Phones Are Destroying Kids’ Ability To Read Books

It turns out that even “elite college students” can’t muster the cerebral capacity and mental acuity to read books.

The edgy title of last week’s article in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” certainly attracted clicks and evoked the intended volume of outrage. But the subtitle of the article, “To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school,” haughtily points the finger at the wrong assailant.

There are some things that can only be known if you spend your life with teenagers in a modern American high school. And, to be generous, I am glad professors at elite colleges like Columbia and the University of Virginia are finally waking up to the deflating reality that our children’s brains have been utterly soiled by the digital spigot of triviality they endlessly consume.

Rest assured, high school English teachers would absolutely love to assign more books and more reading. They would love to share their bibliophile tendencies with the children sitting in front of them. They would cheer at the prospect of having students read the books they assign.

But they can’t and they know it.

It’s not because of No Child Left Behind or Common Core or because of a “shift in values.” High school English teachers are in the trenches, hearing in real time what journalists and academics will only learn about months or years from now.

For example, teenagers now keep their phones on all night. Why? So, they never miss a message, no matter what time it is. Zombie teens aren’t going to rush to read Jane Austen or Sophocles any time soon.

Moreover, they also realize that if they assigned more books there are now various digital tools that empower students to evade the actual task of reading a book cover to cover. They ask ChatGPT to summarize a book. They use Spark Notes. They purée different forms of AI to help with whatever academic chore they are assigned to complete.

Just how frustrating is it to ask a modern teenager to read a book?

Riding a bike in New York City, or even on a college campus, takes real focus to avoid a dangerous collision. But where I live in California’s central valley, teenagers are constantly riding their bikes down long straight sidewalks while dangerously staring at their phones. Teens who ride horses in my rural suburb can be seen doing the same thing.

And yet we somehow expect these same kids who can’t enjoy a simple bike or horse ride to sit down in a corner and spend hours reading a book. Keep in mind one of the most shocking yet revealing statistics in modern educational research: teens are more likely to read a novel at thirteen than they are at seventeen. As one of my best friends recently observed, “My son used to be a voracious reader — a couple books a week. And then we gave him a phone and the reading stopped.”       

Along these same lines, journalists should know what’s coming next. A lot of high school students now admit their attention spans are so truncated and weak they have given up watching movies in theatres altogether. Last year, there was a report that young Americans were using subtitles when they stream content, not because they like to read, but because it allows them to stay glued to their phones while simultaneously watching a movie or TV show.

Which brings me to another demoralizing data point in the quickly degenerating mental state of American students. Two weeks ago, Pew Research released disturbing findings about American educators which found that 58 percent of high school instructors noted their students had “little to no interest” in learning. A whopping, though completely unsurprising, 72 percent say cellphone distraction is a major problem.

Only a third of teachers say they are “very satisfied” with their jobs. Something tells me few of these were English teachers.

All this bad news points to the same disconcerting truth about our era of education: The reliable sanctuaries of meaning in human life are being summarily displaced by a world-historic retreat in intellectual and communicative capacity.

Imagine a future populated by human beings who cannot delight in books and films and higher culture. Imagine a future filled with soulless denizens who don’t know how to communicate the complexities of their feelings or explain the nuances of their thinking. Imagine a future in which the one feature of our humanity that gives rise to science and art and all the refined trappings of human civilization itself — the power to think — has been compromised by an addiction to an infinite supply of meaningless digital droppings.

Those of us who describe ourselves as “educational romantics” view the classroom as an inspiring amalgam — part Delphic oracle, part launchpad. We view learning as a continual process of mental and emotional enlargement. Learning makes the world deeper and richer by inviting our questions and, hopefully, rewards the quest for wisdom.

What we have today is not an enlargement of the self, but a metastasizing diminishment of our children’s capacity to reason, imagine, and converse. It raises a simple but tragic question: Is it too late?