When I was teaching in the university in the 1990s, I always had two or three kids in a class of 30 who didn’t fit the high-achiever, go-getter mold. My institution was a selective one that sent a lot of undergraduates to law, medical, and business schools, but not these students. They didn’t seem to worry very much about grades. They didn’t come to my office before a paper was due to ask me “what I was looking for,” nor did they come to me afterwards to question why they received a B- on the final version.
Their dress was a little sloppy and manner easy-going. They visited my office to talk, but their focus was less on specific class matters than it was on thoughts inspired by the fiction, prose, and poetry we’d covered. If I mentioned a work in class that wasn’t on the syllabus and wouldn’t appear on a test, they might read it anyway and drop by to discuss it the following week.
In my last 10 years of teaching, from 2010 onward, I rarely had a student like that show up. They’d disappeared. It wasn’t my university’s fault. Professors at other schools would tell you the same thing if you asked. Times had changed, cellphones had taken over, and the reading habit that created these curious, offbeat kids pre-2010 hadn’t survived. The chances of forging an intellectual track separate from career and success ambitions had grown ever slimmer.
A bookish sensibility, which doesn’t form quickly or easily, couldn’t hold its own as social media and iPhones proliferated. For it to flourish, kids need to grow up in a home where books matter, parents read to them when they’re young, and leisure time isn’t absorbed by small and large screens. A few friends with similar interests help, plus a high schoolteacher or two who cultivate the reading disposition.
The cost of college may be a factor as well. When I started UCLA in the late ’70s, the price of admission was a measly $400 a year. (I can hear parents with kids in school at the present time groan at the price tag.) The low cost allowed me to jump around from field to field without declaring a major and rushing toward graduation. I didn’t select English until midway in my third year, and I didn’t feel like I’d wasted the previous semesters or that I was embarrassingly behind (though it took me five years a few summer sessions to compile enough credits and requirements to finish). At that level of payment, an extra year was no big deal.
Now, of course, for students to take their time, to treat college as a period of exploration, to concentrate on the growth of mind and improvement of taste ... students can’t afford it and they’re not disposed to it. College is a stepping-stone, a rung on the ladder of prosperity, a rite of passage into good jobs and graduate programs in the professions. It has to be. High-strung and stressed-out, they do their schoolwork and, once it’s done, hit their social media, games, and videos. They need to relax, to go brain-dead for a few hours. To spend their off-hours reading a book by Nietzsche or watching a production of “As You Like It” because a teacher mentioned it in passing is out of the question. They don’t see the benefit.
I miss those other ones. I remember one of them from the mid-’90s, a blond kid in T-shirt and jeans who took an American literature survey class with me. He wasn’t the best writer in the class, and his speech didn’t stand out as particularly articulate. If you saw him on the sidewalk you might not notice anything special about him. But in class and in my office he addressed the material with a careful penetration, as if it were matter for slow reflection. Thoreau, I recall, made him think hard. He read the counsel of Walden as if it really did propose a way to live in 1990s America, a challenge he should face.
We spoke a dozen times during the semester. If I spotted him relaxing on the quad, smiling and barefoot, I would nod. I’m not sure he was a happy young man—there were, perhaps, some elements of spiritual unease inside him—but he possessed a calm that others didn’t, a grounding that others lacked. I wonder what happened to him.
I’m not teaching any longer. My 30 years at Emory were enough. From 1990 to 2020, I and all my English colleagues across the country witnessed a loss of what we cherished. When I was a college student, English stood for an experience dear to a fair percentage of American youths. They had read novels and short stories on their own and in high school that stuck with them. I had friends in Grade 9 who thought Poe was very cool. Later, I saw a few 17-year-olds drawn to “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Catch-22,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and other offerings. Kids like that packed our college courses and never needed to hear their teachers proclaim the value of reading. They believed what we believed; lots of them wanted to be like us. They wanted to hear us explain what’s going on with the “Invisible Man” in Ralph Ellison’s novel.
Those of us old enough to have taught back then shake our heads in disbelief and dismay when we hear professors at elite colleges describe the difficulty students have with any books at all of decent heft. Their complaints make 1985 sound like a Golden Age.
We’re now in the Digital Age, and the spreading movement to ban cellphones in school indicates the damage Web 2.0 has done to young hearts and minds. The bans should proceed nationwide, and a curricular reform should accompany them. The phones have killed book reading, but confiscating the former will not revive the latter. The reading habit must be instilled, deliberate, and systematic. Call it “remedial reading” or whatever you want, but send young Americans out of high school knowing that book reading is as important to their lives as anything social media can offer.
