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I worked for an organization that designs English Language Arts curricula for K-12 schools, and one complaint we regularly received about our materials was that it was unrealistic to expect students to complete the bulk of their reading as homework. "Students just won't do it." Instead, teachers were spending much of their class time reading aloud to students, even in high school. I'm hesitant to blame teachers for this—I taught middle school for four years and it's true that some students simply won't read independently—but I do think that there is a tendency among a significant number of parents and teachers not to ask kids to do things which will cause them to struggle. The pushback from kids is exhausting, for sure, but the long-term repercussions are even worse.

I teach in Boston and work with High Schools, Community Colleges and Universities all across the US.

I think this article is more well-intentioned than a lot of "kids these days" critiques, but still is missing some important context.

First, it's helpful to separate ability from motivation. Is it that students can't read the 20 page paper, or is it more that they don't want to?

The perceived value of higher education has shifted. It used to be that going to, and experiencing college was what was most valuable about it.

Now we tell students that completing college, that the degree itself, is whats most valuable. By this logic, the rational thing to do is to get through college as quickly and easily as possible. Unless students see the inherent value of the 20 page paper, they are going to do what they need to do to get the grade needed for the credits.

It used to feel that to get a good job, you went to to college. Young people today don't think this is necessarily true. If we want them to engage in the classroom we have to start by helping them see the value of what they are being asked to learn.

Also, the writer states: "None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation".

Effective teaching includes the modification and adjustment of the material to meet the needs of the students. If we aren't willing to change, can we expect students to?

He also says: "We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify."

What does the degree certify exactly? Historically, it has certified that students can navigate the hoops and ladders we put them through to navigate a system (that is inherently designed for upper middle class white people).

If we spent less time worrying about how to certify students and more time on helping them to learn, these issues might not be as pronounced.

I trust the intentions and appreciate the insights in this article, but also worry that articles like this make it too easy to blame students solely for the issues we see today.

Reading that article and reading the comments it feels like we are pulling the goalposts back and forth when it comes to why we send kids to school. When I think about the purpose of a school, I think you put kids in, and ideally they would come out with certain abilities. These abilities include reading comprehension and written communication skills. As times have changed it sounds like many people are fine letting these core reading & writing skills go unlearned. I think there is really lose if we enable a generation to weave their way through the school system by avoiding concentration intensive tasks. How do we recover these skills when this generation becomes the teachers.

I wonder how these kids pass their respective grades if they don't meet the criteria required to pass. It seems to me that the threat of failing was real and a thing that motivated me to do well. Are we moving the goalposts at every grade? Whatever you can muster, that just so happens to be what is needed to move up?

As an English major in college in the first half of the nineties, my classes involved intense amounts of reading. The 19th Century British Novel, as you'd imagine, had me reading 800 pages of dense prose a week! I can't believe I was able to do that, and his comment that, "[t]he neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it," really resonates. Whenever I decided to move from my narrative nonfiction reading habits (which allow me to easily read 30-40 pages a day) back into the incredible world of the classics, I always treat it like marathon training! I can't just start "Bleak House" just like I can't go out and run twenty miles tomorrow. But I can dip into a little Edith Wharton or re-visit Jane Austen to fire up that muscle memory.

Whenever I read these articles what saddens me more than the fear that these students don't have muscles to fire back up is the fear they don't see the need for the muscles at all, that they never loved reading or found the joy in the "pain" to justify the effort.

I've been a high school teacher in New York City for 20+ years. During the last mayoral administration, our elementary and middle schools were required to purchase scripted reading curricula created by big educational publishers. Students were never asked to read an entire book, and most assignments involved reading excerpts of nonfiction and answering really boring questions. Most middle schools that I know of tried to sneak some actual books into the curriculum, but, yeah, there's an effect! It's like there's a conscious effort to remove the things that readers actually like about reading.

That said, kids love reading just as much as they always have 20 when they find a good book. A lot of those really difficult books are really good when you get to the point where you actually understand them. That's why I kinda rolled my eyes at this part of the article:

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.

This is just a description of teaching difficult material! We can still do it, and it still works! Let's just hire enough teachers and let them teach!

dominant hegemnoy can't adapt to the times part 8888 O tempora o mores :-) ! . Kids are reading more than ever AND their attention span is shorter than ever because of phones and apps created by adults. We're all in this together. The kids are alright if you give them a chance! And that includes paying teachers well and hiring sufficient numbers of teachers!

I taught high school juniors (many of them honors students). I knew that most did not have the ability for sustained reading when they came to me, despite taking advanced coursework. This was not their fault - they grew up in a really weird world. So we read, silently, whatever physical book they wanted, for 45 minutes a week. And folks - it was so so hard to get them to do that. It was as low stakes as I could make it (they just had to talk to me about 500 pages of reading a quarter), but they were totally unprepared to sit in one place and read a physical book for more than 5 minutes.

And yet! By the end of the first quarter, many of them started to get excited about it. They found a book they enjoyed. They convinced a friend to read it. They found a new genre or author that spoke to them. They got used to reading for 20 minutes, then 30, then longer. At the end of the year, so many students would tell me that they'd finished the required pages for my class and then KEPT READING.

Sustained reading is a skill. You have to practice it. And sustained reading is what makes reading enjoyable because experiencing a novel in 30 second bursts is not fun.

While the article focuses on students, I suspect a similar phenomenon is happening in any workplace where people are being required to use generative AI extensively for their work.

The "muscles" built by the work are atrophying because they're no longer doing the work and instead farming it out to generative AI.

My suspicion is that in a few years, some workplaces won't hire folks who come from other workplaces that have leaned too much on generative AI, because the workers will have lost much of their critical thinking ability.

Reading the discussion here, I thought about this piece from a few months ago: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are.

Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it. I know this because I had them identify obscure passages, without notes, devices, or books at hand. Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, Walden!—could do precisely that.