Kids aren’t reading books anymore. This is bad news for students — and for the country

Kids aren’t reading anymore. That’s the conclusion of a recent article by The Associated Press noting that children are not only reading less for fun — only 14% say they do so daily compared to 27% in 2012 — but they are also not getting assigned actual books much in class either.
Per the AP, “In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world.” (The idea that students who don’t read entire books perform better on standardized tests is complete nonsense, as evidenced by the astronomical test scores of schools like Success Academies.)
Teachers are not just reacting to the problem. They are also causing it. In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English issued a statement saying: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”
This trend has created problems in higher education as well, where students are now less prepared to read even a few pages for their classes. Professors are trying to adapt there too, giving shorter assignments. But how much lower can our expectations get? Not only is reading short passages of novels significantly less interesting than reading the whole thing, but there are skills that one gets from reading something longer that many young people seem to be missing.
On a recent podcast, Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Beth McMurtrie noted, “A lot of the faculty members I’ve talked to frequently say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to these students once they enter the working world.’”
She notes, “We’re not talking about, wow, they didn’t read ‘Moby-Dick.’ We’re talking about these fundamental critical reading and writing skills that students are really struggling to master, and maybe even don’t necessarily see the point of mastering through very little fault of their own.”
But even before they get to the working world, there are ways that this inability to read is exacerbating the terrible atmosphere on campus these days. Many adults have bemoaned the lack of civil discourse in higher education. Protests, boycotts, violence and vandalism seem to have replaced reasoned debate about the most important issues of the day.
One reason this happens is because students are rarely presented with nuanced arguments and when they are, they have trouble understanding them. If you’re getting your understanding of the world from TikTok, it’s going to be pretty shallow. But if no one has actually asked students to read a whole book or even a chapter of a book about the conflict in the Middle East or the history of the Civil Rights Movement or the isolationist strain in American politics, it’s hard to blame them for speaking in slogans.
It’s hard to know how to stop this cycle of ignorance followed by lowering expectations followed by ignorance and lowering expectations even more. Individual professors might have the courage to take a stand. But maybe students could demand better.
Earlier this month, Princeton professor Robert P. George offered advice to conservatives on campus: “Don’t hide and don’t be silent. Exercise and, if necessary, defend your right to think for yourself and to dissent from campus orthodoxies.” All good advice, as well as his encouragement to steer clear of thinking of yourself as a victim — college students, he rightly notes, are among the most privileged people on the planet.
But what these students really need — and not just conservatives but all students — is to spend a lot of time reading. They need to read their own side, the other side, the history of both sides. They need to read things that are not political, and things that are, so they can understand more of the world, in all of its subtleties. It would be nice if more professors assigned them these texts, but students should seek out faculty who do.
It is easy to imagine in these times that winning is everything — on the right and the left, the language used about the other side is apocalyptic. It gives people a sense that the time spent reading a long book, or several, is time wasted, time that could be spent in battle. But you don’t need to go to college to do battle. And you’ve been cheated out of a real education if that’s how you spend your years on campus.
Getting back to reading will not be easy for students who have been accustomed to learning from YouTube and Instagram. But decentering books has been a disaster for our colleges and our country.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Deseret News contributor and the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” among other books.