College students and recent grads are favored targets of the think piece mill. In the mid-2010s, TIME targeted the millennials for being “lazy, entitled narcissists.” More recently, young people are being singled out for being functionally illiterate. The November 2024 issue of The Atlantic featured a viral exposé of elite college students who can’t finish or understand books, with one Georgetown University professor admitting that most Hoyas “have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.” The blame is usually placed—by The Atlantic and others—on the pandemic, the No Child Left Behind Act and Common Core, and those damn phones.
It’s undeniable that social media and test-based school curriculums have likely contributed to the death of the literary hobby. But I believe the miseducation of American youth began when we abandoned the value of self-education through literary pursuit. When will we stop…
