Rebuilding a Literate America
By: Isaac Saul
Source →In the summer or fall of 2025, while idly scrolling through X, I came across a rather interesting article from Natalie Wexler’s Substack, Minding the Gap.
The article detailed the results of a small study of 85 English majors at two Kansas universities. Researchers had students read the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and tasked them with explaining the contents in plain English to a facilitator. Because Bleak House is a nearly 200-year-old British novel — placing it firmly in an unfamiliar cultural context for the average American reader — the students were given a dictionary, reference materials, and permission to use their cell phones to look up unfamiliar terms. Essentially, the students weren’t being tested on their own prior knowledge, only their reading comprehension.
But even in this open-book environment, only four of the 85 students demonstrated a “comprehensive” understanding of the text. 32 showed a “competent” understanding, but they only understood half the text. The rest of the students were identified as “problematic” readers, almost totally unable to comprehend the passage. Wexler, a writer who specializes in education and literacy, pointed out that the problematic readers’ difficulties came from encountering words and phrases that they were unfamiliar with. Even though they had access to research materials, Wexler wrote, their unfamiliarity with Dickens’s prose style and cultural world were so profound that they simply gave up trying to understand the text. The competent readers showed a similar unfamiliarity with these words and phrases but were “comfortable with their confusion.”
As a recent college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English — and particularly as one whose junior and senior research projects centered on American literature from the same time period as Bleak House — I wish I could tell you I had been shocked at these results, or that I thought the study was a fluke. Instead, these findings only confirmed what I had already seen among my own peers in high school in Lynchburg, Tennessee, and in college at Harvard: Increasingly, young Americans aren’t comprehending the things they read.
In fact, at the end of her article, Wexler recalled a different exploration of the death of deep reading whose publication I remember quite vividly — “The End of the English Major,” a 2023 New Yorker investigation by Nathan Heller. For his piece, Heller interviewed college English professors and students around the country, including some from Harvard. Heller’s piece didn’t paint a pretty picture of Harvard English: It showcased students, including English majors themselves, talking about the unimportance of the degree and professors glibly discussing students’ declining interests and abilities in their subject. The article’s release caused quite a stir at Harvard’s Barker Center (the hub of the English department), so much so that the instructor of my sophomore tutorial — a class dedicated to learning about and applying various schools of literary criticism — adjusted the syllabus to spend a whole day at the end of the semester talking about the article and its implications for the field.
Read Isaac Saul’s full article here.
