High Schoolers Aren’t Reading Anymore

From freshman to sophomore year, I’ve come to find that English classes are being wasted on students. Novels, plays, and even short stories assigned within our classes are now considered “too long” for a person to sit down and consume without the use of ChatGPT and Sparknotes. 

It has come to the point where I am unfazed when peers tell me that they didn’t even skim the required text or a collective groan is the response when any amount of reading is assigned as homework. These occurrences can be brushed off as “adjustments to technological advancements”, but the implications are crystal clear: high school students are unable to read.

This is not a new phenomenon, but it has significantly worsened in the past couple of years. Professor Emerita of Linguistics, Naomi S. Baron, has expressed concern over the increased reading decline, which has dropped “40% since the early 2000s” with the ingrainment of AI that started in late 2024, and has only gotten worse. With the ability to read slowly becoming a rarity, AI worsens this by tempting students with an “easy” substitute. This alone doesn’t ruin just reading, but it puts students’ cognitive development at risk by introducing a way to give up the mental processes used while dissecting pieces of literature to AI. Losing literacy is leading our generation of students to an unhealthy dependence as more AI users “draw upon their own thinking capacities” less and less. Reading is one of the only ways to combat this mental decline through the practice of “analyzing and formulating our own interpretations”.

Reading is how humans see the world, so books cannot die with our generation. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to, as long as our generation is intentional about change. It cannot be stressed enough the importance of reading outside of school. Based on personal experience, I’ve seen that people will always read if it revolves around a topic they are passionate about: music, deep literature, engineering, medicine, media, culture, whatever it may be. Practicing literacy does not have to be pushing yourself through 4,000 lines of Hamlet, unless that’s what you’re into.

Encouraging reading isn’t solely about getting rid AI from  classrooms, as unrealistic as it is at this point, but about regaining and preserving basic cognitive skills so we aren’t brainless zombies as the next generation. So, whether it’s a large novel or not, a news article, or something short such as a poem, taking small steps to engrain reading into your everyday lives is a healthy way to grow mentally and combat brain rotting AI.