At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading. Or at least their teachers stopped asking them to read the way they once did. We live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt. And even in old-fashioned literature classes, assignments have been abbreviated so dramatically that high-school English teachers are, according to one recent survey, assigning fewer than three books a year.
I’ve seen the effects of this change up close, having taught English in college classrooms since 2007, and I’ve witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?
When I walked into my American-literature class at Case Western Reserve University last fall, I looked at 32 college students, mostly science majors, and expected an uphill battle. As my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.” One-third of the high-school seniors tested in 2024 were found not to have basic reading skills.
Yet by the end of the semester, as we read the last sentence of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I regretted ever doubting my students. I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day—and that teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves. There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them.
The image of a college literature class hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years. A group of students are sitting around a table, or maybe they’re perched in a lecture hall, looking down at a passage by Melville, reading a sentence out loud, puzzling over a metaphor, feeling the jolt of possibility that comes when their world is reimagined in startling language. My most vivid memory of reading an entire novel in college was picking up Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. On an unseasonably warm spring night in 2002, I propped myself against the steps of the library, opened the book, and stayed there until the early morning.
[Idrees Kahloon: America is sliding toward illiteracy]
I’ve taught for nearly two decades, but last fall I was worried in a way I’d never been before. I’ve always assigned long, challenging books. I regularly teach To the Lighthouse to first-year students, sometimes swapping it out for James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. But anecdotes and statistics about the decline of reading unsettled me. Plus, I was worried about my own raddled attention span, and I was unnerved by the apparent inevitability of AI-generated essays.
My course, a survey of American literature from 1660 to the present, felt like a dare: 400 years of literature in a single semester. And yet my fears that students might refuse to read helped clarify my approach. Instead of hopscotching from one excerpt to the next, I’d create small eddies in time. We’d spend several days, sometimes a couple of weeks, on a single author. We’d read nonfiction and novels—Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia—and long poems. I couldn’t be comprehensive; the course’s remit was, essentially, Puritans to the present. I was, instead, serious about reading whole books (and sermons: It’s impossible not to include Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” if you’re seeking to understand early American literature). I would teach the students what I was starting to miss myself: tarrying with an author beyond his best-known works, developing a relationship with a novelist across wildly different novels.
Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it. I know this because I had them identify obscure passages, without notes, devices, or books at hand. Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, Walden!—could do precisely that.
To give the students time to read, I had to change the way they wrote. I axed the take-home essays I’d assigned before—this wasn’t a “writing” class, anyway—and assigned what I suspected were far more difficult in-class, timed “flash essays,” with prompts I gave the same day. No trudging back from the library with 10 pages on Woolf in the special season of Cleveland weather we call “stupid cold.” Long, research-based essay assignments had always worked well for the top students in the class, the ones who were already trained to write. But I’ve rarely seen, over the course of my career, the kind of development I hoped for in the majority of students whom I asked to write that way.
I was also thinking of the writing I myself had been doing lately, smooshed within the hour I had for lunch, or pounded out on the couch after toddler bedtime. I wanted my students to have a taste of the adrenaline and, yes, stress that came from writing when faced with real time constraints. I wanted edge-of-the-seat writing that opened itself up to failure. They would confront their fear without guardrails, without bumpers, without AI-drafted support, without a plan or even a thesis. One student came up to me after the first flash essay, a little frustrated and worried that he wasn’t meeting the mark. He felt like he was writing into the complete unknown, rather than with a plan in mind. I said that was exactly the point.
In a haunting sentence from Austerlitz, by the German novelist W. G. Sebald, the titular character describes losing control of his language. Once a fluent and successful writer, Austerlitz suddenly falls into a crisis of faith about the sentence, which becomes “at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.” I liked the metaphor of writing into the darkness. So I devised simple essay topics that asked students to write about their own difficulties as readers. One was: “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” Another was: “Write about your morning routine, but in the style of Faulkner.” I didn’t want to create 32 new Faulkners. I wanted the students to experience the moment when their own style broke through the imitation, when the attempt to write like Faulkner failed and revealed, as a kind of photonegative, their own emergent voices. John Keats called this state of being “negative capability,” a condition in which the writer leans to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. If it was really true that the students couldn’t read, then it was up to me to put the books in their way and make them deal with them.
Adults underestimate the power of simply telling a young person to read a book and vouching for it ourselves. A teacher gave me Leo Tolstoy and Victor Hugo when I was far too young. I loved to read already, but at that age (13), my diet had been Star Trek novelizations, Michael Crichton, and—thanks to a dull sick day browsing my parents’ shelves—The Bonfire of the Vanities. In early high school, I read War and Peace and Les Misèrables and was absolutely mystified by the density of detail. I was frequently bored—all those pages on the sewer system of Paris—and then suddenly moved to tears by a character like Eponine, who “smiled a little, and died” in the arms of Marius. I was just too immature for other novels: Emma Bovary’s desire and Charles Swann’s jealousy mystified me, because I would not ask anyone out for at least another five years. Inundating myself with thousand-page novels set in the early 19th century, I had nearly every experience one has while reading, and I had them all at once. I came as close to overdosing on Russian mood swings as I could. But by the time I reached the end of high school, I developed a tolerance for what I did not understand, and then I gradually understood it. Once I did begin to understand, I felt an extraordinary desire to repeat the experience. Reading this much made books feel like a “doorway” for me, as George Saunders has called it.
I saw something like this happen in my American-literature class. First impressions, in literature as in life, are unreliable. When we started Walden, plenty of students were turned off by Thoreau’s long-winded musings on the real-estate market in New England. Two classes later, Thoreau was a friend for life. His timeless needling felt timely: “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep half our life.” Despite his flight to the woods, Thoreau was more easily distracted than any of us—by birdsong, by a train whistle, by the sound of ice cracking. He could barely sustain a single thought without jumping to an unrelated idea. Walden is a book that freely indulges in distraction—not to dull our senses, but to keep ourselves awake, curious, delighted, enraged. Thoreau’s world sends us constant notifications, and by doing so, asks us to reject the “vain reality” where we have been “shipwrecked.”
[From the November 2024 issue: The elite college students who can’t read books]
The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.
None of this is to say that higher education faces no challenges in this moment. Universities’ resources are severely constrained; their research missions have been hobbled. In many institutions, academic freedom has been threatened or abrogated. These are bleak conditions, possibly terminal ones for the post–World War II dream of a research university. I agree with those who argue that universities find themselves in a state of crisis. But narratives about the “end of reading” strike me as self-inflicted, the manifestation of a collective depression. (In other words, to borrow from Thoreau, “We know not where we are.”) If we want students to keep reading books, faculty have the most important role to play—regardless of whatever new devices or platforms emerge to capture students’ attention. The reaction to declining reading skills, poor comprehension, and fragmented attention spans should not be to negotiate or compromise, but to double down on the cure.
Defenses of the humanities largely get things right. Books teach you empathy because you imagine other lives. Poems refresh our conventional words—what Wallace Stevens derided as the “rotted names”—by investing language with power and nuance. I’m partial to the way the poet Adrienne Rich put it while teaching in the tuition-free City College of New York system: “What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it and by those who have been used and abused to the extent that they lacked it.” Literature helps you express your own thoughts in vivid language, partly by imitating the writers who do it well. If you’re not inclined toward the ethical view, or Rich’s vision of social transformation, books might provide escape routes instead, invitations to leisure or to what my colleague Adam Kirsch has called “vice.”
But the whole notion of having to defend literature or the humanities in the first place may have us wrong-footed. It’s not only what you learn from reading Moby-Dick—notwithstanding Melville’s extensive knowledge of 19th-century whaling—but what you are doing when you are reading Moby-Dick. You are neither learning a transferable skill nor escaping from the world’s demands that you do. You are not word-maxxing or optimizing information for efficiency. You are engaged in a singular practice, one with its own primary justification.
The students I taught last semester turned enthusiastically to Faulkner and spent their time reading about the journey of the Bundren family to bury their mother’s body. Why did they do this? Because I asked them to, and told them it was worth it. I said that time was precious, and that we needed to take some of it back for ourselves. So we did.
