Why modern students cannot read

A visible decline with hidden roots

The claim that modern students cannot read sounds provocative, but it captures a real problem that educators, employers and editors encounter every day. Reading ability is not merely a private difficulty for struggling pupils. It is a public question that shapes how societies learn, work and debate. Large assessment surveys show falling proficiency among adults. Close studies of university students reveal surprising gaps in comprehension. At the same time, teaching methods, assessment priorities and digital habits have changed markedly in recent decades. Those shifts explain why many young people arrive at higher education and the workplace without the reading skills once assumed to be universal. The result is not a lack of intelligence or curiosity, but a structural failure in how reading and meaning are taught.

Big Kid Books

(5 book series)

Are you tired of endless flashcards that don’t translate into real-world reading success? For many children and adults, traditional methods like flashcards and dry word lists simply do not work. It is easy to feel stuck and defeated when words do not sound the way they look.

How we measure the problem

International assessments provide the clearest snapshot. The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, PIAAC, and national analyses show that a substantial share of adults score at very low proficiency levels in literacy. In the United States, for example, recent PIAAC results indicate a notable share of adults scoring at or below basic levels, and average adult literacy scores have declined in the most recent cycle. That is not a marginal finding. Literacy, in these surveys, is defined as the ability to access, understand, evaluate and use written texts to achieve goals and participate in society. When many adults fall below this threshold, the social consequences are wide ranging.

University students and the Bleak House test

If the headline statistics are worrying, small, focused studies make the issue immediate. A think aloud study of 85 English majors at two Midwestern universities asked participants to read aloud the opening paragraphs of Dickens and then translate each sentence into plain English. The results were stark. A large portion of the students struggled to render the prose into literal meaning, many relied on skimming or external summaries, and only a tiny minority demonstrated detailed, literal understanding of the passage. These findings are not a single dramatic anecdote. They show how patterns of reading taught and reinforced long before university can create adults who are comfortable with commentary but weak on accurate comprehension.

From phonics to themes: the pedagogic shift

To understand why these problems emerged, we must look back to how reading instruction changed over the last half century. For decades, systematic phonics, the method that teaches letter-sound relationships explicitly and sequentially, formed a foundation for early reading. Meta-analyses and national reviews have shown that systematic phonics improves decoding, spelling and, in many cases, comprehension for young readers. Yet many curricula adopted whole-language or meaning-first approaches that prioritised themes, context and interpretation over explicit decoding. Where phonics teaches the mechanics of words, whole-language often emphasises the social or emotional reading of texts. That change in emphasis produced readers who can recognise language in broad strokes but struggle with the fine-grained decoding required for complex texts.

What neuroscience shows

The pedagogic debate is not only ideological. Brain research supports the practical conclusion that how we learn to read alters processing. Studies using brain imaging and electrical measures have found that readers trained with letter-sound instruction show faster, more left hemisphere dominant activity in regions associated with language processing. Learners who rely on whole-word or contextual guessing show slower recognition and different neural patterns. In short, systematic phonics trains the brain pathways most efficient for fluent reading. When instruction does not build those pathways, learners face a persistent efficiency gap that affects comprehension, speed and stamina.

Critical literacy and unintended consequences

A further layer complicates matters. Contemporary education has embraced forms of critical literacy that ask pupils to interrogate texts for power relations, ideology and context. That emphasis can be intellectually valuable. The unintended consequence occurs when analysis replaces foundational skill. Children who are taught to interpret before they can decode will form habits of skimming, of substituting emotional response for literal comprehension, and of relying on external guides to tell them what a text means. When learners are rewarded for commentary rather than for accurate parsing of sentences, accuracy and vocabulary growth suffer. Over time, that pattern produces readers who are adept at opinion but limited in independent textual understanding.

Technology as amplifier, not origin

The arrival of grammar tools, predictive keyboards and generative systems has intensified the problem, but it is not the root cause. These tools flourish in an environment where many users lack confidence in their own linguistic judgement. When students can hand over the work of phrasing, punctuation and even analysis to software, the practice of exercising judgement weakens. Overuse of corrective tools can turn writing into selection from suggestions rather than an active craft. That weakens the feedback loop between reading and writing that is essential for vocabulary growth and syntactic awareness. Technology is an amplifier of pre-existing deficits. It offers convenience at the price of practice. The consequence is flatter prose and a narrowing of expressive range across wide swathes of published and amateur writing.

Improve Spelling and Reading Skills

(10 books)

This is a series of fun spelling books available in both e-book and paperback formats. These books are designed for various educational purposes, including story time, spelling improvement classes, poetry sessions, and reading intervention programs, as they help improve phonological and phonemic awareness. The books contain stories filled with words that have rimes containing digraphs, trigraphs, and 4-letter graphemes.

Available on Kindle and Paperback

Consequences beyond literature

Reduced reading proficiency is not just an academic worry. Employers report that graduates often struggle with basic written communication. Professional fields that depend on precise reading and writing, from law to medicine, feel the strain. Civic life suffers when citizens cannot evaluate arguments, compare policy documents or read news carefully. The erosion of reading skill therefore has economic, democratic and cultural effects. When a substantial portion of a population cannot read complex texts, societies become more vulnerable to simplification, slogans and shallow persuasion.

Where recovery must begin

Rebuilding reading competence requires policy changes and cultural decisions. Early years instruction should place renewed emphasis on systematic phonics while retaining attention to vocabulary, fluency and comprehension strategies. That combination is the evidence based core of the so-called science of reading. Teachers need professional development and classroom resources that measure progress in decoding and comprehension, not only engagement with themes. At later stages, schools and universities should encourage deep, sustained reading of complete works rather than fragmentary or purely thematic study. Finally, technology should be repurposed to support learning rather than to substitute for effort. Tools should be training wheels, not a permanent crutch.

Individual remedies that work

Parents, tutors and learners can act without waiting for system wide reform. Reading aloud to children, encouraging sustained reading of full texts, and teaching word study explicitly offer immediate benefits. For older students, slow reading, annotation, and disciplined lookup of unfamiliar words rebuild habits of precision. Writers who wish to improve should read aloud to feel cadence, study sentence structure and practise writing without machine suggestions. These are small, disciplined practices, but they restore the habits of attention and the internalised knowledge that good reading needs.

A challenge rather than a complaint

The diagnosis is inconvenient. It requires accepting that changes in pedagogy and culture have reduced skills that were once widely taught. That acceptance is not a condemnation of young people. It is an invitation to repair a broken sequence: teach decoding and vocabulary early, support deep reading through adolescence, and use technology to reinforce rather than replace human judgement. The cost of inaction is high. The reward of repair is substantial. Better reading produces clearer thinking, truer argument and richer expression. If societies value those things, then rebuilding reading must be a priority. The work is technical, cultural and practical, but it is achievable. In the space between policy and practice there is hope for readers and writers yet to come.

Sources:

Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results

They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities

Report of the National Reading Panel

Stanford study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Stanford study wades into reading wars with high marks for phonics-based teaching

_____________________