This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester [at Columbia University], 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.
Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she 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.
Do you think it’s due to smartphones? Even if it isn’t entirely from the smartphones, maybe from a sort of apathetic, helplessness culture that virally spreads via smartphones?
Two reasons why I suspect it’s due to smartphones — people read a lot more before they existed, including me. I’ve also seen kids grow up who read a lot of books until they got a phone and now they don’t read books.
Same here on both counts. In the 1990s I used to read tons of books, and spend the rest of my time coding for fun and playing music.
Now I only listen to audiobooks (slowly/sporadically) and spend more time watching Youtube videos about coding and music than actually doing them.
And my kids have drastically reduced their book reading since getting smartphones too.
As a book lover, it’s upsetting young people are reading less. I don’t have children, nor do I even own a smartphone, so I can’t really comment from any personal experience.
All I know is, I’m 46 years old and in both middle school and high school we had LOTS of required reading, even during Summer break. Not just for English class, but for other classes like Psychology. I still managed to read plenty of books for leisure.
(Although, in my opinion, smartphones do play a hand in an increasing lack of focus, not just in young people, but adults also.)
One thing that pops to mind in the sense of focusing on the pros is something my graduate supervisor suggested back when emojis were first appearing on the scene…
Such as on the Nokia phones we were all suddenly carrying around…
He said that hieroglyphics were once a thing. We’ll probably be alright, so long as we embrace the changing of the guard.
If history shows anything, it’ll just keep changing and you never know when print might swing back… or something completely new and unusual that we’ll also want to consider embracing in order to enjoy the shifting tide.
Such is the problem of social networks that even playing video games becomes more demanding than getting lost in social networks designed to engage people’s brains, that is, to steal your attention.
I mean I think it’s all true and that children growing up with smartphones isn’t a good thing. And I do remember being more creative when I couldn’t reach to that little device every time I have any down time.
But I also remember the teachers asking me if I had really read all the books on the bibliography of my “maturity paper” (the one you do at the end of high school) because they thought it was a lot of long books.
And I was baffled “are you kidding me? This paper is written over two years and you think ten books is too much?”
So there were plenty of kids who didn’t read before smartphones (even among the lot who arguably chose an academic path rather than a practical one).
The smartphones distracting people is at least in part a symptom of other things rather than the whole cause. It doesn’t help that’s for sure, but it’s too simplistic to believe that if we didn’t have the smartphones the problem wouldn’t exist.
Smartphones and social networks obviously are related. But there are a lot of things. I my country books are expensives.you can read but not what you want. You have to have acces to a big library for this. On the other side the Phone is so easy to use and could make a lot of things. Are TV Phone answer to questions etc. Its not the fault only of the phones. The People commonly have no places to read long books. You need silence and quiet palaces
Hi. There are not less reading. People read more than 30 years ago. But they read simple things at the Phone. Not complex books. Except People Who study something.
