Just last summer, Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1481, which effectively banned cell phone use during the public school day for kindergarten through twelfth graders. The ban is, in part, the product of concerns over young people’s relationships with reading and dwindling attention spans due to overexposure to short-term social media content.
Gen Z’s reading habits are proven to lag behind every previous generation. A 2023 survey of English classes for grades three through eight found that only 17% of teachers relied primarily on whole texts, which are defined as “complete poems, novels, plays, and articles.”
Teachers claim that their reluctance to use whole texts is because of student’s refusal and complaints to read for extended periods of time. One survey found that 83% of teachers felt their students' reading stamina had decreased in the last 5 years.
Researchers believe that screens, phones, and social media have accustomed students to skimming or reading only brief parts of texts to extract information, without engaging with texts in their entirety. Social media has also accustomed students to a constant source of over stimulation, often labelled addictive, as short term content triggers reward centers in the brain on loop, in a way that is unnatural and harmful to developing minds.
In English classes, staple whole texts like The Great Gatsby, 1984, The Scarlet Letter, and Hamlet have been replaced by excerpts, abridged versions, or shorter texts to accommodate shrinking attention spans. This might have effects on the required reading lists for public schools across the nation.
There is also a rising concern over the decline of students’ reading comprehension levels, another factor in deciding what students are reading in schools. Standardized testing cannot be ignored as a possible reason for this decline, as it is affecting how students are taught to read.
Standardized reading tests are teaching students to focus more on extracting information from short passages to answer a few questions, rather than to engage with a text thematically and emotionally. Students are also often required to look for a specific meaning that tests and teachers are asking them to find, instead of being allowed to interpret the texts for themselves.
Excerpts and shorter texts also rob students of the ability to emotionally engage with what they are reading, which is a key factor in how well students are able to remember the text and its contents. A short excerpt is quickly forgotten and discarded since we only need to learn a few things from it, and are unaware of its context within a work. A novel provides us with that context and gives us an opportunity to engage with broader themes, while fostering emotional engagement from the reader.
As a consequence of these modern teaching methods, as well as social media addiction, today’s college students are struggling to make sense of 18th and 19th century classic literature, as well as the ability to sit through lectures.
High school ACT scores have also been declining, with 57% of students scoring “below proficient in understanding complex texts” in 2024. Similarly, scores on the most recent national tests of 12th graders’ reading comprehension ability dipped to a historic low, 10 points lower than when the test was first given in 1992.
The phone ban might be having positive effects on students' reading habits, however. One study found that on the first day of school last year, to the end of March, Dallas ISD students checked out more than 200,000 additional books compared to the previous year.
Concerns that getting rid of technology in the classroom causes students to be unprepared for the “real world” have been rebuffed by the Director of Library and Media Services at Dallas ISD. “Our libraries have become spaces in Dallas ISD for digital literacy, for coding, robotics, and digital media creation. This year alone, thousands of our students have engaged in hands-on lessons in research, inquiry, 3D printing, and podcasting, all in the library, all without personal cell phones.”
It is hoped that phone bans in schools might put students in a position to increase their attention spans, as well as increase their interest in reading full texts related to topics that compel and move them. However, to achieve these ends it might require reform in how reading comprehension is taught, as well great efforts from teaching parties to engage their students and interest them in humanities literary tradition.