Students Are Reading Garbage

What Happens When "Born a Crime" Replaces "Catcher in the Rye"?

It’s no secret that student literacy is declining. SAT reading scores of Ivy League admits are consistently lower than their SAT math scores, with Brown, Columbia, Penn, and Harvard students scoring 40 points lower on reading comprehension than on math. Similarly, the National Center for Education Statistics has reported a consistent decline in both fourth and eighth-grade reading scores since 2019, with students in 33 states performing worse on standardized reading tests in 2022 than in 2019. While it is easy to blame the rise of technology, something more insidious is happening both in and outside of the classroom.

Almost exactly a year ago, the Atlantic ran a piece about the decline of reading comprehension skills in Ivy League students, citing Columbia professor Nicholas Dames’s observations that in contrast to students from just several years ago, his incoming freshmen are no longer able to sit through a book in its entirety. Dames’s words sparked a national debate on student literacy, which I have been both closely following and engaging with over the past year. And while I am the last person to brush off claims that students are no longer reading books—they certainly aren’t—I’ve started to notice that it’s not that students aren’t reading but that they aren’t reading the right things.

The problem starts in the English classroom, where cries for social justice have virtually replaced the liberal arts curriculum. The first stated value of “English Language Arts” education from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), for instance, is not increasing literacy or even promoting critical thinking skills, but “to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice.” The NCTE, an organization responsible for guiding English literature pedagogy and curriculum choices since 1911, chose to renounce literature in 2022, writing, “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”

The resulting catastrophe could not be more apparent. Gone are the days when the students I tutor in English come to me with essays on Macbeth or even The Catcher in the Rye. Instead, out of the twenty or so students that I work with every year in a private tutoring capacity, three have come to me with term papers on Born a Crime by former late-night host Trevor Noah, and four have been assigned the quasi-illegible writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now, one might argue that there is value in reading more broadly than the staples of the Western literary canon, but to feed students of English literature overtly politically-charged writing without ever once introducing them to Shakespeare completely skews their perception of what literature really should be—an avenue for exploring the human condition through the medium of the written word. What happens as a result is that students miss out not only on the beauty of good writing—Neither Noah nor Coates could string a legible English sentence together if their very survival depended on it—but also on valuable ideas that stretch far beyond social justice.

Taught to think of writing as an avenue for social justice activism, students rarely choose to read books on their own time outside of the classroom, resorting instead to biased news articles and performative political activism on social media, where buzzwords prevail over well-thought-out ideas. Many of my students actually do read, therefore, but what they read is not literature or even bad YA fiction, but anything that purports to fight for justice. This pull towards activism, which, in their minds, is the same as English literature, often takes them to social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, where such activism is the most performative. And because social media is designed to be addictive, these students spend their after-school evenings reading captions about social justice and skimming through poorly-written reel scripts with grammatical errors. The best part is that ChatGPT now writes the majority of this content, so it all sounds exactly the same. Pair that with the fact that students complete most of their homework with the help of AI, and you get a complete crisis in literacy: students are reading, but they are reading mostly AI-written slop.

Don’t believe me? Spend a minute scrolling through Instagram reel captions and you’ll see my point. Almost all of these captions sound like they were written by the exact same person—or a robot in this case—whether the videos discuss something as charged as politics or something as benign as gardening. Captions are littered with extraneous em-dashes and hackneyed phrases such as “but here’s the kicker.” And we all know that you are what you read—the more students interact with ChatGPT writing, the more they will internalize it and adapt its standardized phrasing in their own writing. Heck, I almost found myself wanting to use the phrase “but here’s the kicker” in this very essay because I, too, read an overwhelming amount of ChatGPT writing at my job, where students come almost exclusively with AI-written essays that will be submitted to elite educational institutions as part of the college application process.

The problem is then two-fold: On the one hand, writing has become synonymous with political activism. On the other hand, students now read almost exclusively AI-written text, internalizing ChatGPT turns of phrases that will eventually appear in their own writing and even speaking habits. The first, of course, naturally leads to the other: students who do not read literature will never encounter good writing in their lives and will therefore assume that AI-generated writing qualifies as “good” writing. What ensues might be a complete standardization of writing and, indeed, of thinking processes for the next generation—for writing is nothing more than a proxy for thinking.

So what is to be done?

For one, separate literature from political activism. If the previous generation convinced students that literature is nothing more than a vehicle for social justice, then it is the duty of the next generation to bring back books like Anna Karenina to study the human condition. The greater the writing students are exposed to, the more they will cringe at poorly-written AI slogans, setting higher standards for their own attempts at creative expression. To rescue literacy, we must recenter, to borrow an idea from the NCTE, “book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Only then can we find hope for the next generation of readers and critical thinkers.

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