mental health, it is having an awful impact on attention span. TikTok and YouTube train our kids’ brains to expect positive stimulus + resulting dopamine hit within seconds. Once they get it – or determine it’s not forthcoming – they scroll to the next algorithmically-served-up video. And when they’re handed a book, kids who spend hours scrolling TikTok every day are more distracted than kids who don’t. Sadly, there are few abstainers; teens now spend about five hours each day on social media. And it goes without saying that one reason for rawdogging is to report it on social media – one more thing for young male followers to watch instead of read.
In sum, children’s current level of exposure to algorithmic content is not a recipe for producing a generation of readers. They’ve become accustomed to seeking rewards they simply won’t get from the next paragraph (let alone this humdrum one).
It’s not only kids. Distracted parents are bad role models because we’re reading less as well. That may not be catastrophic for adults. As Adam Kotsko, a professor at Chicago’s Shimer College, noted in Slate:
I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing.
With their phones and TikTok accounts, our children are growing up in a “distractogenic” environment, meaning extremely conducive to distraction and short attention spans. Because we’re almost as unlikely to successfully change the digital environment as our biology, the only lever within our reach is behavior. But that’s far from a lost cause. Just as athletes train to achieve superior performance – for some, without regard to their environment or even biology – it’s within every child’s reach to build a sufficient (or even superior) attention span. They just need enough training and practice.
Unfortunately, American education hasn’t adapted. In fact, it’s doing the opposite. Evidence is mounting that fewer whole books are being assigned in middle and high school, and the books that are assigned tend to be shorter. For example, the English teacher at Connecticut’s South Windsor High School who no longer assigns all of To Kill a Mockingbird, but rather asks students to read a synopsis and a third of the book. Or the Columbia student cited by Horowitch who’d never been required to read an entire book in high school.
One cause of our book drought is President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind K-12 reform which prioritized standardized tests where students need to read short passages and answer questions to demonstrate comprehension. So schools subsequently shifted to same-style assignments. And as one teacher told Horowitch, “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?”
Ironically, the latest twist of the knife comes from the political left and perceived new curricular priorities. Adding media literacy to English, for example, has led to assigning various shorter texts. And each assignment of a passage or article means fewer books, like the Illinois high school teacher who themed her English course around decision making and, instead of having students read The Odyssey, assigned excerpts along with articles, music, and other media.
This push for media literacy and the need to “explore representation and power through critical reading, listening and viewing” and provide texts and learning activities in English classrooms that are more “culturally responsive… [in order to] reduce prejudice through developing critical questioning and cultural competence” led to a 2022 statement from the National Council of Teachers of English arguing for “the need to move beyond the exclusive focus on traditional reading and writing competencies” and concluding that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”
Initiatives on the right and left have combined to leave high school graduates less prepared to read books. So how have colleges responded? Rather than redoubling efforts to build missing reading muscles, colleges are assigning fewer books. Horowitch reports on the Berkeley course where The Iliad has been replaced by chapters and the Columbia Melville course that has abandoned Moby Dick in favor of shorter works.
Colleges and universities already recognize that students with digitally-determined attention spans can’t handle entire books. But instead of meeting the problem head on, they’re attempting to meet students where they are. As a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology told The Chronicle of Higher Education, she’s always attempted to meet her students “where they are,” but if she goes any further “she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.” It’s nothing less than an abdication of responsibility. As Kotsko wrote in Slate, young Americans aren’t simply “choosing TikTok over Jane Austen. They are being deprived of the ability to choose.”
Admittedly, data on book assignments remains anecdotal. But one reason it rings true – and why hard evidence is likely to emerge – is that it’s highly consistent with the post-Covid approach to completing and grading assignments. Schools are increasingly reluctant to set and/or enforce deadlines. What’s more, many are adopting equitable grading practices with minimum grades set at 50% instead of zero.
Meeting kids where they are isn’t doing them any favors. Just as working professionals need to be able to read without getting distracted, they also need to meet deadlines. And as far as I know, there are no minimum grades in the world of work.
Teachers should be teaching students to respect and meet deadlines. And if they’re not going to address our social-media-induced reading crisis by assigning more books to build attention-span muscles, the least they can do is to stop posting TikTok videos about how students can’t read. That’s adding insult to injury.
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I don’t buy that it could be a good thing that we’re entering into what some experts are calling a “ hybrid oral-written culture.” Beyond attention span, there are more than a few casualties when we lose the ability to read books. For example, seeing the world from other perspectives i.e., empathy. Or evaluating (or even valuing) expertise. Or assessing character, particularly characters who may be more or less than they appear. Or the ability to follow a plot more complex than a WWE match, reality show, or infomercial.
But instead of the above – which tend to be useful in making important decisions – we’re scrolling and flipping, distracted like an electorate rejecting an unpopular incumbent out of hand, where rawdogging young men appear to have played an outsized role. Putting aside its Ahab-like fixation on the great white whale of student loan forgiveness, by “decentering” book reading in the age of social media – by assenting to turn the page on books – what was once the party of the working class somehow lost the plot. But like I said, I don’t want to talk about the election.