Source: Persuasion
by Elan Kluger
“If you sit on Dartmouth’s large outdoor common ground — ‘the Green’ — with a book, it will be assumed that you are reading for class. And even to do class readings for many people is too strenuous. I have glanced over in class at laptop screens opened to ChatGPT. Students proceed to read aloud from the AI output to earn their participation credit. Professors have told me about having to decrease the amount of pages they assign per week, but, even then, some students just cannot be bothered. One can ascribe this change to cellphones …. But it is worth considering that perhaps worries about attention spans are overstated. Serious reading has always been a fringe activity. And, besides, two hour podcasts and three hour movies seem to have become standard fare. It is not the inability to read, it is the missing inclination.” (07/15/25)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/yes-college-students-cant-read-good