CAVE FELEM | BEWARE OF CAT

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"

Jagt's article is focused on reading comprehension, not on being interested by the subject matter. I guarantee that you and me and plenty of other people would much rather read a 100k longfic that we chose about a fandom and pairing that we enjoy, rather than read a 20-page (roughly 10k words) scientific article about a topic that we did not choose for a mandated course about which we feel neutral at best. Besides, all of the students (I assume) did read the assigned articles. The problem is that they didn't comprehend them.

What's the difference between reading a text and comprehending it? Here's a simplified way of thinking about it: If you've read a work of fiction, you can describe the plot. If you've comprehended a work of fiction, you can describe the themes.

Let's use My Immortal as an example. What's the plot of My Immortal? Well, a goth girl attending Hogwarts hates preps, gets romantically involved with both Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, is instructed to romance and redeem Tom Riddle in the past to prevent his being Lord Voldemort in the future, mocks preps, dies at least once, and participates in an orgy involving several male characters including a male human version of Hedwig. (Yes, really.) Meanwhile, the author's notes chronicle the author's falling out with and making up with her BFF, her constant struggle against critics in the reviews, and the brief hacking of her account.

But what about the themes?

That's an interesting question, especially if you're of the opinion that My Immortal is a trollfic.

Actually, I'll give you a few lines of space to think about the answer for a moment before you scroll down and I weigh in myself.

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...oh, while you're here, give my acquaintance Sam Gabriel's podfic rendition a listen, if you're into professionally-done audio recordings of notoriously bad-quality fanfiction.

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All right, My Opinion time. Going for a purely Watsonian/in-text perspective, ignoring the meta-layer of the possibly trolling author.

My Immortal is a love letter to (what the author views as) goth culture. Things like MCR, vampires, and gothic fashion are all held in high esteem, while prep culture is derided. There's also a very anti-authority bent to the fic: Dumbledore and other similarly prudish figures are unhelpful at best, but characters who prove themselves to be rebellious and untraditional despite holding positions of power (think Professor Sinistra/Trevawlry/whatever the author decided her name was at the present moment) are more helpful. And then there's the constant undercurrent of the values of young love: Ebony is specifically told that love can redeem even Lord Voldemort. The relationships in this text are fickle, but they are no less lauded.

...okay I got completely sidetracked. Let's circle back to the themes of Jagt's article:

So the problem is not attention span but an inability to comprehend the text. Jagt says that students "kept losing track" of the article they read. While this may be the students being unwilling to admit that they lost interest in the article, I choose to interpret the statement at face value. I.e. the students did not retain the themes of the text.

One may ask, but why are neurological distractions (cellphones) and shortcuts (LLMs) causing reading comprehension problems? (They're two of the three factors which @alexseanchai mentions Jagt discussing; the third, for the record, is insufficient education methods.) To answer, here's another analogy:

Education is exercise for your brain. It should be obvious why insufficient exercise plans (education methods) will not properly train your brain. Walking 50 meters a day does not constitute training for a mile run. But shortcuts (e.g. getting someone else to lift weights for you, rather than you lifting them yourself) and distractions (distractions) will also hinder your brain-training. Jagt cites substantial evidence for these conclusions.

One last thing: how should one act on this information? I'd suggest, within reason, to limit one's own educational distractions and shortcuts and to make a concerted effort to exercise one's own brain. But, ultimately, how one acts on Jagt's article should be dependent on one's own comprehension of it. And that is your homework for this evening.

A postscript, because I feel like I should speak on what my credentials are: I was raised by a teacher, have a large number of teachers in my extended family, and thus have been privy to lots of discussions about teaching and students in my years of life. I've picked up a lot of knowledge and lingo from that, though I can hardly call myself an expert in the field of education. I was also in the public schooling system myself. I won't say my exact age for the sake of doxxing myself, but I've been privy to education both pre- and post- smartphones. Again: I'm not an expert, so please take my statements in the above paragraphs with a grain of salt.

First up: August's youngest child, Artemios "Art" Ragnvaldsen. A lot of his backstory is based on my own headcanons about August in particular and Ragnvaldr's lineage in general, so I'll sum that up as quick as I can:

The Ragnvaldsens are a large clan of monster hunters. Each adult has a specialized role within the clan. The basic groups are wolf-pelts (head-on monster hunters, work in groups), lynx-pelts (stealth monster assassins, work in pairs), bear-pelts (veteran monster hunters, work alone), and hawk-pelts (support roles). August is a bear-pelt; Art is a lynx-pelt. (I've based the Ragnvaldsens in large part on the House of Slaughter from the comic series Something Is Killing the Children.)

Art has a Shepherding soul and was born in 1925 (making him a year younger than Levi). He's a trained survivalist, specializing in bowmanship and setting traps. He's a good-natured, friendly young man with a love of the wilderness and a soft spot for otherworldly beasts. Which you can probably see being an issue, given that he's literally in The Monster-Hunting Family.

Art's radical approach to monster-hunting (e.g. Maybe Don't Drive The Less Harmful Species To Extinction) is something he's fostered quietly in his heart for a long time. He's kept it from almost everybody, fearing how his family would react, but he won't keep silent forever...

Oh also Art is aroace; he's completely immune to Sylvian magic and is fully unable to gain affinity with her. He's like a Sylvian dead zone. Which would have really fun gameplay consequences.

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Okay next up: O'saa's bastard daughter, Malika. Hear me out hear me out. Picture this: he's like fourteen or fifteen, still in his hometown, just about to head to the temple of Amon to begin his studies, and shortly before he leaves, he sleeps with a young merchant girl about his age named Rushda. Unprotected, of course, because he's above consequences. He leaves town, she gives birth several months later, he never returns home because he's better than that squalid place now, he never learns he had a daughter.

So Malika has a relatively pleasant upbringing, except for the absent father. Her mother's family is relatively well-off, and her father's family also contributes to raising her. By all means she has no right to complain, but she has daddy issues the size of the sun and a temper to match the likes of Nas'hrah. And so Malika goes "I'm going to find my father and make him face the fact that he abandoned me. I will be a child of whom he can be proud" and thus she continues the cycle of familial abandonment.

Malika's a Dominating soul, born in 1925. She's a gifted occultist and becomes a very capable yellow mage, but her incredible power is weakened by her lack of self-control. (Contrast with O'saa, who can muscle through the moonscorching process via sheer willpower.) She has little sympathy for anyone who isn't herself, and her mood is as fickle as the breeze. She's the type of person who would promise herself "I would never have a bastard child of my own" and immediately throw that promise out the window as soon as she sees someone hot. She's also the type of person who would rob you blind and then complain that you were discriminating against her. She is Women's Wrongs incarnate.

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Last but not least: Torrent the Sergal. He was born missing his right arm above the elbow due to a birth defect. He still trained in combat, as sergals are prone to do, but realized that his skills are inclined elsewhere (a realization that had nothing to do with other sergals making fun of him; he's autistic) and instead became a diplomat.

Side note: I headcanon that by the 1930s, humans have started to colonize Vinland's mainland in earnest. There have been human settlements for decades prior (some more successful than others), and the Caribbean is pretty well inhabited, but the Bremen Empire is now supporting a massive wave of Europan colonization of Vinland based on the Bremen equivalent to Manifest Destiny. We can all see that this is a problem. The push started after the First Great War and slowed significantly during the Second Great War, but after that ended and the Europan nations rebuilt, they started funnelling increasing energy into territorial expansion. Like the Cold War but it's a land race instead of an arms race.

The sergals are, of course, Not Happy. They're holding their ground much better than the Native Americans did, because not only do sergals have a relatively advanced civilization (more developed in areas in which humans aren't and vice versa) but they have much more widespread adoption of magic and the occult (a sergal who doesn't believe in magic is roughly equivalent to a flat-Earther in the real world), giving them an advantage in that area.

Okay anyway. Torrent has literally everything going against him (autism, language barrier, etc) but by God if he doesn't relish the challenge. He is a social justice warrior (honorific) and he WILL enact positive change in his community and in Vinland as a whole. He's an Ordered soul and was born in 1913, making him a few months older than Daan. He has a beautiful sergal wife named Oasis and he has the sergal equivalent of a Brooklyn accent.

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I don't have proper portraits of any of these guys just yet but I do have doodles (designs are not finalized):

No subscription. Just program.

On your computer. You got to use it forever and ever and never had to worry about it going away.

Because it was physically on your computer. As a program. That you actually owned. Not because you got it separately, but because it was a standard inclusion with your computer.

I'm sorry but I'll just never get over it. I remember when companies cared about their products being usable out of the box. I remember when our things belonged to us.