A Gentlewomon and a Scholar

おふ〜 🫧

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

Firstly, you don't just need two sticks. You need at least two (fairly) identically sized, (fairly) identically weighted, straight, smooth sticks that are strong enough to carry the weight of what you're making. Which isn't impossible to do with bronze age technology, but it's gonna take time or money. And every time you change gauge of thread, or want a different tightness of fabric from the same artisan, you need a new size of needles. A loom is more flexible about these things. Nalbinding, which looks very similar and fills a similar niche, is more flexible about these things and uses way less resources.

Secondly, it's probably older than the 12th century sock find. That thing has colorwork and a shortrow heel. Not something you do instinctually, not something you figure out on your first or second or fourth attempt if you've never seen it done. So we know it's older. We also know from contextual evidence that it doesn't show up in texts or art or myths before the Middle Ages, so... Not hugely older. It's hard to find archaeological evidence because almost every part of knitting, until fairly recently, was made of material that loves to decay. And if you were to find a knitting needle... It's a pointy stick. Made of wood, maybe bone. Even in the context of lying in a dwelling, that could be many, many things. Loom weights are slightly easier to categorize.

So: Harder, and probably slower to work. Fragile tools, which are probably difficult to make in standardized sizes. Hard to get a consistent gauge you can price for the market. Like you said, these issues aren't impossible, but they might make it less economical, and less likely to become popular.

It's probably not a coincidence that our earliest knitted artifacts are socks, which are A) more durable than most knitted clothes, B) normally knit with heavier yarn than thread, and C) an item much more suited to knitting than weaving, so there's a stronger incentive.

When you have to produce all textile goods for your family, of course you’re going to go for economy. I saw somewhere that it would generally take two or three hand-spinners to produce enough yarn for one weaver, so I can’t imagine how that would translate to knitting or crochet which use a lot more yarn.

Also, worn out woven fabric can be cut down and repurposed into other useful items, while knitting and crochet would come apart if you tried to cut it.

Naalbinding, as mentioned above, is much older than knitting! It uses what is essentially a single large-eyed needle similar to a tapestry needle. A type of needle that you could also use while making your weavings. But additionally, while knitting and crochet are ideal for using a long, single length of yarn, Naalbinding excels at using shorter lengths of yarn - If I use anything longer than 3 ft (about 1m) I run into problems very quickly.

Now when you're weaving? Any loom is going to have waste yarn in the warp - this is how it holds the tension needed to weave. Even on the small table looms I've worked with these scraps can be about 1-2 ft of yarn - a great size for Naalbinding, but extremely difficult to use for knitting or crochet. It's very efficient to take these weaving ends - yarn and thread that's already been worked heavily to simply get into yarn for the weaving! - and use them for naalbinding.

We don't really weave socks because, well. They're a tube. And not just a tube, but to be comfortable, it's a closed tube! With a curvy end! and decreases! This would be really hard to make via weaving, which excels in Flat Rectangles (see: why a lot of Ancient clothing was Flat Rectangles with Fancy Pinning) and simpler shapes.

Even knitting has some issues with socks - though I'm fairly sure knitted socks are going to be more comfortable than naalbound ones, as the fabric has a more even drape. It's not just two even sticks of the same size that you need for knitting a tube - it's a minimum of four. Usually five!

It's also easier to make increases and decreases in naalbinding than knitting, IMO. A closed tube is honestly ideal for the craft, especially if you are fitting it to yourself or a close relative as a mitten or a sock. Like, say, when you're both crafting next to the campfire and every row or two you can hold up the item against their body, and be sure you're on the right track for the fit.

Unsurprisingly they are made of stone. You put a slightly oversized stick there and rub the stone along it until it fits into the groove with no gaps. This one was for arrow shafts (source: https://sandiegoarchaeology.org/artifact-of-the-week-shaft-straightener/)

Here's another one, repurposed from a stone axe:

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357166805_New_Data_for_Research_on_the_Early_Bronze_Age_in_Northern_Poland_2350-1600_BC. Figure 4, page 481.

But you could make these to produce any diameter, and use either sticks or split wood. (As a woodworker myself I'd go for split wood--easier to do in bulk and stronger due to avoiding the pith).

Meaning needles, including 5+ set dpns, would have been well within the technological grasp of, at the very latest, neolithic peoples. Not that they did--i'm just saying, making wooden knitting needles would not have been a hardship at all, including sets of different gauges. And we know stone age peoples had knowledge of the wood they were using; certainly enough to know what species of tree to use. So, split some green ash, round and smooth it on your shaft straightener, whittle the end to a nice point, smooth that on the rock also, let dry a while, and repeat as needed. A lot of modern wooden needles are made from softwood (looking at you, knitpicks laminated birch needles that snapped as soon as I touched them), so remember that hardwood needles would be much much stronger and less delicate. Finer gauge wooden needles still are always going to be somewhat delicate, but theyre usable for a lot of people, so I don't think they should be ruled out by any means.

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought

She exchanged woman’s for man’s attire, and, no longer the most modest of maidens, began the life of a warlike rover. Enrolling in her service many maidens who were of the same mind, she happened to come to a spot where a band of rovers were lamenting the death of their captain, who had been lost in war; they made her their rover captain.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.