"I’ve been teaching college students for decades. Most of them can no longer finish a book"

I have spent two decades teaching humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, and my classes have always been built on one assumption: that students would do the reading. Long, dense texts, week after week. Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.

Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut. But I’ve started to wonder whether I’m fighting a trend that started long before these students ever reached my classroom.

I’m not imagining this. A 2024-2025 surveys of 1,250 high school English teachers found they assigned an average of 2.81 full books a year — down from four books annually in a comparable 2008-2009 survey of 400 teachers. Some high schoolers now read no complete books at all, only excerpts.