A recent opinion piece in The Atlantic has sparked a familiar debate among educators. Walt Hunter argues that many instructors today “meet students where they are” by continually lowering reading expectations. Shorter texts, fewer books, more summaries. Not because reading is unimportant. Rather, because we fear that students can no longer manage, or simply will not engage with, longer, more demanding texts. Hunter’s critique is sharp and understandable. By shielding students, we might be denying them opportunities to grow in deep reading, sustained attention, and intellectual perseverance.
That concern resonates widely. Far too often, we hear that young people no longer read, that novels intimidate them, and that longer texts breed resistance or disengagement. The Atlantic piece names this problem clearly and dares to say what many education professionals quietly think but seldom voice publicly. Perhaps we have been too quick to lower the bar. In some places, including in parts of Europe, policy is now moving to reverse that trend.
Still, this conversation needs deeper nuance.
Earlier this week, I received an insight from Jordi Casteleyn that has stayed with me. What is increasingly absent among many learners today is not simply the ability or willingness to read, but a shared referential framework on which traditional teaching practices rely. That common backdrop to which a teacher can refer at the start of a lesson, through examples, analogies or contextual cues, is increasingly missing. As a result, we now often have to explain references that used to be taken for granted. Students no longer bring that cultural or textual background with them.
There are at least two reasons for this shift.
First, student populations are far more diverse in cultural, linguistic and social backgrounds than in previous generations. That diversity enriches the classroom, but it also means that what once seemed culturally ubiquitous no longer resonates automatically. References to specific books, films, historical events or public debates do not land in the same way across a heterogeneous group.
Second, media consumption has become highly individualised. Where past generations shared a significant portion of their cultural input through mainstream media, common schooling experiences or shared canon, today’s young people inhabit strongly personalised media ecosystems driven by algorithms. They read, watch and listen, but not to the same thing. The result is not necessarily less text or culture, but less shared cultural experience.
Seen this way, the claim that “young people do not read anymore” feels too crude. They read differently. More fragmentarily, often in contexts that sit outside the canonical texts the education system implicitly assumes. The issue is not only motivation or self-discipline. Instead, it is the absence of common anchor points that makes deep reading meaningful and accessible.
This has important implications for how we should interpret the Atlantic piece.
It is appropriate to challenge educational practices that systematically avoid complex texts. We should take that warning seriously. And let me add that the same expectation should apply to writing, speaking and listening across the curriculum. At the same time, we cannot pretend that today’s students start from the same shared foundation that earlier generations brought with them. Raising expectations without deliberately building up the referential framework is unlikely to foster more reading. More often, it leads to alienation.
The challenge, then, is twofold. We must be willing to engage with rich, demanding texts. But we must also be more explicit in creating the context in which those texts acquire meaning. That means explaining why a text matters, exploring background, themes, and connections together, and gradually building reading stamina and interpretive skills.
Reading has always required effort. What has changed is the ease with which we once assumed students arrived with a shared cultural repertoire. That assumption has eroded.
Debates about reading in education are often polarised. Either young people are lazy and distracted, or we must adapt teaching wholesale to short attention spans. Both positions miss the deeper issue. The real question is how, in a fragmented cultural reality, we can rebuild shared points of reference around text, meaning and thinking. A knowledge-rich curriculum may help partly address this, but it will not be sufficient by itself.
Not through nostalgia. Through realism, pedagogical ambition, and the understanding that reading is not just a skill, but also a shared cultural practice that must be intentionally cultivated.