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‘There’s so much they can’t process,’ professor says
Gen Z students are struggling to read and comprehend a sentence, one Pepperdine University professor recently said.
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Humanities Professor Jessica Wilson told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”
“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,” the professor said.
Wilson also said that even when she reads passages in class with the students, “there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”
As a result, Wilson has shifted to approaches like reading passages aloud as a group, breaking them down line by line, and revisiting the same poem or text multiple times throughout the semester, according to Fortune.
“I’m not trying to lower my standards. I just have to have different pedagogical approaches to accomplish the same goal,” Wilson said.
The professor also warned of the consequences of declining literacy.
It results in “polarization, anxiety, loneliness, a lack of friendship,” as “all of these things happen when you don’t have a society that reads together,” she said.
University of Notre Dame Theology Professor Timothy O’Malley expressed a similar frustration to the outlet, saying that students are not accustomed to reading assignments.
When he first began teaching, O’Malley assigned between 25 and 40 pages per class. “Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” he said, adding that they rely too heavily on AI-generated summaries.
Columbia University Literature Professor Nicholas Dames told The Atlantic that his students “seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.”
Meanwhile, University of Virginia Chinese-literature Professor Jack Chen said he notices his students “shutting down” when they encounter ideas they don’t understand. They no longer have the mental stamina to work through a difficult text.
Alongside the decline in reading proficiency, writing skills have also fallen sharply, according to a recent report from the University of California San Diego.
Experts told The College Fix the crisis stems from a mix of pandemic disruptions, the abandonment of standardized testing, poor teaching methods, and a focus on equity over excellence.
What’s more, according to the Fordham Institute, Gen Z is not only struggling to read, but also to tell the time.
New York City schools report that high school students are unable to read analog clocks after a recent ban on smartphones in the classroom. Education policy expert Dale Chu wrote that this points to broader gaps in fundamental skills, even among college students.
“There have been many shifts since Millennials and Gen Xers were in school—away from mental arithmetic, timed math drills, and memorized multiplication tables and toward looser, less structured approaches—but too often these routines faded without a serious reckoning over their value,” Chu wrote.
“Telling time looks less like an outdated relic than a casualty of a broader drift away from rigor and mastery,” he wrote.
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