Students Are Unprepared to Read Books

How high schools and universities are failing the next generation of readers

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This article originally appeared in Minding the Campus in November 2024.

A recent article in the Atlantic revealed the startling truth that students at Columbia University—one of America’s most elite colleges—are unprepared to read books.

Columbia University, where I completed my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature, based its reputation on its famous Core Curriculum, a series of required courses that introduce students to the masterpieces of Western literature, philosophy, music, and art. As a seventeen-year-old with several college offers, I committed to Columbia after poring over its Core Curriculum syllabi, and I was excited to matriculate at a college that shared my appreciation of the Western canon.

I arrived on campus expecting to find a host of like-minded scholars; instead, during my introductory literature seminar—Lit Hum, as it is colloquially known—I saw most students read books only sparingly, swapping paperbacks for SparkNotes study guides. Back then, I attributed this apathy to a mismatch of interests—after all, many of the students I interacted with were physics or economics majors who would not need to be exceedingly literate to succeed in their future careers. But, even before the age of TikTok, I couldn’t fully explain to myself why the students around me seemed so disinterested in reading.

Growing up, I was surrounded by adults who emphasized the importance of knowledge and scholarship; my prime role model, my grandmother, was a distinguished chemistry professor who had probably read more books than many of the English professors I encountered at Columbia. My dad, an engineer, was always reading mystery novels on our stationary bike at home, and my mom, who worked in data analytics for a medical nonprofit, would always read me short stories in Russian, nurturing my love of Russian literature—a love that would culminate in my prolonged affair with Dostoyevsky. Even my dermatologist, who cured my teenage acne, was always ready to engage me in an hour-long conversation about Philip Roth or Sylvia Plath while he operated.

In my mind, reading was not a practice relegated to English majors—it was a mark of general erudition and thirst for knowledge that transcended speciality. In fact, during my childhood, I encountered few people who called themselves readers and were not in some sort of STEM field. Why, then, did my Columbia peers who were in STEM seem so disdainful of reading?

In her article for the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch chronicles the decay of reading in high schools, exposing a general shift away from the belief that the purpose of high school English classes is to read books cover to cover. She finds that students are now more frequently assigned short-form pieces like book excerpts and news articles, leaving them unprepared to tackle longer works like Pride and Prejudice or Crime and Punishment—both of which were on Columbia’s Lit Hum syllabus when I was a student, though Dostoyevsky has been suspiciously retired. As someone who works with high school students at my college consulting startup, I have witnessed a decay in general literacy among my own seniors, many of whom have cruised through almost the entirety of high school without having read a single book—and not simply because they shirk their assignments. For instance, during a mock interview for Stanford, I asked one of my students to reflect on a book she had read in the past four years that had changed her perspective on the world. She stuttered before admitting that she had not read a single book since middle school; when I prompted her to name the books she had been assigned in English class, she said she had been asked to visit a restaurant and write a “food review.” Another student recently came to me with an AP Literature assignment that asked her to analyze the lyrics of a Kendrick Lamar song. A student who had, in fact, been assigned a book cover to cover slogged through the entirety of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles without comprehending a single important plot point—and her teacher told her that that was all right and that they would be moving on to an easier read in the spring.

High school English teachers, it seems, have collectively decided that reading books is no longer important. One educator, for instance, deems my own method of teaching writing through the words of Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, and Fitzgerald “useless,” disparaging the idea that literature encourages students to develop strong writing and communication skills. In a 2022 statement on English Language Arts (ELA) education, the National Council of Teachers of English proclaims, “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Over on Twitter—I’m not calling it X—one English teacher laments that she herself can no longer get through more than two to three books a year because she cannot “find time for joy in a world that only values capital.” Without delving too far into the Marxist clown show that has overtaken the English literary world (I discuss that in depth here and here), I think we can assume that teaching English literature is no longer the top priority of many high school English teachers.

In contrast to the battalion of intellectually versatile adults that I grew up with, many of my students who intend to major in STEM fields are being taught that high levels of verbal fluency will have no effect on their careers. But the problem goes even deeper than an education system that has replaced its commitment to the liberal arts with a focus on more “practical” fields. English teachers, it seems, have abandoned their love of literature as a whole, spending more time indulging grievances than reading books. It should come as no surprise, then, that elite college students are unprepared to read books—their greatest role models in the literary space are no longer reading books themselves.

Follow Liza Libes on Minding the Campus here.