Recent articles at The Hechinger Report, the Associated Press, The Atlantic, and other outlets indicate young adults are struggling to read long passages of literature – including students accepted to America’s top universities.

As The Atlantic reported this week:

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. …

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.