My Students Can't Read

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.