For whom the book tolls

Sometimes, even professors have to laugh to keep from crying.  

This past winter, Geoff Rector, an English professor at the University of Ottawa was getting ready to teach a course on the traditions of King Arthur, one he hadn’t taught it in more than a dozen years. “The first thing I did when I was putting the class together,” he says, “was I went back and looked at the syllabus that I had given. And right away I just laughed out loud. “There’s no way that I could assign the amount of reading today.”  

Dr. Rector’s observation is the kind of anecdote that seems to be getting a lot of traction recently. Last fall, in an article in the Atlantic entitled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” Rose Horowitch, herself a 2023 graduate of Yale University, argued that “Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.” This, in her view, is catastrophic. “To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read the Iliad—all of it,” she says. The essay – a largely anecdotal takedown of the reading skills of today’s students that Ms. Horowitch attributed variously to smartphones, and a number of similar demons – predictably caused a sensation.

“The major change for me is the addiction to social media.” 

Hyperbole aside, there is real, quantitative evidence that there has been a measurable decline in the reading skills of Canadian students. And one very obvious place where this would show up would be undergraduate English, arguably one of the most “reading-heavy” departments of the university. But how severe, or how permanent, this decline is, is open to question. As is what to do. 

Sounding the alarm 

In March 2025, the C.D. Howe institute released an e-brief entitled “The Case of the Boiling Frogs: Provincial Indifference to Declining Education Outcomes.” Authored by John Richards, a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University’s School of Social Policy, the report looked at declining student achievement in Canada, using information gathered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), through the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA seeks to evaluate the academic performance of fifteen-year-old students in different countries, both within and outside the OECD. To do this, it looks at three different areas of achievement: math, general knowledge of science and a language comprehension piece, given in the students’ native tongue.  

The inspiration behind PISA’s creation, according to Dr. Richards, was the realization among economists that just looking at infrastructure or whether a country has open markets “was not going to do the trick in trying to explain why some countries are rich and some countries are poor. It became pretty obvious that you had to acknowledge educating kids.” As an economist, he sees a correlation between academic and economic performance. “That’s one of the reasons that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are poor and China is rich.” The evaluation is run every three years. In 2022, 690,000 students in 38 OECD member countries as well as 41 “partner” countries and regions within countries took the tests, including 23,000 Canadians.  

Dr. Richards noted that Canada still ranks among the top ten countries in terms of overall student achievement.  “At first glance,” he wrote, “one might conclude all is well. However, Canada’s national trends have consistently declined since initial benchmarking of the three subjects in the early 2000s.” And this was in fact the point of his report – to raise the alarm about declining student achievement across Canada.  

When it comes to evaluating students’ performance, PISA takes the scores from the first year the test was applied as its benchmark and assigns that a value of 500. In language comprehension, which are the stats that matter for reading, the average Canadian student had dropped from 534 in 2000 to 507. “A decline of 20 points on the assessment scale is equivalent to the loss of one year of school,” Dr. Richards writes. The larger (and generally wealthier) provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia) did better than the small ones, but all showed a decline of at least one year.  

The fifteen-year-olds who wrote those tests in 2022 are 18 today and getting ready to enter university. 

University students less able and less willing to read difficult texts 

That student reading skills have declined is one thing; why, is another.  

By blowing a hole in the school year right across Canada and isolating kids at home, COVID might seem a likely culprit. Reading skills did indeed decline during this period, and in fact, Dr. Richards says, “the longer the closures, the larger the provincial declines.”  However, he points out in the report that “over the decade, 2012-2022, Canada experienced statistically significant declines,” in all three of the subjects PISA looks at, before and after the pandemic. Other factors, he notes, played a bigger role in hastening the decline. 

Gregor Campbell has been teaching English at the University of Guelph for more than 30 years and before that as a graduate student. And when he looks back on those decades, it has been the rise of the computer and particularly the Internet that has profoundly changed teaching for him. “The major change for me is the addiction to social media,” he says. Like Dr. Rector, he too has reduced the readings in his classes. “In the old days, I would teach all fiction, and now I’ll do, like, a novel and then a film. I just feel that an all-novel course is too hard on them, too demanding.”

“I just feel that an all-novel course is too hard on them, too demanding.”

Dr. Campbell’s students grew up immersed in the chopped-up, fragmented world of the social media. This may be one reason why surveys show that fewer kids read today for fun, but Dr. Campbell realizes it’s part of a larger phenomenon. “When you’re on the subway, anywhere you’re in public, you just look around and everyone, even old people, are addicted to their cell phones.”  Still, he takes some comfort in the fact that his best students continue to produce the same level of high-quality work, adding: “I still get good papers.” 

It’s always been a big jump from high school to university, but after the initial shock, most students learned to buckle down and catch up. That’s harder now. “Part of the reason that I can’t expect students to read as much as they used to, if not as well as they used to,” says Dr. Rector, “is that every student we have has a job.” A higher cost of living and increases in tuition, combined with student loans and scholarships that have not kept pace with inflation, make working necessary for many students. A 2022 Angus Reid poll, undertaken for Studiosity, a company offering on-line academic support for students, found that 76 per cent of post-secondary students juggle work and studies, leaving less time to focus on assignments and adding to stress. 

Compounding, or possibly even overshadowing these factors is how students have been taught to read for the past few decades. Older readers might remember the arguments over whether students should be taught to read using phonics, the classic system of sounding out the words and slowly building up the skills and vocabulary to take on ever-more complex pieces of writing, or what was popularly known as the whole language approach, in which children are taught to recognize entire words rather than sounding them out phonetically, which in turn gave rise to something known as “balanced literacy.” 

In 2019,  Jamie Metsala, a professor of education at Halifax’s Mount Saint Vincent University, together with  Linda Siegel, an expert in special education from the University of British Columbia, undertook a research project for the Ontario Human Rights Commission that examined literacy and teaching in the province in terms of human rights:  were some students, those with dyslexia, for example, denied chances in part because of the techniques used to teach them to read? In the subsequent report, Right to Read, released in 2023, Drs. Metsala and Siegel identified how the students were being taught as part of the problem. The founding father of whole language, Dr. Ken Goodman, referred to reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game,” notes Dr. Metsala, based on our knowledge of language and the world. “We predicted what was coming next, and then we just needed to sample the print to confirm our predictions.” Its successor, balanced literacy, “largely used the same kind of teaching methods, which, you know, were putting children in patterned, predictable texts.” Referring to learning to read as a sort of code we crack that lets us read far beyond the examples we are given, she says that with balanced literacy, “they didn’t really have to learn the code to read those early texts.” 

To be sure, admits Dr. Metsala, plenty of students did learn to read well where this system was in use. However, she adds, “It’s not based on evidence or what’s going to get the most kids off to a good trajectory. We need these foundational word reading skills, and we need them to be quick and automatic. Which leads to fluency.”  

This is essential for creating successful readers. “We know that when children get off to a good trajectory in these foundational word reading skills, they’re likely to read more and to enjoy reading more. For young children, self- efficacy is a huge part of motivation.” Dr. Metsala wonders, too, if current classroom practices that have students reading separate books rather than having them work through one book together with their teacher is also a factor.  They’re missing the opportunities “where the teacher is reinforcing vocabulary, giving them more chances to learn it and use it, which all takes quite a bit, sometimes, to make it stick.”  

Combine COVID, the rapid expansion of social media and strategies for teaching reading that, says Dr. Metsala, seemed to have no evidence to support them, and it’s perhaps not surprising that today’s fifteen-year-olds are one year behind where they once were. It’s perhaps surprising that it’s not more. 

There is growing concern over what’s being lost when university students are unwilling, or unable to grapple with big, challenging books.   According to research published in 2023 in the National Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development,   studying literature “improves brain power, promotes empathy and builds critical thinking skills.”  Tackling those tough texts, something that takes both skill and motivation, exposes readers to different perspectives and challenges their assumptions, an important step in fostering an informed and critically minded public.  

 Can the tide be turned?  

This problem isn’t immediately within the power of the universities to change. There are ways that they can meet it, however. Reducing the number of books educators expect students to read is one of them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either, according to Professor Suzanne James, who is in charge of first-year English courses at UBC. Currently planning a new English 100 course for her department, she says fewer books can be a chance to read more deeply. “In that course, I’m teaching fewer books, but I am teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is a longer, more dense book.” Students will be looking at it in depth. In a world of fractured communication and a barrage of “information,” there’s something to be said for that approach. That rationale is what prompted Gregor Campbell to combine film with novels in his English courses at U of G.

“We know that when children get off to a good trajectory in these foundational word reading skills, they’re likely to read more and to enjoy reading more.” 

Heather Evans, assistant professor in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing  at Queen’s University uses a similar practice: “In my second-, third-, and fourth-year courses, I am assigning fewer long readings than in the past; when I do assign long readings (e.g. novels), I strategically alternate them with short readings, in the hope that students will be able to keep up with the workload.” 

And at uOttawa, the department introduced two new courses a few years back for first- and second-year students, Engaging with Literature and Critical Conversations: Form and Style that were essentially introductions to methodology — how, for example, to read a poem critically.  

While restructuring how, and how much, children read won’t yield results immediately, the way in which students are being taught to read in the early years of school appears to be evolving from balanced literacy to a more evidence-based approach, called “structured literacy.” This approach, wrote Jamie Metsala in a December 2024 article published in Maclean’s magazine is based on that time-honoured idea that when we “explicitly teach children the relationships between letters and sounds — and how to use them — it helps them to read and spell.”   In structured literacy, students in the early grades will receive instruction in letter-sound connection, reading words and spelling for about 30 minutes daily. Ontario, Alberta, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are all on track to begin implementing it next year. This may help with the “modest but continuous decline” in reading ability that Dr. Richards warns in his report has hindered reading ability and may ultimately limit, he fears, Canada’s economic trajectory in the long run.  

That there has been a loss in reading ability is undeniable. And that probably does represent a decline in a more traditional book-based culture. Whether it’s a civilization-killer, which seems to be the subtext in Ms. Horowitch’s Atlantic article, however, seems debatable. What can be done about it, though, is mostly adjust.  What we read, and how we read it has changed constantly throughout time. As have the arguments about it. And if we’re older, it’s sometimes hard to disconnect them from what we remember — or selectively think we remember — about some golden past.