“I first started teaching in 2013 for honors classes. Kids would be bringing books and secretly reading under their desks. No one brings books to class anymore,” AS English II teacher Jason Hunt said. Now, instead of reading, many students hide their phones under their desks.
With the rising popularity and availability of social media since the Iphone’s release in 2007, M-A English teachers have noticed a stark decline in student literacy and critical thinking skills.
Maria Angelone has been at M-A for 24 of her 32 years as an English teacher. “My students don’t score as high on reading quizzes as they used to. I give the same quizzes I’ve been giving for years, but 85% of my students used to pass their reading quizzes, and now it’s more like 55 or 60%.”
In the U.S., the percentage of adults who reported reading at least one book per year fell from 54.6 to 48.5% between 2012 and 2022. The number of 13 year olds who reported reading for fun “almost every day” fell 13% from 2012 to 2023. For eighth and twelfth graders, national reading scores have been continuously dropping from 1992 to 2019.
The SAT has removed its section on advanced vocabulary, a skill that comes mainly from reading.
American literacy is declining.
Reading for pleasure is shown to have a strong link to literacy, academic performance and cognitive health. In a survey of over 250 M-A students, over 80% said they read two or fewer books outside of class in the last six months, and 35% said they hadn’t read any.
“I do a whole lesson where I ask students how often they read, what they read, and how they learned to read. Over 90% of my students say they don’t read for pleasure, and sometimes they don’t even read assigned books,” Angelone said.
Attention Spans
Freshman Edward Thompson noted how, although he wants to read for fun more, he finds it difficult to concentrate.”When I’m reading, I can’t only read. I have to do something else like listen to music or try to play games. When I try to play games, I always want to watch TikTok while playing,” he said.
Thompson isn’t the only one. While research is still emerging, many experts have connected excessive social media use with a shorter attention span and, in some cases, the development of ADHD symptoms. A shorter attention span makes reading, focusing, and dissecting complex texts more difficult.
Compulsive use of TikTok also “correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, and contextual thinking” according to an internal study by TikTok itself.
Even Hunt admits to falling victim to his phone. “When I was 15, I read the entire seventh Harry Potter book in a day,” Hunt said. “And now, I can’t even get through a couple of chapters without feeling distracted and needing to do something else. I blame my phone. Was I a better, more conditioned reader in high school versus now?”
Time
Only 15% of surveyed students said their reading has increased since middle school, and over half have noticed a decrease.
For many students, high school comes with increased academic rigor, homework, sports, extracurricular activities, and the stress of college admissions.
“When I was in middle school, I would read a lot, maybe an hour and a half on school days. Come sophomore year, I stopped. There’s been more work in school and less time,” senior Heidi Chen said.
However, over the past 20 years, the time students spend on homework has significantly decreased. Students feel busier, but time spent doing school work does not align with this trend.
“I want to say that it’s a lack of time that made me stop reading, but I definitely feel like social media is taking up a lot more of my free time,” Chen said.
As of 2023, U.S. teens are spending more time on social media than they are on school work, despite a perceived increase in workload.
“We do feel busier, but part of that is that we have to check our phones for texts, and our personal emails, and our work emails. We’re simply barraged with information. It’s causing a feeling of ‘I have no time,’ and then that feeds into ‘I don’t read because I don’t have any time,’ and then ‘I don’t have the stamina because reading is like exercising and takes practice,’” librarian Catherine Burton-Tillson said.
The Future
As a result of these trends, educators have adapted to the new digital age, altering their teaching styles to encourage students to read.
“Reading that, six years ago, [M-A English teacher John] McBlair used to assign for homework and would have discussed it in class, he now has to read in class,” Hunt said. By dissecting the texts in person, McBlair can walk students through interpreting the text.
Burton-Tillson puts a lot of effort into encouraging students to check out books from the M-A library over breaks, running programs like Book Talk and raffles for gift cards if students take out books.
“We want students to be reading,” Burton-Tillson said. “There’s so much depth to what reading does: building empathy, building stamina, building critical thinking skills, building understanding for other points of view.”
“I think that if we want to see positive change, one thing that we could do is get rid of smartphones in schools, or even set a law that no teenager can have social media until they’re 16. We’ve always put profits over people. There’s no limit, so we get social media,” Hunt said.
