Students Have Lost the Ability to Read Long Texts — Teachers Blame AI

Students Have Forgotten How to Read Long Texts — Teachers Blame AI

American literature professor Tyler Yagdt has encountered a phenomenon that troubles him: one of his students could not get through a 20-page article. The text that Yagdt himself easily read ten years ago during his student years turned out to be insurmountable for a modern young person.

When Students Cannot Read

The young man confessed to his professor: he constantly loses the thread of the narrative when reading long texts. But this is not a single case of laziness. Yagdt notices this problem among many students in his classes. They come to lectures without having read the material, explaining this by their inability to concentrate on a single text for more than a few minutes. Previously, this was an exception, now it is becoming the norm. Students literally cannot maintain attention on material for longer than a short interval. Attempting to read even a medium-length article leads to distraction, loss of meaning, and complete abandonment of the text.

AI Retrained a Generation for Quick Answers

The professor sees the main culprit in AI assistants. Students have grown accustomed to a new workflow:

• Request a ready-made summary from ChatGPT instead of reading the full text
• Use AI summarizers to automatically compress articles
• Ask a clarifying question to a bot instead of conducting independent analysis
• Receive an answer in two lines instead of working through the material
• Completely delegate cognitive work to artificial intelligence

At first glance, this saves time and effort. In practice, this quickly leads to the atrophy of deep reading skills. The brains of young people adapt: why spend energy understanding complex text if AI can summarize everything in seconds?

Loss of the Ability to Think Critically

This is not simply the loss of a reading skill. Deep reading is one of the fundamental tools of education. A person who is unable to concentrate on a long text loses the ability to analyze, distinguish nuances, and construct their own conclusions. It becomes more difficult for teachers to teach because students are not prepared for cognitive strain.

"This is not just a reading problem — it is a catastrophe for education,"

Yagdt believes. In his opinion, universities urgently need an overhaul of their approaches. You cannot simply ban AI. It is necessary to teach students to think critically about the use of these tools instead of blindly replacing their own intellectual work.

What This Means

This is the first, but clear wake-up call. Education is at a crossroads: either the world will grow accustomed to a generation of people who cannot read deeply and think, or the education system needs radical changes in teaching approaches and the role of AI in the educational process.