Students Can No Longer Read Long Texts, and Instructors Blame AI

American literature instructor Tyler Jagt has run into something that worries him: one of his students couldn't get through a 20-page article. Jagt read the same text easily as a student ten years ago. For a young person today, it proved too much.

When students can't read

The student admitted that he keeps losing the thread whenever he reads long texts. This isn't a one-off case of laziness, though. Jagt sees the same problem in many students in his classes. They show up to lectures without doing the reading and explain that they can't focus on a single text for more than a few minutes.

This used to be the exception. Now it's becoming the norm. Students literally can't keep their attention on material for more than a short stretch. Even a moderately long article leaves them distracted; they lose the meaning and give up on the text entirely.

AI retrained a generation to expect quick answers

Jagt sees AI assistants as the main culprit. Students have grown used to a new workflow:

• Ask ChatGPT for a ready-made summary instead of reading the full text
• Use AI summarizers to condense articles automatically
• Ask a bot a follow-up question instead of analyzing the material themselves
• Get a two-line answer instead of working through the material
• Hand off cognitive work to artificial intelligence entirely

At first glance, this saves time and effort. In practice, it quickly erodes the skill of deep reading. Young people's brains adapt: why spend energy understanding a complex text when AI can summarize it all in seconds?

Losing the ability to think critically

The damage goes beyond reading skills. Deep reading is one of the fundamental tools of education. Someone who can't focus on a long text loses the ability to analyze, pick up on nuance, and draw their own conclusions. Teaching gets harder because students aren't prepared for the cognitive strain.

"This isn't just a reading problem — it's a catastrophe for education,"

Jagt says.

In his view, universities urgently need to rethink their approach. Simply banning AI won't work. Instead, schools need to teach students to think critically about how they use these tools, rather than blindly substituting them for their own intellectual work.

What it means

This is an early but clear warning sign. Education is at a crossroads: either the world gets used to a generation that can't read or think deeply, or the education system needs a radical overhaul of how it teaches and of AI's role in learning.