Sphagnum Opus

Wingate Flowers - Hayley Barker , 2023.

American , b. 1973 -

S.W.Randall (American, b.1965).

After All, 2025

Oil on panel | 36i x36".

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"

there are four petals on the flower of “my stupid students are the stupidest ever.” of these, one of them is kind of new (only kind of…) 1. we cannot relate to our stupid students because we are very interested in a subject that 99% of students do not care about. this is because we educators are the end product of a filtration machine, and we should be patient with ourselves. when we were young we also had to take courses which we were not that into at the time. let us not take it personally that they do not really give a shit about electromagnetism. 2. we cannot relate to our stupid students because we are naturally inclined to perform a kind of thinking that they are not good at. why would a tone deaf person take so many music classes that they could teach them at the end of it? they wouldn’t. people specialize in things they are good at naturally, things they have a talent for. let’s say your postsecondary education lasted 8 years. of those 8 years, 7 of them were spent with people who shared your natural affinities. but the students you teach do not. that’s okay, because you get to be the last word on their education in the subject.

3. we cannot relate to our stupid students because they are young and we are old. when i started teaching, i wore suit jackets to class to emphasize my position. this is no longer necessary, as the lines on my brow and the white in my hair do it for me. but what is now routine for me is still novel to them. and the mindset of youth which is now far over my horizon: that maelstrom of sex, death, change, uncertainty, poverty and novelty; they are currently in the throes of it all. so what seems to me to be a rational priority, may not be clear at all to them.

4. we cannot relate to our stupid students because they were educated differently from us and lack the core foundation required to build a strong education. (the subject of the op editorial) listen: it’s true to some degree. some politicians have been trying to make public education worse. and furthermore, since post secondary education is becoming mandatory for getting sit-down jobs, more and more students who lack an academic mindset are being pushed into it. the result: more bad students. i get it. but dig this, chums. imagine ww2 has just ended and you’ve got all these students on the GI bill coming into your halls. they grew up in the great depression, probably with nutritional deficits at key stages of development. they haven’t read a book other than a walkie talkie manual in 4 years. they might have ptsd, and a huge chip on their shoulder. they want to be eating baloney sandwiches and reading girly magazines but their momma told them that they’ve got an opportunity no one else in their family has ever had, so now they’re sitting in front of you and you have to teach them calculus? now, back to the present. who do you think had worse students to work with?

the challenge of educating students always starts with crappy lumber. and it always has. because that’s the dream itself. that’s the dream of public education. we are not educating princes with royal tutors. we take the whole keg: from the brim to the dregs, and we try to turn them into something helpful to the future. we try to continue the tradition. we pass onto their shoulders the endowment of humanity. it is vitally important that we do not allow the differentiation and formation of an educated upper class. it is vitally important that we do not walk into the classrooms expecting failure. we need to expect improvement.

this said, it sucks that public schools are sucking in different bad ways. especially since teachers are much better than they used to be. and it sucks that universities aren’t built around educating students (have they ever been)? but the key thing, the thing the politicians and administrators can’t take away from us is motivation. the kids with the butts in the seats? they have a dream and —even though they do not know what changes will be expected of them to achieve it— they are willing to gamble their time and energies to achieve it. their motivation is what has educated generation after generation of successful students. their motivation is the reverse-osmotic pressure which pushes them through the filter of academe. and it will persist. and the second is our motivation. we do the work to bridge the gap. we do the work to show these crappy pieces of lumber how to shave away at themselves, and glue themselves back into something powerful. into someone who can think and reason and compare and discern. and the way we do that isn’t just with our textbooks (no one reads) or our lectures (no one listens to) but also with our hearts. there is a bond between the instructors and the students. and this bond helps push them forward. helps motivate them to change themselves. helps pass our dreams of scholarship from their hands into the unknown future.

I also taught children and maintain my stance that their skills are 1:1 related to how consistent their educators were in caring for and encouraging their learning. I know teaching elementary school art to the children of illiterate parents isn't the same thing as teaching Harvard undergraduates but my instinct is that the fundamentals are not all that different. Its not simply "meet the students where they are," its "build stronger roots so they can better reach their potential".

Friend who is in a relationship with someone I don't like.

Friend off social media.

Friend who moved back home after college.

Friend who has an energy that burns me out so I can only take them in small doses.

Friend who doesn't drive.

Friend who insists on only socializing with large groups and refuses to respond to my requests to spend time together one-on-one.