An article by Tyler Jagt, published on 1 June 2026, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “My Students Can’t Read” has been creating a bit of a stir this past week and I’d like to comment on its gist.
Jagt claims that his BA students’ inability to read a 20-page article (he teaches Rhetoric) suggests that there is “a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.” He worries that we’re “admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and [we] are pretending otherwise.” Universities are “conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify,” a concern many of us share.
Jagt highlights three main factors, supported by scientific research, for the diminished reading skills: the neurological loss caused by the continued use of smartphones from a still early age (10-11); the ‘cognitive debt’ or diminished ability to read and write provoked by the use of generative AI; and the introduction at US K-12 level of Common Core-influenced reading instruction, which relies on disconnected fragments rather than whole texts. He insists that US democracy is at risk because “The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.” Literacy, he says, must be rebuilt and the academy has both the willingness and the obligation to do it.
However, Jagt’s idea that banning smartphones and generative AI is urgent clashes with students’ ability to short-circuit any restrictions, as we are learning these days with the nightmare that is controlling cheating students at the Spanish university access tests. Correcting the deficits of the secondary school means correcting the deficits of the primary school and, ultimately, of society’s disinterest in literacy. As things are now, the elites that govern the world want docile citizens, preferably illiterate, to better manipulate them. Foucault explained to us already many decades ago how this is done. The (immediate) future looks bleak, particularly because those elites are not themselves particularly intelligent or well educated. They’re mostly psychopathic and stupid, but clever, a horrific combination.
I mostly agree with Jagt’s arguments, but I would like to play Devil’s advocate to argue that it’s not the case that students can’t read but that they won’t read. I want to base my argumentation on my experience of having taught this semester the subject I have mentioned lately quite often, ‘English Prose: Autobiography and Memoirs’, and on comments Jagt makes about the 20-page article his students could not read.
I’ll begin with the article. I don’t know what exact article Jagt used, but he explains that, given its importance for his subject, he split it in two and offered a version with explanatory notes to his students, thus investing time in skills that, he notes, should have been learned in middle school. In my subject, I have not used complete academic articles or chapters, much less books. Instead, I have used a selection of passages from 26 secondary sources, published between 1952 and 2025, that are essential to understand autobiography and memoirs. I have used those sources to teach my students, additionally, how new knowledge unfolds from a pioneering PhD dissertation to the establishment of the combo association-journal-conference. I also invited two friends, Felicity Hand and Esther Pujolràs, who have co-authored a first-rate academic book on life writing in the Indian Ocean, for students to enjoy the fruits of academic collaboration and friendship.
When I prepared my mini-lectures in my office the passages I selected seemed to me reasonably accessible to third/fourth year BA students. Yet, when I started reading them in class aloud, I could immediately notice that the students were having difficulties following them, not because their reading skills are inadequate (though they may be) but mainly because academic prose has become an anti-didactic jargon that only cares to address specialists like myself. I did comment on this issue in class, now and then, but decided to forge ahead and treat my students as if they were MA or PhD level students. Please, note that they are non-native speakers of English, yet, even so, they never complained that they could not follow me.
The essays the students have written, connecting each book they have read with one of the secondary sources I brought to class, have given me a clear indication of what they prefer: they like academic prose that is accessible, communicative and didactic. Jacques Derrida interested no one, but they loved Vivian Gornick, who, of course, is not an academic but a journalist and memoirist who has written very lucidly about life writing. Students can’t read academic texts proficiently, Jagt is right, but we need to discuss why current academic prose is so dull, ugly and inefficient. By refusing to read the article he gave them, his students were not only saying ‘I can’t’ but also, most likely, ‘I won’t read this text.’ Of course, the refusal to read may be connected with the frustration generated by not understanding said text, but I confess that I don’t understand much current literary theory, and I certainly don’t belong to the same demographic.
As a retired teacher in my Department reminded me, I got the wrong impression about my own 1980s cohort for not everyone read the set books or read them well. The refusal to read is co-substantial to children’s and young adults’ resistance to being educated, because that takes a huge effort. There was never a golden age when every university student was perfectly literate and able to read complex texts. And although smartphones, AI, and pig-headed educational policies are major hindrances on the road to progress, it has always been the case that most people are functional illiterates, if not downright illiterate.
If US democracy is at risk of dying, by the way, this is not because of the new conditions shaping the younger generation but the result of the political illiteracy of generations miseducated before the internet was a thing. A high degree of literacy is always desirable, and it’s the goal to which I myself and every other Literature teacher devotes all their efforts, but political Western democracy was born when most voters were illiterate. Our main worry is not the inability to read, but the inability to read critically, though I would agree with Jagt that you can hardly read critically if you can’t read. You can’t run if you don’t know how to walk. Obvious.
I would say, then, that Jagt is not adequately addressing the combination of the two key factors I’m discussing: the inability to read (and write) with the reluctance to do so in order to get an education. I have a clear example of this in my own teaching this year. In the first semester, as I have narrated here, I taught a core subject, ‘Contemporary English Literature’, for which I got ferocious criticism in the students’ surveys. In the second semester I have taught, as noted, a Literature elective. Most of the students in the elective were also enrolled in the core subject, and talking to them has confirmed my suspicion that the negative feedback came from the students who prefer Language and Linguistics. They were furious because they were being forced to take yet another compulsory Literature subject when they expected to be done with reading (we introduced ‘Contemporary’ only last year). Believe me when I say that the atmosphere in class had nothing to do with the atmosphere in the elective subject this semester.
All the students in ‘Contemporary’ did well, including the most reluctant ones, but I know that they won’t read another book in their life if they can help it. In contrast, the students in ‘Autobiography and Memoirs’, being more inclined to read, have been surprised to discover yet another genre to read and enjoy. That willingness to read and the fact that they could choose their books (from a list I provided) has greatly increased standards, which is why I could teach advanced literary theory as I did not dare do in ‘Contemporary’. Both types of students, by the way, will be getting the same degree, even though their reading skills are diverse.
My argument, if you follow me, is that, as university teachers we can’t teach students to read and write unless they want to learn, and the problem is that they’re very reluctant. We need to address that reluctance at the same time as we consider the impact of other factors. The reluctance I’m mentioning is what has sent students massively into the cold embrace of AI. In contrast, in my own subject, in which students have been actively collaborating with my teaching, I have detected no AI use. I still need to solve the problem of how to keep students looking at me instead of their laptops as I lecture, but that’s another question.
For me, the key mistake was made when primary schools started delaying the onset of reading instruction to around seven and told parents that they should not teach their children to read and write independently. My mother was taught to read by her father, a humble former shepherd later employed as a porter at a train station, when she was not yet four. She still reads non-stop. The supposedly poorly run public school of my neighbourhood taught us children to read beginning at four. At that age, kids still understand reading instruction as a game; by 7 it’s a chore. I have seen this with my nephews and nieces. Out of five, only two girls are readers, and that’s because they got interested as teens when they started to choose their own books. So, there you are: either you catch them young, or you run the risk of never catching them. Smartphones and AI don’t stop the best students from doing great work but are poison for the rest, who lack a sufficiently strong training in basic skills and quickly surrender.
On the worst days, what depresses me is the idea that we have thrown away the project to increase critical literacy for the sake of the bunch of idiots that perverted the uses of the internet. The smartphone and the laptop per se are just tools to access social networks, which are our worst enemy. If we spoke of children’s and young person’s addiction to Wikipedia that would not be a problem at all. The problem are the illiterate mediocrities making fortunes as influencers or technobros and the appalling bad example they give, as they destroy the appeal that education should have. They are the ones teaching our students that it’s cool to be illiterate and we are uncool. To add to our mortification as educators, tech companies are now telling us that we all need to train our students to be ‘AI literate’. In fact, since generative AI is not generating benefits they are desperate to push it down our throats and make us all subscribe their services, which are based on pirating knowledge.
So, students can’t read but, most importantly, they won’t for many wrong reasons. Let’s address them. More next week…