Teaching during the “rise of AI” and the “end of reading”
This week marks the start of my sixteenth year of teaching college English, and my almost 10-year-old son starts fourth grade.
We will be teaching and learning at the intersection of two dramatic social changes: the rise of generative AI and the end of reading. Everyone thinks ChatGPT will replace human writing in the future, and few people want to read anything longer than a headline.
What's a writing teacher—or writer—to do if most of the world doesn't want to read and thinks writing will eventually be outsourced to AI anyway?
Reading “ends”? Does it matter?
Generative AI needs no introduction. The idea of the “end of reading” came about in recent article V The Chronicle of Higher Educationthe flagship magazine for American colleges. The article examines the reasons why college students’ reading ability is declining: knowledge loss due to the pandemic, poor reading instruction, learning to standardized tests, and simply not reading much beyond social media.
I hate to bash “kids these days.” Yes, young people don’t read as much as previous generations. But who let that happen? Their parents and teachers. Parents let their kids read less and use social media more. Teachers have turned reading into something required for standardized tests. College professors tell students, “Everything you need to know is on the slides they put online for you,” and then are surprised when they don’t read and miss class.
But we should worry about young people reading less because we should worry about young people.
IN similar article For Psychology Today An English teacher says some of her college students claim that never read an entire book. They read social media and short passages for standardized testing, but long-form reading is a relic of elementary school for many college freshmen today. Article Chronicle confirms this information with statistics:
In 2020, only 17 percent of 13-year-olds surveyed said they read for fun nearly every day, up from 27 percent in 2012 and 35 percent when data collection began in 1984. according to National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Reading books matters. Long text is the type of text most likely to provide valuable information, develop critical thinking skills, and foster empathy. And on some level, reading builds commitment and work ethic.
One of my colleagues teaches children's literature, a course for students majoring in elementary education. The previous instructor of the course required his students to read 100 picture books. With wide eyes and slack-jawed mouth, my colleague said that she had revised the course's reading volume because she thought the current students would rebel if asked to read 40 picture books. Picture. Books.
Reading is work, and people are busy. Writing is work, but fortunately ChatGPT can do it for us.
Last year, I asked my university’s director of online programs about the feasibility of an online writing degree. Her office analyzed the prospect like Lowe’s Home Improvement trying to decide whether to open a store in a city with Home Depot. Then she said that online students want a “clear return on investment,” and ChatGPT made the return on investment of a writing degree challenging.
What should a writing teacher do?
The Link Between AI Hype and Society's Struggle with Reading
In my first draft, the title was “The Link Between AI Hype and the Slow Death of Reading.” But reading is not “dying” or “ending.”
Reading will never “die” or “end” because people will always need to consume someone else’s thoughts in order to learn from those thoughts. Yes, yes, video dominates the internet, but complex topics require carefully written text to explain. Besides, do you want to watch a 5-minute video to learn or remember a 5-second snippet that you need right now?
Probably not, and that’s the reality of the reading problem. People still have a decent attention span for information that interests them, but modern technology and media have trained us to consume tsunamis of information one bucket at a time. The exhaustion caused by social media and the modern busyness of work and personal life leaves us too exhausted for more.
As he writes Liz Swan in his essay for Psychology Today :
The type of “reading” people do on social media platforms is brief, isolated, and information-driven: I like this, I don’t like that, you’re wrong, I’m right, look at me, buy this, don’t buy that. Collectively, these brief exchanges allow people to keep track of what everyone in the world is thinking about everything right now (which sounds exhausting).
If this 5 minute video doesn't answer my question quickly, I'm not going to stick around to see if it does. I'll try another result in my Google search, maybe try some other keywords, and then give up. There's a reason Google search results show videos with the start of the relevant segment marked for you and ready to play from there.
Now apply the same logic and behavior to reading, where the cognitive load is increased compared to video, where the content or structure may be complex. If the dopamine doesn't hit quickly, it's harder to stick with it. Reading it is felt How Job Reading minimally or not at all feels like avoiding hard work.
A twelve-minute read? Maybe another time. Six five-minute reads later, I feel like this successful, but no more motivated to read for twelve minutes.
Add to that the demands of modern work culture, long days of reading or typing on a computer, constant connectivity and access to information that can make us feel overwhelmed, and the time and energy required to directly raise the children and grandparents of millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers, and it’s no wonder so many people don’t have the energy to read 12-minute articles and would rather hand over the writing to artificial intelligence.
The “feels like work” problem becomes much worse if you suffer from bad reading pedagogy . The science of reading shows that children need to be taught phonics—how letters represent sounds and letter combinations represent spoken words—so they can decode written text. A generation of teachers decided that teaching phonics ruined the joy of reading, so they simply exposed children to texts and hoped that they would learn to read the same way children learn to talk. As it turns out, the painful difficulty of decoding long text with “sight words” and contextual cues ruins the joy of reading.
I loved reading since the third grade (thank you, Hooked on Phonics !), and reading still feels like work to me. At the end of another long day of reading and writing on a computer screen for hours, reading one of the books on my nightstand feels like too much of a chore. Social media demands much less of us. We can scroll, scroll, scroll without any demands on our minds until we find something interesting that gives us a nice dopamine rush.
The desire to minimize effort links the widespread decline in reading with the explosion of interest in generative AI.
Reading requires effort to enter a state of “flow” in which we lose track of time while reading. Writing requires effort to translate electrical signals in the brain into an internal monologue, and then to reproduce that monologue in a form that someone else can understand.
Minimizing reading, especially long texts, and outsourcing writing to AI makes us feel like we’re working less, smarter, not harder, or not working at all. This appeals to our natural desire to conserve precious energy and reclaim time, especially in our hectic, hyper-connected world.
Meanwhile, online and social media content offers a ton of information, entertainment, and dopamine for a fraction of the investment—or so it seems as we scroll through hundreds of headlines over the course of 45 minutes, drinking from the ocean one cup at a time.
Canary in the Coal Mine
Minimizing reading and handing over writing to generative AI saves effort through shortcuts. But using these shortcuts can easily short-circuit the development of higher-level thinking, empathy, knowledge, and even work ethic. College freshmen in the early 2020s may prove to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
To be clear, I don't think students are as hopeless as some claim. I think they are responding naturally, even rationally, to their environment. Professors can't put PowerPoint slides online, teach classes reading from the slides, test solely on the material on the slides, and then expect students to read the textbooks and show up for class.
I'm not worried that students are stupid. They're not stupid. I'm worried that today's students are missing out on something incredibly valuable without even realizing it.
Once again, Liz Swans put it well in Psychology Today :
Extended reading requires us to follow a line of thought, to really consider and understand a point of view. We undergo deep learning as new input reorganizes neural connections in our brains so that we can perceive the world in truly new ways. In other words, we learn when we read.
All academic subjects are important because each offers a piece of the puzzle for understanding ourselves and our world. But none, I would argue, is more important than reading, because when we can read, and I mean really read, we can potentially learn and understand anything.
Or, as he more accurately says, Joan Westenberg in his book, The Death of Critical Thinking Will Kill Us Long Before Artificial Intelligence»:
We are witnessing a multigenerational decline in reading comprehension. We read less, remember less, and struggle to engage in critical analysis. … The loss of the ability to understand the world around us and comprehend complex ideas is an existential crisis.
Long reading is the type that is most likely to provide valuable information, build critical thinking skills, and foster empathy. Writing is the best way to create quality long texts.
And it’s no coincidence that the explosion of interest in AI coincides with the decline of reading. People who have trouble reading a book will almost certainly have trouble putting in the effort to write one.
Are there any solutions?
Headlines like “end of reading” are misleading ways to dramatize the real difficulty and importance of getting people to read long texts. The hype around AI speaks as much to people’s desire to avoid hard work like writing as to the usefulness of AI.
Teaching during the rise of AI and the “end of reading” means swimming against these powerful cultural currents. Here are some suggested strokes, based on advice from Liz Swans and the professors cited in The Chronicle :
Help students (and parents!) limit “surface reading” online so they have more time for deeper reading.
Explain to students (and parents!) that deep reading skills are ultimately more important than test preparation skills.
Make time to consciously read what you enjoy. Read Vogue or Sports Illustrated better than not reading at all.
Create “no technology” classrooms. Give reading tests. Kick students out if they show up without reading.
Connect with children and students. Show that you care about their learning and success.
Hold children and students to high standards and show them how to meet those standards. Make sure they earn their grades and know they are doing so.
Integrate reading strategies into content lessons.
Provide reading guides designed to develop students' ability to identify and express main ideas.
Teach students to annotate texts. Few students take notes while reading.
Encourage the formation of study groups. Students can be responsible for each other and support each other.
Give less reading, but deeper immerse students in his ideas. Less can be more when we read and discuss Aristotle.
The older generation loves to criticize the younger generation. But young people didn't just appear out of thin air, fully formed. They are products of their environment.
If we change the environment, we can change their learning and growth. If we help our children and students see the meaning of what we are asking them to do, they are more likely to dedicate themselves, their energy, and their time to it.
