"The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse," writes Tyler Jagt, a literature and critical writing professor who has taught at several colleges, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Jagt is only the latest university professor to declare this generation of students to be nearly illiterate. In fact, it has been a common refrain among college teachers over the last couple of generations.
While Jagt acknowledges this, he brought the receipts for this critique.
Instead of addressing this crisis, "the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires," according to Jagt.
Adam Kotsko, who teaches at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who were, at one time, able to handle 30 pages of reading per class now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.”Kotsko added that this “is not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but rather a "lack of underlying skills" they were never given a chance to develop.
This is due almost entirely to the "whole language" philosophy of reading and writing still being taught to students, which has decimated the skill level of grades 1-8.
Whole language is an educational philosophy and method for teaching reading and writing that treats literacy as a natural process—much like learning to speak. Instead of breaking language down into its component parts (like letters and sounds), the whole language approach focuses on the construction of meaning through authentic literature, writing, and context.
Popularized extensively during the 1980s and 1990s, it has become one of the most fiercely debated topics in modern education.
Children are exposed to whole texts (storybooks, poems, and journals) rather than isolated vocabulary lists or phonics workbooks. Phonics has only recently been reluctantly added to this philosophy.
When I was a kid learning to read, if I came across an unfamiliar word, I was told to "sound it out" using phonics rules to figure it out.
Today, when encountering an unfamiliar word, students learning to read based on the principles of whole language are taught to guess it using three types of cues:
Meaning (Semantic): Does it make sense in the context of the story or illustrations?
Structure (Syntactic): Does it fit "grammatically in the sentence?" How you can fit a word "grammatically into a sentence when the student doesn't know much about grammar is unknown.
Visual (Graphophonic): "What does the first letter or look of the word suggest?" ("Look of a word"? Lord help us.)
Can you imagine these kids trying to read Moby Dick or Great Expectations?
Letter sounds and spelling rules are not taught in a systematic, standalone way. Instead, "they are addressed briefly and organically if they come up while reading a text."
There's that word again: "organically." Perhaps they should try burying kids under an avalanche of great books, hoping the lessons and beauty of language are absorbed "organically."
It gets worse when kids are taught to write. Young children are encouraged to write freely using "phonetic" or "invented spelling" to prioritize expression and meaning over mechanics.
A vast body of cognitive science and linguistic research has thoroughly discredited the core premise of whole language. Research proves that reading is not natural like speech; the human brain must be explicitly trained to rewire itself to translate visual symbols into sounds. Studies show that while a small percentage of children will pick up reading effortlessly through exposure, the vast majority require explicit, systematic instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness to become fluent readers.
Critics and researchers have pointed out that strategies like the three-cueing system actually mimic the habits of readers who struggle with context and meaning. Capable readers do not guess words based on pictures or context; they rapidly and automatically decode the letters on the page.
If you can't do something well, you tend to avoid it. In school, that means you end up only doing the absolute minimum (or less) to get by.
This is more than simple anecdotal evidence.
Chronicle of Higher Education:
On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
If you guessed that one of the major reasons for the catastrophic decline in reading and writing skills (beyond the whole language fiasco) was smartphones, you win a cookie.
"In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users," writes Jagt.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
If space aliens wanted to create the conditions to take over planet Earth, they would not have a better ally than ChatGPT. It's only going to get worse as students get better at using AI to do their coursework for them. They are going to allow AI to do their thinking for them.
What will it be like in 20 years? I probably won't be here to see it, but I am not optimistic.
