Last week, the Atlantic published a story that was disheartening, but not surprising. Students were arriving at elite colleges – Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia et al – without the ability to read full books. More than 30 literature professors at these schools reported similar phenomena: teenagers at secondary level were taught to read extracts, poems, news articles but were increasingly less likely to be assigned whole novels, even less the serious tomes (think Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch) that form the basis of the canon.
I am reminded of my experiences with the Irish literature curriculum: when I sat my Leaving Certificate in 2013, we had to be familiar with one Shakespeare play, a small coterie of poets, and two very short novels that certainly have no place among the greats (one read more like Young Adult fiction). It might be easy to look at the American case study and think it’s confined to their borders. But it seems that a lack of intellectual ambition for young students is a problem more general than that.
Faced with the onslaught of discordant online content, reality gets lost
Every generation looks badly read, until you meet the next one. But, as teacher friends report anecdotally, and the professors who spoke to the Atlantic say on record, there is something different about this round of literary handwringing. It is not just that many children don’t want to read (though of course this will always be the case) but that they actually can’t: their attention spans are shot; they never developed the skills required to engage with a lot of text at once; they find plots too hard to follow.
There is, evident in the syllabus, a low expectation of pupils’ willingness to read. But that is a surmountable problem: whether willing or not, there are plenty of things we make teenagers do (maths, PE, Irish). And, hostility to the idea of sitting down every night to slowly parse Dostoyevsky, I suspect, is something encoded in the DNA of every child, and not at all relevant to this apparent shift. The obvious change in the temperature is the smartphone.
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We know all of this: the phone erodes the ability to focus and denies us the important experience of boredom. In short bursts, it feeds you disparate and incoherent content: a video of a dog on a skateboard; a short clip from a climate protest; a weather report from Florida; a man frying a scallop; an influencer doing their makeup; a news item from southern Lebanon; a missile exploding over Tel Aviv; a horse wearing a cowboy hat. Two minutes later, your brain has been assaulted from every side, and you have remembered none of it.
It is not just that children don’t want to read (though of course this will always be the case) but that they actually can’t
It is not indulging in moral panic to say that this is a defining crisis of the 21st century, the effects of which will play out over the lives of the children we have used as guinea pigs in this Great Content Experiment. We know in the short term that this “digital fentanyl” (a phrase coined by Mike Pence) has eradicated intellectual discipline and compromised the ability of teenagers (not all, of course) to access the interiority and perspective-granting only great novels can offer. In the long term it may all be a lot more troubling than that.
But the future effects of this genuinely epochal shift are one thing. For now, we should be thinking about what society loses when we lose reading. The simple case is that reading is good in and of itself – it doesn’t need to provide a higher purpose, or offer practical benefit beyond the pleasure of the novel on its own. TikTok and X might pump our brains with dopamine, but no one is leaving those sites feeling better than reaching the denouement of a great piece of fiction.
Hostility to the idea of sitting down every night to slowly parse Dostoyevsky, I suspect, is something encoded in the DNA of every child
But there is something far more important at stake. Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death has cropped up recently in a few conversations. A friend drew my attention to a particular passage (ironic that, after this worthy diatribe, I have not read the full thing): “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read.” Huxley sounds on the money: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
And this, I think, is precisely it. Faced with the onslaught of discordant online content – whether the textual garbage of X or the audio/visual dumping zone of TikTok and Instagram – reality gets lost. Not because everything is untrue (though, of course, a lot of it is), but because it is impossible to extract broader truths, narratives, deeper understandings from the salvo.
And so, if literature’s relevance – and centrality to the education system – recedes, then so does the art of slow reading, intense scrutiny of ideas, the ability to stick with one serious theme for a long time. In its place, truth drowns in that sea of irrelevance.