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looorg [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ [theatlantic.com]

Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.

It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones.

Students at elite collages such as Columbia can't read books anymore. It's not that they can't read but they can apparently only read short texts in short bursts of time. Their attention span have been ruined by smartphones, modern technology and a few decades of modern teaching methods that prioritize small texts.

What makes it extra bad is that these are apparently students that are taking courses in literature. These should be the avid readers. I guess we'll see more college books with large text, more pictures and being "for dummies" (it used to be a joke, not anymore I guess).

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