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How the Internet Threatens the Literacy of the Next Generation

-- By LisaMiller - 23 Oct 2024

The Burgeoning Illiterate Threat

On October 1, 2024, Rose Horowitch published an article in The Atlantic titled, "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books," that explores the new phenomenon of younger generations declining to engage with literature. Horowitch starts the article with a story about Columbia University undergraduate students, showing this problem is widespread and does not spare even the so-called elite and erudite students. As part of the Core Curriculum, Columbia students take a course which requires them to read all the iconic books of Western culture, and the professor in the article notes that over the past decade students often do not complete the full reading assignments and come to college unprepared to read full books.

This story sparked my interest because I attended Columbia University, and when I entered first-year just in 2019, I experienced many of the same sentiments Horowitch describes. For most students, the question was not how they would make the time to complete the readings, but how they were going to act like they did all the readings. My first week in school, many of the student orientation leaders told me that no one ever reads all the books, and if you do you should consider it a personal accomplishment. If students at Columbia University, one of the best universities in the nation, are not interested in reading–or even expected to read–full books, what can we expect from future generations?

The Academic Crutches of “Shortened Passages”

For students who have the capability to read entire, grade-appropriate books, the intellectual processing of reading is a brain exercise necessary for growth. The job of a student is to individually extract lessons from the texts their instructors carefully curate. Horowitch states that a public high school teacher in Illinois used to “structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks.” The music, articles, and TED Talks are supposed to be the result of reading the books, not skipping straight to that step. If students are only reading parts of these lessons and not extracting the lessons from it themselves, then the teachers must connect the dots for them. The job of a school is to shepherd the students into higher learning, not feed them preselected information.

But this is not the fault of educators–outside pressure from school administrators and politicians concerned with supplying the next generation’s workforce would rather find use this educational “shortcut” than actually invest in these students’ future. Horowitch writes, “Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.” Teaching to the test may accomplish the short-term goal of getting students into Ivy League schools, but at what cost? Society’s current view of academics is very output based: how can I get the highest grade or get into the best school? Mounting pressures lead to Internet tools like Google’s NotebookLM, which uses Artificial Intelligence to summarize class material and notes into a two person podcast that outlines the concepts in a simple manner. The use of AI in education is a slippery slope that can quickly devolve into perpetual reliance if we’re not careful.

Getting Back to the Basics

While programs like No Child Left Behind or the rise of academics geared towards standardized testing undeniably have their negative effects on students, the real agitator is the Internet rapidly taking over all facets of life. The benefits of the Internet in children’s education exist on a bell curve, and the generation of students who no longer have the full attention span to read books are at the tail-end. While research and sharing information has become more accessible, greedy corporations have taken advantage of human needs for shortcuts. The Internet has created these distractions and now attempts to “fix” the problem it created through AI podcasts. What kind of world are we creating where students do not have the literary toolbox to understand, analyze, and criticize everyday political, capitalist, and social rhetoric? A society that cannot independently think is a society that is susceptible to propaganda. Media literacy is pertinent in today’s technological landscape, and according to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, deep reading creates critical thinking and self reflection habits “in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.” At this current rate, the next generation will know how to follow the shoes of their predecessors and trust what they are being fed rather than ask questions. After all, that is supposed to be the job of higher education, including law school: telling future lawyers how to think, not what to think.

The problem, however, begins long before Ivy League students arrive on campus. It begins in elementary schools when state legislatures ban books on topics of racism, sexuality, gender, and history. Censorship in public schools controls the bounds of the students’ minds before they can even realize what is happening. Horowitch states, “For years, [a Columbia University professor] has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books.” The shortened attention spans and desire to be entertained at all times stumps exploration and self-reflection. Students can open the Internet and expect to find the answer immediately, or have tomorrow’s 75 page reading summarized into 75 words in less than a minute. Banning books further pigeonholes our future leaders into a silo of stunted intellectual curiosity and dependency on Internet tools. We’re losing the foundational skills to survive on our own, relying on a select few that know everything and have us at their whim. Regaining autonomy through knowledge and protecting our future requires us to go back to the beginning, and perhaps we can start by opening up a book.

I have some trouble believing that the culture-war book banning furor is itself contributing to loss of book-reading. As we have seen, even in our classroom nobody believes children have a right to read what they want (except me) so it is clear that everyone expects some books to be banned (except me), yet children have read for pleasure forever. And survey data concerning children's reading for pleasure shows precipitous declines in states and countries that don't ban books too. So I think we can leave that element aside.

Nor do I think that we can expect school reading to be the source of children's reading musculature alone. Without reading for pleasure, academic reading will always be work, and students will do less than they are told to do of it.

So reading for pleasure's decline is the phenomenon to focus on, I think. That could be wrong, of course. The pleasure of reading is entirely absent from your account in this draft altogether. Either you do think I'm wrong, in which case it would be good to read about your reasons, or there is another part of this essay, for which we could make room by quoting Horowitch les extensively.

Yes, I read a great deal more in college than you did,particularly if you are right that the Core isn't actually read by the people studying it. But all the assigned reading I did in school was not more than 5% of all I read growing up. So we might begin with a simple exercise in hour-counting. I think that will tell you what has happened. Considering what can be read by a young retentive person in all those thousands of missing hours, one can roughly quantify the extent of the intelligence loss that has occurred. But no one wants to; it's too scary.

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