Reading & Higher Education: Educational Culture and Smart Phones Discourage Attentive Reading

The Atlantic’s November cover story, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” is a chronicle of generational wreckage: “Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books,” Rose Horowitch reports. She means whole books, cover to cover. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.”

Expectations that were once routine — that students could competently and sympathetically read and discuss whole volumes, from Pride and Prejudice to Crime and Punishment — are now unsustainable. Many students no longer command the powers of concentration, or possess the linguistic skills, to engage the standard texts. Professors, yielding to the situation, are shrinking and cutting assignments.

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Ian Tuttle

Ian Tuttle is a research fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative.

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The Atlantic’s November cover story, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” is a chronicle of generational wreckage: “Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books,” Rose Horowitch reports. She means whole books, cover to cover. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.”

Expectations that were once routine — that students could competently and sympathetically read and discuss whole volumes, from Pride and Prejudice to Crime and Punishment — are now unsustainable. Many students no longer command the powers of concentration, or possess the linguistic skills, to engage the standard texts. Professors, yielding to the situation, are shrinking and cutting assignments.