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‘We need to fight against the rising culture of impatience and short attention spans’
Recent headlines reporting that some elite college students struggle to read an entire book — and others grapple with reading a few sentences — have prompted two center-right scholars to craft model legislation that would require students in middle and high school to read two full books per semester.
“We need to fight against the rising culture of impatience and short attention spans,” said Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and co-author of the proposal, dubbed the Books Optimize Our Kids’ Schools Act.
“It’s gotten to the point where students at Columbia University, one of the few elite schools that still requires the Great Books, often can’t finish those books,” he told The College Fix via email. “One big reason is, these students were never assigned whole books in middle or high school.”
The BOOKS Act proposes that state lawmakers craft a bill requiring students in sixth through 12th grade to read two books in their entirety per semester in their English classes.
While the model legislation does not include a specific list to choose from, it states only books that have well-established critical reputations can be selected, and at least one of the required books must have been originally published before 1900.
Kurtz said he hopes both liberal- and conservative-leaning states might adopt this legislation, so he and his co-author Mark Bauerlein “didn’t want to get too prescriptive on specific books.”
“There are provisions that discourage experimental books with no critical track record, and the fact that half the books have to have been published before 1900 means that there will be plenty of classics,” he said. “Beyond that, we wanted to leave plenty of scope for local states and school districts to make their own choices. Local control is important, and there are plenty of classical public charter schools perfectly capable of coming up with excellent book selections.”
The proposal comes after a front-page headline in the New York Times published in December 2025 declared: “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.”
Similarly, an Atlantic article from October 2024 reported: “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”
And a Pepperdine University professor recently pointed out some of her students can barely read a few sentences, adding “there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page,” Fortune reported.
The BOOKS Act argues the current state of affairs is a tragedy.
“[T]he ability to read and contemplate books is a supreme educational achievement, an essential preparation for college, an engine of maturity and happiness, the key to success in many professions, a preparation for civic participation and leadership, the primary mechanism for transmitting the culture of the West, the most effective way of accessing times and places not our own, and the core of marker of civilization itself,” it states.
Bauerlein, contributing editor at First Things and professor emeritus of English at Emory University, posted on X: “If the schools can’t or won’t make kids read entire books, legislators can.”
Kurtz, in his email to The Fix, said it’s a proposal all sides can agree on, saying it “seemed like an issue on which liberals and conservatives might unite.”
“Having the patience and the confidence in an ultimate reward to work through a great novel builds the grit for any sort of serious life project,” he said. “Any significant accomplishment requires time and commitment.”
The act would also help combat the constant scrolling students engage in today, he said.
“There’s no better way to do it than by reading great books, because you know the reward will be there: excitement, satisfaction, but also sometimes moments of puzzlement and even distaste, all on the way to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world,” Kurtz said.
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