I’ve been teach college students for decades. Most of them can no longer finish a book

I have spent two decades teaching humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, and my classes have always been built on one assumption: that students would do the reading. Long, dense texts, week after week. Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.Recommended Video Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut. But I’ve started to wonder whether I’m fighting a trend that started long before these students ever reached my classroom. The numbers behind my hunch I’m not imagining this.

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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.