Forgivness

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"

“Three-cuing”, “whole-language,” “balanced literacy,” and a slew of other names for the same basic model (and its slight variations) for teaching reading at the most fundamental level (preschool through high school) is a huge part of the problem.

>protein mom

>looks inside

Chop up the veggies, stick 'em in a bowl, season how you like, put enough oil on to coat everything, toss like a salad, then put it on a baking sheet in the oven at like 400~500 degrees until it looks delicious.

Source

Section 1

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

You are probably right, he would have so much treasure in heaven.

Guidance

Q: What is Guidance, and Can We Guide Others? Guidance is a light kindled in someone by God as a result of his or her use of free will in the way of belief. As we affirmed earlier, only God can guide to the truth. There are many verses in the Qur'an that state this explicitly. For example:

If God willed, he could have brought them all to the guidance. (6:35)

If it had been your Lord's will, all who are on the Earth would have believed, all together. (10:99)

You do not guide whom you like, but God guides whom He wills. (28:56)

You cannot make the dead to hear, nor can you make the deaf to hear the call when they have turned to flee. Nor can you guide the blind out of their deviation. You can make none to hear save those who believe in Our Revelation so that they surrender and become Muslims. (30:52–53)

Since it is God Who guides, we implore Him in every rak'a of our daily prescribed prayers:

Guide us to the Straight Path (1:6).

God's Messenger says:

"I have been sent to call people to belief. It is none but God only Who guides them and places belief in their hearts." Besides the verses above and many other similar ones, other verses state that God's Messenger calls and guides people to the Straight Path:

Surely you call them to the Straight Path (23:73) and:

Thus We have revealed a Spirit to you from Our Command. You did not know what was the Scripture, nor what the Faith was, but We have made it a light whereby We guide whom We will of Our servants. You are indeed guiding to the Straight Path. (42:52)

These verses are not contradictory. As we said above, God creates everyone with the potential to accept belief. However, the family, educational, and environmental conditions have a certain role in guidance or misguidance. So, in order to call people to belief, God sent Messengers throughout human history and gave some of them Books whereby people could reform themselves. Prophet Muhammad, the last Messenger, received the Qur'an from God via revelation. The Qur'an, being the last Divine Book and uncorrupted, contains the principles of guidance.

The Messenger's personal conduct and good example, which embody its teaching, also make his way of life a means to guidance. He recites the Divine Revelation, shows people the signs of God, and destroys their misconceptions, superstitions, and sins. In fact, every thing, event, and phenomenon is a sign pointing to God's Existence and Unity. Therefore, if you want to believe sincerely and without prejudice, struggle against carnal desires and the temptations of your evil-commanding self, and use your free will to seek the truth, God will guide you to one of the ways leading to Him. He declares in the Qur'an:

Be aware of God and seek the means (of approach to and knowledge of) Him, and strive in His way in order that you may succeed and be prosperous [in both worlds]. (5:35)

As for those who strive in Us [in Our way, for Our sake, and to reach Us], We guide them to Our paths; God is with the good. (29:69)

In order to find or to deserve guidance, you must strive for it sincerely and search for the ways leading to it. Those whom God has blessed with guidance should set good examples for others, and then call others to it through all lawful (Islamic) means. In many verses, God commands His Messenger to do just that:

Warn your tribe of near kindred [of their end and the consequences of their deeds and of the punishment of Hell). (26:214)

Remind and give advice, for you are one to remind. (88:21)

Proclaim openly and insistently what you are commanded. (15:94)

Call to the path of your Lord with wisdom and fair exhortation, and reason with them in the most courteous manner. (16:125)

Surely in the Messenger of God you have a good example for him who hopes for God and the Last Day, and remembers God oft. (33:21)

The Messenger communicated God's revelations to people and called them to belief in the best and most effective way. He also bore all difficulties and persecutions, and rejected the most alluring bribes to stop calling people to belief in God. He continued his mission without expecting any worldly reward. Since he sought only God's good pleasure and to cause people to be prosperous in both worlds, when he conquered Makka (an event marking his triumph to make God's Word prevail among his people) he forgave those who had persecuted both him and his followers for 21 years, saying:

"No reproach this day shall be on you. God will forgive you. He is the Most Merciful of the Merciful. Go! You are free." He once told 'Ali: If someone finds guidance at your hand, this is better for you than having red camels.According to the rule that "the one who causes is like the doer," the one who leads another to guidance receives the same reward as the new believer, without any decrease in his or her own reward. Similarly, the Messenger says:

Whoever establishes a good path receives the same reward as those who follow that path thereafter until the Last Day, without any decrease in their reward. Whoever establishes an evil path is burdened with the same sins as those who follow it thereafter until the Last Day, without any decrease in their burden. Those who lead others to guidance should not remind them of this by saying such things as: "If I hadn't been a means to your guidance, you never would have been guided." This is a grave sin and shows ingratitude to God, for only God guides and causes one to lead another to guidance.

Similarly, those use by God to guide someone to guidance, should never attribute their deed to themselves. Rather, they should say something like:

"Praise God, for He has made me, a poor and needy person, a means for so meritorious a deed as leading someone to guidance. God is so powerful, so merciful to His servants, and so munificent that He creates clusters of grapes on wood. The wood has no right to ascribe to itself the grapes growing on it. I am no better than that wood." As for those who have found guidance, they should think: "Seeing my need and helplessness, God, my Master, used one of His servants to lead me toward guidance. All praise be to Him."

and he said, “Here I am.” Then he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, lie down again.” So he went and lay down. The LORD called yet again, “Samuel!” So Samuel arose and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he answered, “I did not call, my son, lie down again.”

Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, nor had the word of the LORD yet been revealed to him. So the LORD called Samuel again for the third time. And he arose and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli discerned that the LORD was calling the boy. And Eli said to Samuel, “Go lie down, and it shall be if He calls you, that you shall say, ‘Speak, LORD, for Your servant is listening.’”

So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Then the LORD came and stood and called as at other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for Your servant is listening.” The LORD said to Samuel, “Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel at which both ears of everyone who hears it will tingle.

“In that day I will carry out against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. “For I have told him that I am about to judge his house forever for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons brought a curse on themselves and he did not rebuke them. “Therefore I have sworn to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever.”

So Samuel lay down until morning. Then he opened the doors of the house of the LORD. But Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. Then Eli called Samuel and said, “Samuel, my son.” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “What is the word that He spoke to you? Please do not hide it from me. May God do so to you, and more also, if you hide anything from me of all the words that He spoke to you.” So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him. And he said, “It is the LORD; let Him do what seems good to Him.” Thus Samuel grew and the LORD was with him and let none of his words fail.

I mean, I think I was also mind-blown by the fact that people have been talking and writing about aliens for all of recorded history, even before there was any scientific precedent to guess that they could exist.

But that very thing (asking questions without a scientific precedent) was instrumental to proto-scientific thought ever becoming a formalized scientific method. These guys had a baseline for asking questions. So there are these scholars in the 1600's seriously articulating ideas like "So if God created the universe, doesn't that mean it's likely that every planet is inhabited, since it would be created for a purpose?" And "No, no, that doesn't make sense, Jesus would have to come to every planet and die, and that would be messed up." And then "Okay, but what if the people on other planets never sinned?"

And they speculate in great detail about the composition and environment of the other celestial bodies, and it was a real paradigm shift for my mind because of just how little they were working with. They had to debate questions that never occurred to me because I took the foundational knowledge for granted, like "Could the Sun be inhabited?" They thought that maybe if you viewed the Earth from outside, the outer atmosphere would appear bright like the Sun from a distance, so the Sun might be the same "kind" of celestial body as Earth.

I think we often misrepresent the misconceptions of the past too—the geocentric universe wasn't accepted just because of the Bible, it was also because we hadn't cracked chemistry yet and we didn't know how gravity worked, and our models had to explain why everything seemed to be attracted to the center of the Earth.

like, chemistry and biology are fundamentally built from things that aren't directly observable without certain technology that is very difficult to make. We can't directly observe microorganisms using any of our senses. We can't directly observe how chemical elements are different. The guys who first cracked important parts of chemistry did so through stuff like evaporating the solids out of gallons and gallons of human piss.