Anxious, lonely and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
From Fortune magazine, January 9:
As Gen Z ditch books at record levels, students are arriving to classrooms unable to complete assigned reading on par with previous expectations. It’s leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations.
One shocked professor has described young adults showing up to class, unable to read a single sentence.
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”
Her observation reflects a broader trend: nearly half of all Americans did not read a single book in 2025, with the habit plunging some 40% over the last decade. And even with young people embracing BookTok, a TikTok subcommunity dedicated to books and literature, Gen Z’s reading habits still lag behind all other generations. Americans aged 18 to 29 read on average just 5.8 books in 2025, according to YouGov.
“I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson admitted. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”
Students are struggling to read long passages
With students struggling, academics have been forced to adapt—a move critics describe as “coddling.”For her part, Wilson has turned to reading passages aloud together, discussing them line by line, or repeatedly returning to a single poem or text over the course of a semester—in part so students can begin to develop the skills to read critically on their own and be prepared for their post-graduate career.
“I’m not trying to lower my standards. I just have to have different pedagogical approaches to accomplish the same goal,” Wilson said, adding that she’s taught at five institutions during her 22-year tenure, and more selective ones like Pepperdine tend to have better-prepared students.
For Timothy O’Malley, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, adapting to changes in student behavior hasn’t been especially difficult. It’s always his job to tailor classes to students needs, he argued. What’s more, he said students showing up to class unprepared is nothing new.
Early in his career, O’Malley typically assigned 25 to 40 pages of reading per class —and students would either do it or admit they struggled.
“Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” O’Malley said—noting that many students instead just lean on AI summaries and miss the point of assigned reading.
He traces part of the problem to earlier stages of education, where reading has been framed as a means to an end rather than a pleasure or habit. Years of standardized testing, he argued, have also trained students to scan for information rather than sit with complex texts.
“They’ve been formed in a kind of scanning approach to reading,” he said—useful for navigating news articles online, but far less effective for engaging with dense novels or philosophical works....
....MUCH MORE
This is the generation that gets by on feelz.
We should have let them eat Tide pods.
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