Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

自 1998 年以来，尼古拉斯 · 达姆斯一直在哥伦比亚大学教授文学人文课程，这是该校的必修课。他热爱这份工作，但情况已经发生了变化。在过去的十年里，学生们对阅读感到不知所措。当然，大学生们从未读完所有指定的书籍，但这感觉不同。达姆斯的学生现在似乎对一学期完成多本书的想法感到困惑。他的同事们也注意到了同样的问题。许多学生不再进入大学——即使是那些高度选择性的精英大学——准备阅读书籍。

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

这一发展让达姆斯感到困惑，直到 2022 年秋季学期的一天，一名一年级学生来到他的办公时间，分享了她发现早期作业有多么具有挑战性。文学人文课通常要求学生在短短一两周内读完一本书，有时甚至是又长又难懂的书。但这位学生告诉达姆斯，在她就读的公立高中，她从未被要求读完一整本书。她被分配阅读的是摘录、诗歌和新闻文章，而不是从头到尾读完一本书。

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

“我的下巴都掉了，” 戴姆斯告诉我。这个轶事帮助解释了他所看到的学生们的变化：并不是他们不想读书。而是他们不知道怎么读。中学和高中已经不再要求他们读书了。

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

1979 年，一位颇具影响力的识字学者玛莎 · 麦克斯韦 (Martha Maxwell) 写道：“每一代人都会在某个时刻发现学生的阅读能力无法达到他们想要的水平或教授期望的水平。” 研究这部小说历史的达姆斯承认这种抱怨持续了很长时间。“我内心总是很想对这是新事物的想法持怀疑态度，” 他说。

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

然而，“我认为我们注意到一个现象，我也不得不谨慎对待。” 二十年前，Dames 的课堂上一周讨论《傲慢与偏见》，下一周讨论《罪与罚》，毫无问题。现在，他的学生们直接告诉他，阅读量感觉是不可能完成的。不仅仅是快节奏的问题；他们在跟踪整体情节的同时，难以关注到小细节。

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

没有关于这一趋势的综合数据，但我采访的 33 位教授中的大多数都讲述了类似的经历。许多教授在教职工会议和与同事的交谈中讨论了这一变化。普林斯顿的历史学家安东尼 · 格拉夫顿表示，他的学生来到校园时，词汇量更小，对语言的理解也不如以前。他说：“总有一些学生能深刻、轻松地阅读并写出优美的文章，但现在他们更像是例外。” 弗吉尼亚大学的中国文学教授杰克 · 陈发现，当面对他们不理解的思想时，他的学生会 “关闭” 自己；他们现在比以前更难坚持阅读具有挑战性的文本。乔治城大学英语系主任丹尼尔 · 肖尔告诉我，他的学生甚至难以专注于一首十四行诗。

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

未能完成一首 14 行的诗而不分心，暗示了一个熟悉的阅读能力下降的解释：智能手机。青少年总是被他们的设备所诱惑，这阻碍了他们为大学课程的严格要求做准备——然后他们进入大学，分心的事情不断涌现。“这改变了人们对什么值得关注的期望，” 弗吉尼亚大学的心理学家丹尼尔 · 威灵汉姆告诉我。“无聊变得不自然了。” 阅读书籍，即使是出于乐趣，也无法与 TikTok、Instagram、YouTube 竞争。1976 年，大约 40% 的高中毕业生表示他们在前一年至少读了六本书以取乐，而 11.5% 的人一本书都没读。到 2022 年，这些百分比已经颠倒。

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

但中学生和高中的孩子们似乎在课堂上遇到的书籍也越来越少。二十多年来，新的教育举措如《不让一个孩子掉队》和《共同核心》强调了信息文本和标准化测试。许多学校的教师从书籍转向了短篇信息文本，随后是关于作者主要思想的问题——模仿标准化阅读理解测试的格式。斯坦福教育教授安特罗 · 加西亚正在完成他作为全国英语教师委员会副主席的任期，此前曾在洛杉矶的一所公立学校任教。他告诉我，新的指导方针旨在帮助学生进行清晰的论证和综合文本。但 “这样做的同时，我们牺牲了年轻人一般处理长篇文本的能力。”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

迈克 · 斯兹科尔卡是一位教师和管理员，他在波士顿和纽约的学校工作了近二十年，他告诉我，摘录已经取代了各个年级的书籍。“没有一种考试技能可以与之相关…… 你能坐下来读托尔斯泰吗？” 他说。如果一项技能不容易衡量，教师和学区领导就没有多少动力去教授它。卡罗尔 · 贾戈是一位跨足全国帮助教师设计课程的读写专家，她说教育工作者告诉她，他们已经停止教授那些他们长期以来所崇敬的小说，比如《我的安东尼亚》和《远大前程》。疫情打乱了教学大纲并将课程转移到线上，加速了从教授完整作品的转变。

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.

在最近的一项针对约 300 名三至八年级教育工作者的 EdWeek 研究中心调查中，只有 17% 的人表示他们主要教授整本书。另外 49% 的人将整本书与选集和摘录结合起来。但近四分之一的受访者表示，书籍不再是他们课程的中心。伊利诺伊州的一位公立高中教师告诉我，她过去常常围绕书籍来组织课程，但现在专注于技能，比如如何做出好的决定。在一个关于领导力的单元中，学生们阅读荷马的《奥德赛》部分内容，并用音乐、文章和 TED 演讲来补充。（她向我保证，她的学生每学期至少阅读两本完整的书籍。）亚特兰大的一位 AP 英语文学教师告诉我，这门课过去每年要读 14 本书。现在减少到六七本。

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

私立学校培养了不成比例的精英大学生，似乎在转向阅读完整卷本方面较慢，导致 Dames 所描述的令人不安的阅读技能差距在新生中出现。但私立学校并非不受这一趋势的影响。在我五年前毕业的预科学校，我在高年级时选修了简 · 奥斯汀的课程。我只读了一本奥斯汀的小说。

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

达姆斯和其他教授观察到的问题与社区学院和非选择性大学的问题不同，在这些学校中，一些学生入学时存在读写和理解能力缺陷，这可能导致他们无法完成大学课程。像哥伦比亚大学这样的精英学校的高成就学生能够解码单词和句子。但他们难以集中注意力或激发必要的雄心去深入阅读一本有分量的书。

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

面对这种困境，许多大学教授感到他们别无选择，只能减少阅读任务并降低期望。自 1997 年以来一直在加州大学伯克利分校教授文学的维多利亚 · 卡恩，过去每周布置 200 页的阅读任务。现在她布置的阅读量不到原来的一半。“我不要求读完整部《伊利亚特》。我只布置《伊利亚特》的部分章节。我希望他们中的一些人会读完整本书，” 卡恩告诉我。“我不能说，‘好吧，在接下来的三周里，我期望你们读完《伊利亚特》’，因为他们不会去读的。”

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

哥伦比亚大学长期从事美国研究的教授安德鲁 · 德尔班科 (Andrew Delbanco) 现在教授美国散文短篇作品研讨会，而不是文学调查课程。梅尔维尔部分曾经包括《白鲸》；现在，他的学生们就用比利 · 巴德、贝尼托 · 塞雷诺和 “书记员巴特比” 来凑合。德尔班科告诉我，这样做有一些好处——短篇作品让我们有更多时间专注于 “语言的复杂性和微妙性”——而且他已经接受了这种变化。“人们必须适应时代，” 他说。

The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.

决定文学人文课程大纲的哥伦比亚大学教师决定为本学年缩减阅读书单。（近年来书单一直在增加，尽管学生在阅读上遇到困难，但随着非白人作者的新书被加入书单。）像德尔班科一样，一些人认为教授较少的书籍有其优势。即使是准备最充分的学生，多年来可能也一直在略读他们的文学人文课作业。项目主席约瑟夫 · 霍利说，他宁愿学生错过一些经典作品——《罪与罚》现在不在书单上——但更深入地阅读剩余的文本。而且，至关重要的是，这一改变将给教授更多时间来教导学生他们期望的阅读方式。

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

但尚不清楚教师能否通过精简教学大纲来培养学生对阅读的热爱。我采访的一些专家认为，书籍阅读的减少归因于价值观的转变，而非技能的缺失。他们认为，学生仍然可以阅读书籍——只是他们选择不这样做。如今的学生比过去更关心他们的就业前景。每年，他们告诉霍利，尽管喜欢在文学人文课上学到的东西，但他们计划去获得一个对职业生涯更有用的学位。

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

导致人文学科入学人数下降的相同因素可能会导致学生在所修课程中减少阅读时间。2023 年对哈佛大学高年级学生的调查发现，他们在工作和课外活动上花费的时间几乎与学术活动一样多。而且，由于多年的成绩膨胀（在最近的一份报告中，哈佛大学 79% 的成绩在 A 范围内），大学生即使不做完所有作业也能应付过去。

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

无论是由于衰退还是冷漠，一代学生正在阅读更少的书籍。随着年龄的增长，他们可能会读更多的书——老年人是最热衷于阅读的群体——但数据并不令人鼓舞。美国时间使用调查显示，过去二十年中，以阅读书籍为乐的人群总体数量已经减少。几位教授告诉我，他们的学生认为阅读书籍类似于听黑胶唱片——这可能是小众文化仍然喜欢的东西，但大部分是早期时代的遗物。

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

出版业的生存需要一个愿意并能够花时间阅读长篇文章的读者群体。但正如文学杂志的读者肯定会意识到的那样，处于危险之中的不仅仅是这个历史悠久的行业。书籍可以培养一种复杂的同理心，将读者带入数百年前生活的人的思维中，或者带入与读者自身生活环境截然不同的人的思维中。“许多当代同理心的概念都是建立在认同和身份政治之上的，” 伯克利教授卡恩说。“阅读比这更复杂，因此它扩大了你的同情心。”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

然而，这些好处需要陪伴一个角色经历他们的旅程；它们不能通过阅读五页甚至 30 页的摘录来近似。根据神经科学家玛丽安妮 · 沃尔夫的说法，所谓的深度阅读——持续沉浸在文本中——刺激了许多有价值的心理习惯，包括批判性思维和自我反思，这是快速浏览或短时间阅读所不能做到的。

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

我采访的教授们一再描绘出年轻人阅读习惯的严峻画面。（历史学家阿德里安 · 约翰斯是少数持不同意见的人之一，但他也承认：“我的经历有点不寻常，因为芝加哥大学是那些真正读书的人的最后堡垒。”）多年来，达姆斯一直询问他的新生们最喜欢的书。过去，他们提到的书包括《呼啸山庄》和《简 · 爱》。现在，他说，几乎一半的人提到的是青少年书籍。里克 · 里奥丹的《波西 · 杰克逊》系列似乎特别受欢迎。

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

我可以想象到比文学人文课的考验和刺激更糟糕的准备。里奥丹的系列作品虽然充满了轻浮的动作和有时幼稚的幽默，但也巧妙地参与了一项与西方经典一样古老的文学练习：为希腊神话中任性的神和妥协的英雄编织新的冒险。但当然，尽管有数千年的重新诠释，我们从未忘记原作是有原因的。要理解人类状况，并欣赏人类最伟大的成就，你仍然需要阅读《伊利亚特》——全部内容。

Due to an editing error, this article initially misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”

由于编辑错误，本文最初错误地陈述了尼古拉斯 · 达姆斯开始教授文学人文的年份。本文出现在 2024 年 11 月刊的印刷版中，标题为 “那些不会读书的精英大学生”。