Generation Brain Rot

Here’s the latest harrowing dispatch from the frontlines of education, as yet another higher education instructor laments that his pupils literally can’t read.

In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education, university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read “without complaint” as an undergraduate a decade ago.

One student confessed that the reason they didn’t finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there’s no doubt that they’re not alone.

Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment’s “basic” level in reading, meaning they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” Younger children aren’t better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can’t read at a proficient level.

“What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch,” Jagt writes. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”

Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can’t understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.

More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech’s adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

Among researchers, there remains serious doubts over AI’s supposed benefits as an educational tool. One of the few major studies that purported ChatGPT improved learning performance was retracted last month. Most studies paint a grimmer picture of AI’s cognitive effects: impaired critical thinking, to name one, and a link to memory loss.

Jagt cites an MIT study that found users who used ChatGPT during cognitive tasks like writing essays showed lower brain activity in areas associated with creativity compared to students who only used a traditional Google Search or didn’t lookup information at all. An astonishing 83 percent of the AI users couldn’t quote a single line from the essays they had just written, and capstoning the alarm, the brain activity in the AI users didn’t return to normal when they were later asked to write without AI.

That brings us to the other tech culprit: smartphones.

On our pernicious pocket devices, Jagt touted a 2017 study that found that simply having a smartphone physically nearby — even if it’s face down or turned off — reduced available cognitive capacity and impaired cognitive functioning.

“So when a student tells me they ‘kept losing track’ of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition,” Jagt wrote. “The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.”

Jagt’s final grievance is how the reading crisis is a structural problem, yet institutions let it be a “private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts.” Jagt explains how he’s had to break the 20-page article assignments into two halves, and spend time modeling for students on the board how to track an argument. But splitting the article compromises its argument, Jagt says, “just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill.”

“When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger,” he wrote. “Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not ‘free students up for higher-order work.’ It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.”

More on education: College Professors Say Incoming Students No Longer Understand Middle School Math and Science