Faulty reasoning signals

• Negativity Bias - 33.1%
• Hasty Generalization - 22.5%
• Appeal to Emotion - 19.1%

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When a Harvard student needs ChatGPT to help with reading a novel, it’s clear that America’s high schools aren’t teaching students how to read.

A new story from The Atlantic shows the decline in literacy by telling the story of a Harvard student having trouble in class. Assistant Director for Humanities and Social Sciences Support Margaret Rennix said this student came to her and told her about using AI to translate Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange into easier language. Rennix told The Atlantic that the student was confused by what the student called “Old English” in the 1962 novel.

Unlike actual Old English texts like Beowulf , which some colleges still assign, A Clockwork Orange is written in English, as well as a fictional Russian-based slang called “Nadsat.” The Nadsat language is not impossible to read, however, as many internet sources contain dictionaries of the words used in the text.

Rennix explained how some students view reading in the modern age: “By asking them to read, professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium,” she told The Atlantic.

The Atlantic’s new cover story by @rosehorowitch is absolutely definitive on the end of the age of reading in America—and the emergence of a new post-literate age in modern life

Some core facts and anecdotes:

1. Reading is shrinking. The share of Americans who read for pleasure…

- Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 8, 2026

The literacy crisis has certainly made its way to universities, but it did not begin there. A survey by The New York Times found that high schoolers are reading very few full books every year — often only one or two. Rather than assigning full books, the survey found, teachers instead assign short excerpts from texts in the hopes that students will read them. In the digital era, educators are catering to students’ shortened attention spans.

“The reader of an excerpt is utterly reliant on the skill of the one who chose the excerpt, to say nothing of the good faith required to represent the original author well,” Rachelle Peterson wrote for The Federalist in March. “And the reader of excerpts is in a position of dependence on some cultural elite who made the big decisions for him.”

Aatif Rashid, teacher at UCLA’s Extension Writers Program, expressed a similar concern about excerpted texts in a post on X : “[T]he big thing that stood out to me as a teacher is how schools are actively making the reading crisis worse by reducing the number of books they assign in high school.”

The literacy decline isn’t just anecdotal. In a 2025 Education Week survey , 58 percent of educators said “a quarter or more” of their students struggle with “basic reading skills.” Twenty-eight percent of the respondents said the main reason their students struggle is a lack of motivation to read, while 19 percent blamed a lack of fluency.

This follows a concerning trend of declining literacy in America overall. The National Literacy Institute found that 21 percent of American adults are functionally illiterate in a 2024 study.

Some states such as Texas are trying their hardest to push back against the declining literacy rates among America’s students. The Texas Board of Education recently approved new curriculum that includes a literary canon , universal across all public schools. All public school students in the state will be required to read texts like Hamlet by William Shakespeare, The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, and passages from the Bible.

Transitioning back to full-length texts is the first of many steps public schools need to take to reverse this decline. Otherwise, we can expect a generation of Ivy League graduates who cannot read a high school-level novel.

Skye Graham is an intern at The Federalist. She is a senior History major at Hillsdale College and serves as the assistant features editor for the Hillsdale Collegian.

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