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"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
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"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
if hiphop weren't real its existence would sound like an exceptionally heavy-handed metaphor about racism from a really cringe didactic fantasy novel. yeah the racialized underclass in this society, the one that's constantly derided by the ethnic majority as stupid and anti-intellectual, they have a complex artistic tradition based around improvisational poetry which is sometimes enacted on a competitive basis for dispute resolution. you get judged based on the subtlety of your wordplay and the complexity of your internal rhyme schemes. the dominant group periodically gets mad about how this doesn't count as real art like their own objectively more simplistic music and poetry because sometimes it has swears in it
And it isn't just a single artform, it's part of a philosophical tradition that links four accomplishments (Poetry, music, calligraphy and dance) and which uses these together to describe the practitioner's own history and the lineage of their teachers, to communicate in the present, and to tell archetypal stories which encode plans for the future.
Also it's like basically identical in abstract to flyting, a version the ethnic majority had in their past. The author is doing a very heavy-handed "we're all the same" metaphor.
There's a subplot where some disabled people are, because of their culture, struggling with processing this form. Later writers use this to highlight how people are shaped by their surroundings, and how it's awful the ethnic majority is basically limiting people's ability to enjoy things.
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hes 19, with unlimited power, and he ain’t got a gf. the only time we see him interact with any women his own age is when he’s rejecting like 7 of them rapid fire. he pretends to date pacha in a gag that lasts like 10 solid minutes. listen to me god damnit
Okay, but just in case anyone is coming to tumblr dot com for my hot takes on 20+ year old kids' movies: Kuzco super WAS gay (or at least coded as such) and of course, I didn't get it until I watched it as a gay grownup.
He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.
Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.
In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.
So yes. There you have it. I will not be taking criticism at this time.
In response to the question “How did a movie like this get made at all much less by fucking Disney?” there was a recent Vulture article that outlines the whole shit show of a history behind this film according to everyone (writers, directors, VAs, Stings) involved. The gist of the story is that they fucked up making a whole, true-to-form Disney musical that never came to see the light of day SO BADLY that Disney switched directors, locked the writer’s room, and didn’t review a single script until weeks after the film was in theaters.
Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:
realized just now I never posted my notes from that one time I had the theater all to myself to watch phm
some highlights:
chekov's gun but with the pocket knife. we see grace put a knife into his spacesuit pocket while dragging all the cables and lights to the tunnel to see rocky. that same knife saves his life during the fishing incident.
The whole ship is labeled with flags from different countries who made those parts! Japan's flag on the outside of the hail mary near the airlock. South Korea on the hatches between parts of the ship. Canada on the wall(?) while grace is holding the camera and talking to it during the rocky moving in montage. Australia (i think?) in the clean room where the taumoeba breeder tanks are kept. American and specifically Boeing built the room that houses and launches the Beatles. You can literally see all these flags in teeny tiny little spots and know that that country made that thing. Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head
Grace wears the dress and glasses that ilyukhina wore in the party scene, and the bucket hat that yao wore
The ONLY time we see the scar from rocky on grace is when grace is doing the math to decide if hes gonna go to earth or go to rocky. Every single other time, its under bandages or covered by a sleeve
Grace's lip quivers at least 4 times while talking to stratt before he runs
The EVA suits either all have the same number on them or they have a way to clean/repair the suits. He wears suit #2 and it gets beat up and dirty during the fishing incident, but when he says bye to rocky and then goes to the blip a to find rocky, the suit is no longer beat up
The 3 astrophage in the movie ARE named just like in the book. Its a blink and youll miss it bit on the whiteboard before the shopping montage
Grace had a twizzler in his mouth at the store in checkout. They are shown buying the skittles but not the twizzlers. Either grace brought twizzlers in and ate them in the store, or he convinced Carl to buy them and opened them before they paid for them.
The "2" thing with grace (number 2 on the project, 2 on his eva suit) continues. His PPE suit in the argon filled lab has a big 2 on it under the numbers '1075'
When grace reads off what the astrophage are made of, he does so out of order to whats on screen
The hail mary has idle screens. Like the movie one where it would bounce around and get close to the corner
Grace has plants in his classroom and doesnt have the overhead lights on
Eventually ill get screenshots for this all. mostly for the flags to indicate what country/program built what parts of the hail mary
Greatest hits of FIFA cultural exchanges thus far:
Learning about flyovers and pyrotechnics at American games being a thing
Non-americans discovering the size of American football stadiums....for high schools in texas. Also the size of our stadiums in general.
Going to baseball games as a side treat! Lmao.
Non-americans losing their minds over "like, 100 petrol pumps," at buc-ees.
Related: Americans often forget how huge target and Walmart is.
People discovering American BBQ
Non-americans being obsessed with mid American restaurant chains like Golden Corral and Taco Bell
A lot of them really did feel god in this chile's apparently
The rightful obsession with waffle house
New understanding of American Big Drink With Ice supremacy as summer creeps in
Begrudging acceptance of mandatory water breaks during games
Americans realizing we have a Team USA and we are not, in fact, just "hosting our friends" from around the world — mostly because we won our first match and our team is decent??? Not amazing but not the worst.
Side rant: us women's football team is legendary good and we should care about that more like. Hello???
Admitting Americans are right about air conditioning
Related: the english team did warm ups in Florida RIP, and also the there's a video of the French team just being like fuck the heat, fuck the sun, this is so hot...
Americans who do not normally care about international football but fucking love a sport and cheering so we're just hyping whatever team is nearby, like we see a party and just show up and learn the chant. Like sorry many of us don't know shit about soccer but if we see a bunch of people in viking helmets or kilts or holding a bunch of flags and cheering we're game.
TAILGATING!!!!
I already said this but American yellow school bus is an international celebrity
The Scottish drank Boston dry of beer apparently, like they quadrupled what Boston normally sells for fourth of July weekend. SAM ADAMS HAD TO GET AN EMERGENCY BEER DELIVERY.
Also the English team fans got kicked out of The Londoner pub in Dallas after drinking 5,000 beers and going over max capacity lmao
Free refill drinks, tortilla chips & salsa.
So many non-americans are going to be here for the 4th of July for our 250th anniversary which is going to be great and hilarious
Non-americans discovering ranch as a beloved condiment
Non-americans understanding American obsession with hamburger now
Japan's homebase is in Texas and the cultural differences are frankly great and also the Japanese fans are SO NICE and helped clean up the stadium after a match???
All the short videos with the eagle screech (which I think is actually a hawk but whatever)
watched asteroid city like OHHHH so yeah this movie about grief and isolation and it’s told in a confusing and discombobulated but also comforting and beautiful way because that’s what isolation and grief are and it’s about the fact that the audience knows all of these people but wtf are they doing here and it’s the fact that a literal alien is used to show alienation and also to show the sudden abnormality that grief creates and the questions it leaves behind and the roadrunner isn’t being chased so what does that mean guys!!! because the coyote is dead so what does the roadrunner do??? and it’s literally the fact that this creative genius made a play about his lover not being able to cope with his death before he has said lover and (clearly) before he has said death but it doesn’t matter anyways because he dies and ofc you can’t get over it but he pre-scripts you to relive that heartbreak every single day in two dimensions. and it’s the fact that the lines between the actors of the play and the play itself are so blurred!!!! angie/jones dissociating, mercedes/midge saying “i still don’t forgive you”, augie burning his hand and really not knowing why, THE CONFUSED NARRATOR, the fact that jones doesn’t even understand why his heart is breaking every night (hasn’t woken up cause he hasn’t fallen asleep dare i say), the fact that woodrow doesn’t know where to look or how to look because he’s awkward but he’s also an understudy and not used to half of the shit he’s doing!!!
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i think that asteroid city partially taking place in the 1950s is like. genuinely the most nauseatingly heartbreaking part of the movie for me. you are in the southwest in the fifties and you have a male lover. and you don't understand his plays but he says it's okay, you don't need to. you can just love each other. not in public, barely in private because you are rarely alone, but the love is there. nobody else knows it but the love is there. and then he dies in a car accident. the play goes on without him and you still don't understand it but you can't ask him anymore. your character has lost his soulmate and you have lost yours but only one of you is allowed to talk about it. your grief will only ever be seen as acting. his soulmate is absent, cut out from the play just like yours was. nobody knows. you remember your lines. you burn your hand on the quickie griddle and you understand but you can never tell him again. thirty years later death ravages your community and you wonder if maybe it was lucky that you lost him when you did. you don't know. you'll never know. you can never ask him again.
what if you were in love with a man and he died and every night you had to go onstage and have your heart broken in a play he wrote about a widower played by you and because you're not sure what you're doing or if there's a meaning of life at all your life feels like a play you're just going through the motions of but the man you loved was a brilliant playwright so the world he created was colorful and complete and this is the only way you can experience your own grief and in a scene he wrote and cut from the play your character's dead with tells you that you have to try to move on but you can't wake up to that reality because (you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep) you haven't accepted the fact that it is your own real grief you're feeling in the first place. what then.
Imagine being in love with a playwright and he writes a play before he even meets you about how you can't get over his death which hasn't happened yet, and when he does actually die you are actively acting in said play, but because it's the 50s you can't grieve in a meaningful way, causing imposter syndrome both for your acting and also your grieving process. Shoutout to Jones Hall from Asteroid City i'd go insane too like wtf.
rereading pierce's early tortall books as an adult is like. they're not perfect. especially as someone brown and asian lol. but you can feel like that specific era of feminism coming off the page almost as a response to the state of the genre when it was written. the amount of times an older women would take a child or teen protagonist aside and be like just so you know you don't have to marry someone you slept with. no one can force you to be pregnant. contraceptive methods are easily available. sex workers deserve respect and care. you don't have to stay silent about abuse and despite our sexist society resources do exist to protect you. a womans body is her own. just a relentless focus on reproductive health specifically in her medieval fantasy books about dealing with gender roles
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