In the summer or fall of 2025, while idly scrolling through X, I came across a rather interesting article from Natalie Wexler’s Substack, Minding the Gap.
The article detailed the results of a small study of 85 English majors at two Kansas universities. Researchers had students read the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and tasked them with explaining the contents in plain English to a facilitator. Because Bleak House is a nearly 200-year-old British novel — placing it firmly in an unfamiliar cultural context for the average American reader — the students were given a dictionary, reference materials, and permission to use their cell phones to look up unfamiliar terms. Essentially, the students weren’t being tested on their own prior knowledge, only their reading comprehension.
But even in this open-book environment, only four of the 85 students demonstrated a “comprehensive” understanding of the text. 32 showed a “competent” understanding, but they only understood half the text. The rest of the students were identified as “problematic” readers, almost totally unable to comprehend the passage. Wexler, a writer who specializes in education and literacy, pointed out that the problematic readers’ difficulties came from encountering words and phrases that they were unfamiliar with. Even though they had access to research materials, Wexler wrote, their unfamiliarity with Dickens’s prose style and cultural world were so profound that they simply gave up trying to understand the text. The competent readers showed a similar unfamiliarity with these words and phrases but were “comfortable with their confusion.”
As a recent college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English — and particularly as one whose junior and senior research projects centered on American literature from the same time period as Bleak House — I wish I could tell you I had been shocked at these results, or that I thought the study was a fluke. Instead, these findings only confirmed what I had already seen among my own peers in high school in Lynchburg, Tennessee, and in college at Harvard: Increasingly, young Americans aren’t comprehending the things they read.
In fact, at the end of her article, Wexler recalled a different exploration of the death of deep reading whose publication I remember quite vividly — “The End of the English Major,” a 2023 New Yorker investigation by Nathan Heller. For his piece, Heller interviewed college English professors and students around the country, including some from Harvard. Heller’s piece didn’t paint a pretty picture of Harvard English: It showcased students, including English majors themselves, talking about the unimportance of the degree and professors glibly discussing students’ declining interests and abilities in their subject. The article’s release caused quite a stir at Harvard’s Barker Center (the hub of the English department), so much so that the instructor of my sophomore tutorial — a class dedicated to learning about and applying various schools of literary criticism — adjusted the syllabus to spend a whole day at the end of the semester talking about the article and its implications for the field.
Wexler highlighted one Harvard professor in Heller’s piece who talked about her undergraduates’ failure to understand nineteenth-century syntax. Though, as she said, misunderstanding archaic syntax is “an easier problem to address” than the Kansas students’ complete failure to comprehend Dickens, it’s still likely a symptom of the same underlying condition: a systemic, educational failure to teach students to engage with difficult texts.
Natalie Wexler isn’t the only person who’s concerned with the state of reading among young Americans. In recent years, articles about Gen Z reading less or being unable to read have abounded, as have investigations into declining literacy rates among Gen Z, backed up by a plethora of studies. The full breadth of reporting and research depicts an American generation in a full-blown literacy crisis.
But that’s not to say the crisis is hopeless. Running parallel to these stories about college students unable to understand the texts they encounter is a story of a gradual recovery at the elementary school level, spearheaded by the unlikeliest of educational heroes. I’m talking, of course, about the Southern Surge in reading education: elementary schoolers in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee are improving in reading scores at astonishing rates, outpacing states like California and Vermont despite the latter spending more on education per student by comfortable margins. Mississippi, which led the charge starting in the 2010s, has overseen such great improvements that its former state superintendent, Carey Wright, was hired by the state of Maryland to deliver similar results there.
The literacy crisis is one of the most profound problems facing Gen Z and Gen Alpha. As my generation ages up into the workforce and the citizenry, lower literacy rates mean a decline in the ability to understand the world around us — including the laws and political texts upon which this country was built. And if fewer Americans understand the texts that shape our society, our society will be susceptible to changing for the worse, forgetting the whys and the hows that built the most successful, prosperous nation on earth. In the belly of that forgetting lies the possibility of national decline.
The problems.
