How the Internet Threatens the Literacy of the Next Generation

-- By LisaMiller - 15 Dec 2024

The Burgeoning Illiterate Threat

On October 1, 2024, Rose Horowitch published an article in The Atlantic titled, "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books," which explores the new phenomenon of younger generations declining to engage with literature. She targets Columbia's Core Curriculum which requires students to read all the iconic books of Western culture, and the professor in the article notes that over the past decade, students often do not complete the full reading assignments and come to college unprepared to read full books.

This story sparked my interest because I attended Columbia University, and when I entered my first year, I experienced many of the same sentiments Horowitch describes. For most students, the question was not how they would make the time to complete the readings, but how they would act like they did all the readings. During my first week in school, many student orientation leaders told me that no one ever reads all the books, and if you do you should consider it a personal accomplishment. If students at Columbia University, one of the best universities in the nation, are not interested in reading -- or even expected to read -- full books, what can we expect from future generations?

The Academic Crutches of "Shortened Passages"

This begins long before stepping onto College Walk. Reading for pleasure has gone down which makes reading always seem like a task. For students who can read entire, grade-appropriate books, the intellectual processing of reading is a brain exercise necessary for growth. The job of a student is to extract individual lessons from the texts their instructors carefully curate. Horowitch states that a public high school teacher in Illinois used to "structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills such as how to make good decisions." For example, instead of reading Homer's Odyssey to learn about leadership skills, they instead read excerpts and supplemented them with music, articles, and TED Talks to learn about leadership skills. The music, articles, and TED Talks should be the result of reading the books, not skipping straight to that step. If students are only reading parts of these lessons and not extracting the lessons themselves, then the teachers must connect the dots for them. Teaching to the test may accomplish the short-term goal of getting students into Ivy League schools, but at what cost? The job of a school is to shepherd the students into higher learning, not feed them preselected information. The academic pressures, however, only exacerbate an existing troublesome problem: a decline in youth readership.

A Watched Pot Never Boils

But this is not the fault of educators -- outside pressure from school administrators and politicians concerned with supplying the next generation's workforce would rather use this educational "shortcut" than actually invest in these students' future. And on top of that -- students just don't like to read anymore!

Reading is not supposed to be all work and no play -- it's a foundational skill that opens a world of creativity rooted in enjoyment. However, when children don’t want to read anymore, the entertainment factor gets sucked out and they are left with what seems like work to them. For decades, more than half of all nine-year-olds reported reading for fun, but that number dropped to 39% in 2020 and 16% of nine-year-olds reported never or hardly ever reading just for fun. Instead of being left with chapter books to entertain themselves, kids are left with iPads and mind-numbing games to pass the time. Their brains are being hijacked by money-hungry app developers whose goal is to keep user's eyes on the screen rather than producing intellectual value.

Tests are meant to measure a student's intelligence, but when you never establish an individual's desire to learn, you must artificially manufacture that desire elsewhere. Instead of dangling a carrot, you must use the stick. Parents and admissions officers expect a natural yearning for learning when that foundation was never there. The Internet has distracted kids from finding a personal love for reading, and the pressures to still perform build on this as they get older. Suddenly they would rather ask AI for a summary of To Kill A Mockingbird because they see getting through a novel as a chore rather than a journey to be experienced. Losing that journey means losing the critical thinking skills and capacity for intelligence that come with reading. We keep pushing, waiting, and expecting intellectual greatness out of younger generations without giving them the space to grow on their own first.

Getting Back to the Basics

While programs like No Child Left Behind or the rise of academics geared towards standardized testing undeniably have their negative effects on students, the real agitator is the younger generation’s lack of desire to read. This coupled with the Internet rapidly taking over all facets of life, there are surmounting influences discouraging them from reading. The Internet has created these distractions and now attempts to "fix" the problem it created through tools like AI podcasts. Educators have to adapt to our shortening attention spans rather than appropriately feeding a growing mind. The benefits of the Internet in children's education exist on a bell curve, and the generation of students who no longer have the full attention span to read books is at the tail-end. While research and sharing information have become more accessible, greedy corporations have taken advantage of human needs for shortcuts. What kind of world are we creating where students do not have the literary toolbox to understand, analyze, and criticize everyday political, capitalist, and social rhetoric? A society that cannot independently think is a society that is susceptible to propaganda.

The problem, however, begins long before Ivy League students arrive on campus. Regaining autonomy through knowledge and protecting our future requires us to return to the beginning, and perhaps we can start by opening up a book.