Is reading a dying skill? An article in the November 2024 issue of The Atlantic documented the changes that have occurred in the “great books” course at Columbia University. Rose Horowitch, the article’s author, explained that Columbia’s reading course called Literature Humanities, which started in 1998,  has slowly been easing off its celebrated rigorous curriculum. The course has reduced the number of books students are required to read. Horowitch claims that these changes came in response to students being unable to read at a high level.

Not everyone at Columbia agreed with the author’s assertion. The student-run newspaper The Columbia Spectator, for example, published a response claiming that Horowitch only interviewed about five professors about this topic, “many of whom rejected the notion that students are incapable of reading at advanced levels.” 

Similarly, Columbia’s dean of academic affairs, Larry Jackson, claimed the Literature Humanities curriculum changed to address engagement levels, not reading capabilities. “In no time in those discussions did anyone who was involved in the syllabus review say, ‘I think we should cut some books from this syllabus because it’s just too hard and students don’t know how to read,’” Jackson said. “Our sense was that we were not able to have a quality engagement with the texts because we were just moving through them too quickly.” 

The article caused some introspection and conversation among the English faculty at Woodberry. Ben Hale, who chairs the English department, said, “Some teachers thought it was exaggerated, while others thought it was a fair warning,” but claims that no major changes have been made to any of Woodberry’s English courses.

Mr. Hale observed  that students today don't read on their own for pleasure as much as past students have. “Being able to dig into a book quickly takes practice — attention span is bad because of distractions,” he said.

The department thinks the issue isn't that students in the United States cannot read but that they cannot focus on the longer readings, which make it harder to assign larger books — but at Woodberry, the reading always results in good discussions and assignments. “Course loads are heavy here, leaving students less opportunity to read during their free time, which is understandable,” said school librarian Phoebe Warmack. 

Another English teacher, Trevor Thornton, claims students spend more time digesting opinions and narratives through audio and videos (through social media) than from books. So reading books seems like a laborious task rather than a pleasurable one.  

Another root of the problem is that advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier for students to get around doing the actual reading. Mr. Hale thinks AI allows students to obtain information about the books they are assigned in a quick and easy fashion but, “it takes away from the experience a reader has with pages.” 

He claims that reading is not checking a box or just gaining information.

“If that was the point, we wouldn’t read books,” he said. “Reading has a lot of purposes, like obtaining  information, of course. But it has layers of complexity. Being able to connect dots, being emotionally connected with characters, learning about life, why do people do what they do, what matters. Reading is teaching us life's questions.”