My Students Can't Read
College instructors report that many students now struggle to read and retain even short academic texts, despite being verbally articulate and formally qualified for higher education. Commenters link this decline in deep reading and attention to smartphone use, standardized-test-driven schooling, and credential inflation that pushes underprepared students through the system. Proposed responses range from stricter standards, remediation, and curriculum reform to broader structural changes in how society values and delivers education, with sharp disagreement over whether this represents cognitive decline or adaptation to a new information environment.
Access and meta-comments
- Many note the article is behind a paywall; archive links are shared, with some jokes about not being able to “read” it.
- Several point out the irony of a literacy article being hard to access.
Can’t read vs. won’t read
- Some argue many students technically can read but won’t engage with 20-page texts in a distraction-heavy world.
- Others stress a real skills deficit: community college instructors report students who can only read/write a few sentences per minute.
- There’s debate over whether the complaint is about capability, motivation, or respect for readers’ time (overlong, meandering articles).
Smartphones, attention, and cognition
- Strong view: phones, social media, and endless-scroll apps are degrading attention and “working memory,” making sustained reading hard.
- Mitigation strategies mentioned: turning off notifications, deliberately reading books, doing focused projects.
- A minority view sees this as cultural adaptation to information overload rather than cognitive decline.
Education standards, grade inflation, and credentials
- Many see high school diplomas and even college degrees as devalued by social promotion and grade inflation.
- Claims that 90%+ of undergrads and many grad students are there just for credentials; Socratic or rigorous work is rare.
- Others push back that such extreme cutoffs would effectively restrict higher ed to a tiny IQ elite.
- College is framed as “13th grade” or replacement for a meaningful high school education; student debt amplifies the problem.
What to do with weaker students
- One camp: failing ~35% and restoring rigor is necessary, even if it means more people tracked into unskilled work or apprenticeships.
- Counter: you must grapple with where these people go; mass failure has social and legal (disparate impact) implications.
- Some emphasize better stratification, remediation, and apprenticeships; others see current “pass everyone” norms as more harmful.
Long-form reading, AI, and culture
- Observations that even professionals balk at 2–20 page documents and increasingly rely on LLM summaries.
- Some see loss of long-form literacy as a civilizational loss and “outsourcing of thinking”; others view it as inevitable change.
- Debate over whether classic literature (e.g., Shakespeare, Dickens) is still useful or now an unrelatable barrier.
Teaching methods and “forcing functions”
- Several endorse “forcing functions” (practice exams, assignments, questions) to expose overconfidence and drive real learning.
- Point that passive reading feels like learning but often isn’t; testing and application reveal gaps.