How can we get students back to reading books?

Maybe I'm too old and out of touch, but I think it's a real problem that there's a whole generation of college students who aren't used to sitting down and reading books.

This really hit me about 15 years ago. I was part of an interview panel for a thing for graduating seniors. One of the interviewees was a English major, with a concentration in Literature. I wanted to be welcoming with what I thought would be a softball question: "Who are some of your favorite authors?" Apparently, this wasn't small talk to them. They ended up naming an one author (I entirely forget who) who had written one well-known book that is part of the contemporary high school canon for high school. It was so long ago I don't recall the details, but I remember being a bit stunned by the impression that a Literature major was apparently not in the habit of reading books. When I asked my colleagues in that department about this, they let me know that this wasn't so surprising.

A lot of students show up at college without having read a single book from start to finish, and not being expected to have done so. Many high schools aren't even assigning books anymore?! Students aren't really surprised that reading has been on the decline. And before you imagine this is about me teaching at a school that is in the basement of the university wealth rankings, this phenomenon stretches across socioeconomic barriers. Rich kids aren't reading either.

I'd like to think that I'm not a fuddy-duddy. I understand that the information age has transformed how all of us we navigate the world. Without social media or the internet of any kind, I remember using an encyclopedia and going to the library to find the answer to a question. When I was helping move my dad out of the house I grew up in, I found a few stray boxes of my stuff, one of which was chock full of letters. Correspondence with friends from high school and college days. We wrote letters to one another? Huh.

Anyhow. I know that life happens at a faster pace and everybody's attention span – most assuredly my own – is not what it used to be. Heck, sitting down to watch an entire 2-hour film seems like a commitment. When I've recently watched some old Columbo episodes, the pacing was so darn slow compared to what we're used to nowadays. Yet, somehow I've managed to retain the habit of getting into a book, even though there's an itch to repeatedly check my phone. Though I recognize the itch is there.

That said, isn't this decline in reading an objectively bad thing? Shouldn't people heading off to college be experienced and comfortable with reading whole books?

If those questions are easy to answer with "Yes," and "Yes," then here is a question that is really hard to answer: What are we, as science professors, able to do about the decline in reading? What can we do in the classroom and with our curricula to address this problem when it lands in our courses? It's possible for science classes to contain whole books but it's far from the norm. (I took a seminar course in which we read Earth In the Balance, which by the way was a transformative experience. But the entire point of the seminar was to go through that one book chapter by chapter, in detail.)

If we were to assign a whole book along with everything else in our courses, that would be just too much, or even if it wouldn't be too much, it would be perceived as too much and well outside the norm.

The decline in student reading harms our their development in STEM fields because reading comprehension comes with practice and experience. If our students are reading less, that means they are understanding less of what they read. (And all those links I shared at the top of the post explain how this pops up in standardized assessments.)

It's a fundamental educational problem that we're not really dealing with for science majors. I'm not sure what we can do about this, except perhaps when we are teaching first year seminar type courses, to make sure that we read at least one whole book.

The title of the post asks, "How?" and I think the answer is bigger than what happens in universities. But we can at least try to normalize reading a bit more?

To be clear, even though I enjoy reading for pleasure, I'm not expecting that everybody else should have fun reading on a regular basis. For those with enough leisure time for diversions, there are so many other things that can be enriching. Even if it's not enriching, people are free to do whatever the heck they want and that's just fine with me. But I do think that one of the fundamental parts of higher education is the capability and practice of reading books. And if someone who is able to read doesn't read books at all? Of any kind, not even once in a while? Okay, I'll admit to being judgy about that. I'm just saying that reading books should be a lot more normal than it is nowadays.

(By the way, if you're curious about my reading habits, I'm reading about one book per week on average, sometimes more when I have more personal time. I realize this is a lot compared to some people, but also far less than a lot of people I know too. I usually have a couple books that I'm working through at any given moment. Usually I have a nonfiction book that I read intermittently, when I want to take a break from whatever novel I'm in. Currently, it's that nonfiction is Crumb and I just started Dhalgren. In the past month or so, I've read Taft, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Black Swan Green, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the first two Murderbot Diaries. The nonfiction before Crumb was Naturalists at Sea. Best book I've read this year so far? Juice, by Tim Winton. Who, by the way, is I say is my favorite author, when asked.)