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You may remember the stories about how college students, even English Lit ones, had lost the ability to read novels.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”
Can they watch movies? No, and while this is more about the study of film, film audiences are aging and it’s not just that Gen Z is less likely to go to theaters, they’re less capable of watching a conventional ‘film’ as opposed to the 300,000 spliced together fight scenes, close ups, special effects shots overlaid with ironic music choices and quips that make up a Marvel movie and have no coherent plot.
They watch podcasts and clips of things. Not movies.
Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”
I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.
Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California—home to perhaps the top film program in the country—said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation. At the outset, he told students that even if they ignored parts of the film, they needed to watch the famously essential and prophetic final scene. Even that request proved too much for some of the class. When the scene played, Lippit noticed that several students were staring at their phones, he told me. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he said.
Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition. Professors whose syllabi require in-person screenings outside of class time might see their enrollment drop, Meredith Ward, director of the Program in Film and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Accordingly, many professors now allow students to stream movies on their own time.
You can imagine how that turns out. At Indiana University, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he said, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. (Recall that these are students who chose to take a film class.)
After watching movies distractedly—if they watch them at all—students unsurprisingly can’t answer basic questions about what they saw. In a multiple-choice question on a recent final exam, Jeff Smith, a film professor at UW Madison, asked what happens at the end of the Truffaut film Jules and Jim. More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie). Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.
Everyone grades them on a curve. And that’s the problem.
Matt Damon, the star of many movies that college students may not have seen, said that Netflix has started encouraging filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes of a film to get viewers hooked. And just because young people are streaming movies, it doesn’t mean they’re paying attention. When they sit down to watch, many are browsing social media on a second screen. Netflix has accordingly advised directors to have characters repeat the plot three or four times so that multitasking audiences can keep up with what’s happening, Damon said.
Believe it or not, movies are joining novels as a niche art. The future will be some sort of interactive videogame that can be watched distractedly or interacted with in bite size segments. Movies, like novels, will be for a smaller and more discerning audience.
When we talk about the end of Western Civilization — this is it. No reading, no films, no art… Nothing but endless gibberish on smart phones.
The question that immediately pops up is: why do these non readers get accepted to English Lit classes to begin with?
And of course, another question is: have these students ever finished a children’s book from cover to cover? Possibly not. And how many mothers/fathers/carers READ books to kids out loud?
Sorry your comment was more than two sentences beyond my 4 year old attention span. But I gave you a thumbs up only.
Good questions. Even my mother read to me before I learned to do it myself, and I have trouble imagining retards who don’t read or even watch movies except the ones made for mental defectives.
Colleges and universities are a sick joke nowadays and any retard can attend for their left-wing indoctrination, which explains why those tards are accepted to English literature classes.
Welcome the zombie generation. Who will own nothing, know nothing and will be serves to digital gods.
a..k..a -The elites who will control their lives from cradle to grave-
Dan, normally I read every word and sometimes twice because your articles are concise and carry more punches in than a prize fight. But once you mentioned attention span of youth I thought of two things. No wonder they are moronic reactionaries rioting on their college or university day care their parents money sent them to that is failing them to get a life after college. Because the youth are failing themselves. Why is this? Their brains are wired for computing and not reading and now even movies? They will learn life the hard way. They were addicted to online privilege from an early age.
Then you bring up “The Conversation” I recall seeing in the old Venice movie theater in 1974 with a group of friends high on pot and lsd. And you could hear a pin drop. I recall every moment of that thriller. Especially the ending.
The generations of idiots are in colleges save the technology and science students. Really, why is someone even taking a literature course let alone as a declared major if they do not love reading. I have an 8 year old great niece who reads like her little face is always in a book. She is very intense and don’t ever tell her she can’t read. This skill will get her far.
What these students need is to have all computing taken away from them and given a regular flip cell phone and no smartphone for 3 weeks and see how they change, then 6 months and so on.
We are not a better off nation of having a bloody computer on us at all times.
Smart phones and social media rot kids’ brains, that’s for sure.
The civil order might survive ignorant college literature or film students, but the social death knell of ordered liberty is sounded by the DEI law students and faculty at Harvard and elsewhere who actually have contempt for the rule of law. Yes, those DEI proto-fascists actually contend that something they call “diversity” trumps the quintessential precept of civil libertarian freedom: Equality before the law!
“Diversity” is America’s weakness and unity is our strength. What the D-Bag left calls DEI is actually conformity, inequity and exclusion of disfavored demographics anyway. All left-wing precepts and notions are false, retarded and destructive. They really are. They’re like islamopithecines that way.
The dumbing down purpose of tech addiction was depicted perfectly in Truffaut’s 1966 movie version of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” when the hero’s wife (Julie Christie) and her friends become moron zombies watching Wall Screens 24-7 (and taking “medications” for every neurotic anxiety) until her husband smashes the screens and reveals to her that he reads books! She leaves him. Gorgeous movie and so true to the book’s concept that the opening credits are voiced over and no words appear on the screen until the last frame: “The End”.
I often lament that the richness of the countless books and movies and art and magazines from my past that made me who I am and still does has passed from modern life. I read books from my massive personal library and watch movies from my massive collection of literally 1000s of mp4s every day (along with info mining the internet to monitor modern Totalitarianism). I don’t have tv and have never had a “smart phone” or used “social media” and never will. I feel like a ghost in the machine walking amidst younger people who are totally alien to me and often seem to me like animals — creatures living a totally different reality than the one that gave and still gives my life meaning.
I never have radios or tv or cell phones or laptops playing in the background so I’m often asked by tech-addict younger family members when they visit me how I can just sit in stillness or do boring household chores for long periods without any distractions and I always say, Silence is its own reward — it allows me think. They look at me as if I just landed from another planet and I wish I had — it would take the edge off the despair I feel watching them devolve into lesser human beings and knowing there is nothing I can do to help them because their brains are now tech-poisoned and cognitively no longer capable of the sustained concentration needed for reading books. Sad.
Very interesting.
“The Conversation” was a hard one. I went decades without understanding it, finally had to read a cheat sheet 🙂
Cheat sheets were always good, but I might never have been able to turn in a HS book report without Classic Comic books.
I remember reading those Classic Comic Books when I was a boy. They had them in my Jr High and similar material in my grade school because teachers were educators back then, not indoctrination agents of the organized left. The comics were good and had good illustrators. . They got me to read the classic books themselves just like movie adaptions did. “A Tale of Two Cities” by Dickens comes to mind.
Yeah, “The Conversation” was pretty slow. so it was hard to follow. Gene Hackman was great, as usual. It was a Martin Scorcese movie so it had the young Harrison Ford and Cindy Williams in it, like American Graffiti. I’ve always liked them. I haven’t seen Williams since that Rodney Dangerfield movie, “Meet Wally Sparks.” My Indonesian girlfriend’s mother liked it even though she had to use Indonesian subtitles to watch it. Those old laser discs were much better than DVDs, even though they were the size of old vinyl records.
Literature students in college don’t read and film students don’t watch movies? WTF? Here’s an idea for the perfessors. Fail the hammer headed mutants. Good God, how lazy and superficial are kids nowadays? Thank God I don’t depend on them for anything.
This whole situation with toddlers in kindergartens being trained in anti-ICE slogans and teachers bunking off school to take their students on anti government demos reminds me of the Chinese cultural revolution.
Consider also the Cambodian autogenocide. Those living in cities were marched to the countryside as class enemies. Those wearing glasses were especially targeted as educated.
Next there will be cannibalism in the streets, like in the Chinese cultural devolution.
If young people want to see their future, it was all written in 1925 by T.S. Eliot. Their story will end this way:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
From “The Hollow Men.”
Nuclear bangs are inevitable. They won’t end the world, though.
Every time they lower standards, they lower the value of my own degree. Maybe they shouldn’t major in English Literature if they are intimidated by English Literature. There are trade schools were young people can learn something that contributes to society. They will also be an endless need for ditch diggers.