Public schools perpetrating “crime” of illiteracy on students as ‘iPhone generation’ approaches college age, professors warn 

An increasing number of professors at first-tier colleges are lamenting the lack of reading skills in their students from public schools, with some educators calling it a national “literacy crisis.” 

Even without hard numbers about the extent of this phenomenon, anecdotal evidence from The Atlantic suggests a “concerning rate of illiteracy (they) are seeing in their classrooms from first-year students,” noted Nia Tipton for YourTango.com. 

“Their revelation has added to the growing crisis in many American public schools, where students are severely behind in their reading levels.” 

For example, Tipton quotes from Victoria Kahn, professor of literature at UC Berkeley, who has cut her previous weekly assignment of 200 pages by more than half. 

“I don’t do the whole ‘Iliad.’ I assign books of ‘The Iliad.’ I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” she said. “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.” 

Intellectuals suggest several factors for the decline in reading ability – including an overdependence on screens, misplaced emphasis on graduation rates and teaching to standardized tests instead of long-form prose. 

‘The iPhone … is approaching college age’ 

Adam Kotsko, a humanities professor at North Central College near Chicago, expressed concerns in a Slate article about the “ubiquitous smartphone” taking away the ability to focus, which is required for lengthy reading. 

“It is no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age,” he wrote, “meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.” 

The introduction of the smartphone and other mobile devices has created an insatiable appetite – often encouraged by their instructors – for more screentime at ever-earlier ages. 

One public-school teacher complained online about pushback from fellow educators when she offered books for students to read during a long bus trip. 

“The special education teacher turned to one of the [paraprofessionals] and said, ‘This is why we should’ve just brought their iPads,’” she wrote. “Mind you, the kids were not acting up and were enjoying reading/looking at the books.” 

Too much screentime is robbing children of creativity and other crucial kinds of development, argues writer Mary-Faith Martinez: “Gone is the need for imagination, comprehension, and, perhaps most importantly, literacy.” 

Although the American Academy of Pediatrics once recommended no more than two hours of non-educational screentime per weekday, it has relaxed its guidelines to “suggest creating a plan for specific types” of screentime, Martinez wrote. 

“Knowing that the suggestion was once no more than two hours a day is eye-opening,” she notes, citing CDC average estimates of 6 hours of screentime for ages 8-10, 9 hours for ages 11-14, and 7.5 hours for ages 15-18. “Children are certainly getting more screentime than this.” 

As a result, college-level students have not had the opportunity to develop skills to “meaningfully engage” with books expressing complex concepts over multiple pages, according to Kotsko. 

“Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument – skills I used to be able to take for granted.” 

Focus on graduation rates, not academic performance 

Another reason for the high levels of illiteracy involves emphasis on graduation rates, not actual academics – something former teachers have spotlighted for years. 

As previously reported by The Lion, author Jeremy Noonan found himself increasingly at odds with administrators while teaching science classes in Georgia. 

“The public school accountability system, by relying solely on quantitative metrics like graduation rates to gauge educational quality and to evaluate administrators, frustrates teachers’ ability to truly teach and care for their students and look out for their long-term well-being,” he writes. 

Noonan pointed to statistical evidence where “indicators of actual student achievement have stagnated or declined, leaving only a minority of graduates prepared for college-level studies and the rest largely unprepared for anything else.” 

“A failing student is a wrench in the system,” he notes. “He lowers the graduation rate, and the school looks bad. The bureaucracy rationalizes that the students will be better off with a diploma. But if they aren’t learning, their futures are being compromised.” 

One such example is Chicago, where the public school system highlights its 84 percent graduation rate but downplays students’ dismal scores on reading and math proficiency. 

Ultimately, Noonan decided to leave his profession altogether instead of continuing the “moral inversion” of graduating students who hadn’t yet mastered the subject material. 

“An accountability system that focuses only on measurable outcomes has produced a utilitarian, ‘anything goes’ approach to education. This system suppresses the kind of moral and philosophical discourse needed to correct the flawed ideas and immoral practices.” 

Teaching to the test 

Additionally, bureaucratic tendencies may have misfired in another area some educators believe responsible for the literacy crisis – an increase in teaching to tests. 

“Rather than focusing on a genuine educational benchmark, students are being prepped for standardized tests, which in turn drive more financial revenue to school districts when their kids do well,” writes Zayda Slabbekoorn. 

“Alongside ‘infamous Common Core standard’ shifts, teachers are fighting to assign longer novels and text to their students, despite misguided evidence suggesting it doesn’t directly lead to higher test scores.” 

Kotsko even calls out these tests as “actively cannibalizing students’ education experience,” contributing to students’ failure to follow “extended narratives and arguments in the classroom.” 

“What’s happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen,” he quips. “They are being deprived of the ability to choose — for no real reason or benefit.” 

Such robbery of active learning for students will have repercussions in real-life interactions with others, he argues. 

“The world is a complicated place. People – their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires – are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions.” 

Ultimately, the current educational system should accept responsibility for “perpetrating this crime” of illiteracy upon its own students, according to Kotsko. 

“We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.”