Often enough, I point out how politicized our education system is, to the point of being propaganda.
But the decline in education goes even deeper than the rainbow flags, focus on pronouns, calls to activism, and the relentless dishonesty. Even in those brief moments when actual “teaching” is done, the quality is poor.
Here’s the article: https://t.co/GRnsLsRxRJ
It misses the nuances of one supply-side factor, on costs.
It isn’t that schools can’t afford books… although paying for major publisher curriculum licenses eats up a lot of district budget, implicitly making it harder to afford… pic.twitter.com/XY0bhvuAlI
— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) December 13, 2025
One superb example of just how awful our educational system has become is the fact that people below a certain age are functionally incapable of reading books—assuming that they are functionally capable of reading at all, which in some school districts (Chicago, I am talking about YOU!) is very iffy.
This is the scariest chart you’ll see today. pic.twitter.com/IZglgTTNpe
— nxthompson (@nxthompson) December 17, 2025
College professors have been complaining that students are incapable of reading anything longer than a few pages and often struggle to achieve that modest goal.
icholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
Columbia University is one of the most elite schools in the world, a member of the highbrow Ivy League, and literature students can’t sit down to read a book because they were never asked to.
While I am as conspiratorial as the next guy when it comes to our cultural elite, in this case I think the problem lies more in laziness, the ignorance of teachers themselves, and a curriculum in most schools that emphasizes checking boxes. We love to romanticize our own school experiences and likely had much better educations than today’s children, so most Americans have no idea how bad the average education has become. It’s not that there aren’t good teachers and good schools, but when a student can arrive at an elite school without ever having read a single book in school, you should be hearing alarm bells.
The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.
Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”
The Times’ story on this phenomenon focuses on the major publishers that produce the texts on which curricula are based, and no doubt they have a point: this is a significant component of the problem, which is the result of a perfect storm of horrible trends that include the degrading attention span caused by electronic overstimulation—I have noticed my own attention span declining even though I don’t use the most dopamine-inducing social media apps—ignorant and politicized educators and unions, a focus (likely necessary due to declining educational attainment) on metrics, and an ideological focus on social justice.
Many were longtime teachers who reported assigning fewer whole books now than they did earlier in their careers. Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.
Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.
Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.
These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.
Students using excerpt-based curriculums are often assigned snippets of classic novels, which they access through a web interface. This program, StudySync, offers an 859-word segment of “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison.Credit…StudySync
Popular curriculum programs like the one above were created by publishing companies, in part, to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under significant pressure to raise students’ scores on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test results are also prominently featured on school-ranking and real estate websites.
The Times’ story leans into the idea that the enhanced focus on testing has corrupted the curriculum, and no doubt that is at least somewhat true. You teach to what you measure, and the ability to think in more complex ways is nearly impossible to measure. But that ignores the fact that major educational reforms were put in place because student achievement already sucked. It just keeps sucking more and more each year, and standardized testing are an incomplete and largely ineffective bulwark against the trend.
After all, the scores are plummeting, despite the focus on meeting the standards. So it’s hard to blame “teaching to the test” when even on such a low standard, the education system is failing.
Money isn’t the problem. Aside from Luxembourg, no country spends more on education, although a couple of other countries occasionally and briefly match or exceed our per-pupil spending on some measures, by tiny amounts. The US spends lavishly on education; our educrats waste that money, and no amount of increased funding will reverse that trend.
It’s the policies and the workforce, not the inputs, that are the problem. Does anybody believe that adding in another thousand dollars per pupil will make us exceed Luxembourg’s performance? Really? Could you look me in the eye and say that?
The modern world was built on literacy. Self-government cannot survive without it. Critical thinking depends on it—you can’t think if you can’t wrestle with complicated ideas and conflicting visions.
Historical illiteracy is another victim of the decline in reading. History is not a series of “events” that can be recited, as if students could even do that. How can you understand the American Revolution without understanding the Founders’ understanding of why they fought and what was at stake?
Even empathy, which is the ultimate virtue in the modern world, cannot be built without understanding the complexities of others’ experiences and the inner thoughts that reside in our minds and emotions. Novels give us a window into the souls of others, and expand our own conception of the range of human experiences.
The decline of reading is not just a tragedy that impoverishes the people who never learned how to. It is, literally, an existential threat to our civilization.
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