Class is in 20 minutes, and the syllabus says to read a 40-page research paper, a chapter of a book or some crazy long piece of text. There’s no way the reading is going to get done in time for class. Life got in the way. Maybe you look up a summary, maybe ChatGPT it, then just let others do the heavy lifting in the class discussion. Or, you try to get some participation credit and say something vague as you try to read your professor’s poker face while wondering whether they can tell you haven’t read it.
I hate to admit how many times I’ve done this, and I’m sure you’d probably hate to admit it too. I never intend not to do my readings — it just happens. Dartmouth is hard, and sometimes I would rather go out than sit in my room silently reading.
This column is not meant to be a scolding, someone chiding about laziness when all I want to do is have fun. This is an expression of genuine concern about the future of our collective knowledge and appreciation for life. There is no way for me to tell whether people have always skipped readings, but I believe the advent of technology has made it far easier to do so, and therefore far more common. Coming from a student at Dartmouth, an elite institution of learning, it seems like the phenomenon of skipping readings has become alarmingly common. In some cases, it even feels like “oh, I didn’t do the readings either, don’t worry” has become a frequent quip among students when reassuring each other if they’re feeling nervous about a test or discussion.
To be fair, technology was invented for a reason. The fact that we can read highly detailed, easy-to-digest summaries of pretty much anything is a boon to learning, if used properly. It can greatly increase one’s scope of knowledge, but it also makes the knowledge gained limited if overused. When a student uses ChatGPT and other summary tools, they are given the broad strokes of any given reading. The broad strokes can be good, but it is simply impossible to convey what, say, 10,000 words do with a 400 to 500 word summary. Details are lost, nuances are lost and occasionally, critical dimensions of the argument are lost.
The more pernicious loss that comes with less people doing their readings is the skill and discipline required to sit down and read. It’s no secret that phones have harmed our ability to pay attention to things. In fact, a 2023 study in Scientific Reports found that the presence of your phone in the room can actively harm your ability to pay attention. Because of this, the ability to sit down and read for extended periods of time has become a skill, and an exceedingly rare one, even among college students.
It might be helpful to take the current phenomenon to an extreme in a thought experiment. Imagine that 30 years from now, a significantly diminished population of college students actually do the readings for any of their classes – let’s say, approximately five to 10%. At this point, we will begin to effectively lose the collective, in-depth knowledge stored in the books that people used to read. All we will have is the surface level understanding of important thinkers, and barely any experts left to help us better understand and apply their ideas to the pressing problems of our times. Libraries full of books that no one alive has ever understood will sit quietly as problems fester, and there will be very few people left with the knowledge needed to fully grapple with them.
There’s an argument to be made that sooner or later none of us will need this knowledge at all – the breakneck advancement of artificial intelligence could mean that we will have robots who will have read more than any of us could in a lifetime making decisions for us. In this case, there is an even stronger argument for reading — the appreciation for life, and the pure joy and fulfillment that reading gives to an individual.
Although we might not have in a while, I’m sure every Dartmouth student knows the thrill of finishing a good book. Furthermore, I’m sure every Dartmouth student knows the excitement of uncovering and synthesizing a new bit of knowledge for the first time by reading a text and perhaps more importantly, the feeling that you have a better understanding of life and the lives of others. Reading substantially enriches life, it helps us understand the people around us and it is probably one of the best uses of time as a human.
More practically, Dartmouth also costs more than $90,000 a year. I came here to have fun, but also to learn. I know that it’s almost always hard to make time for readings, but they must be done, at least more often than they currently are. If our current practices don’t change – and I fear they might get worse – humankind’s collective knowledge and appreciation for life will be substantially damaged, and that would be one of the greatest tragedies of our lifetime.
Opinion columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He is from Connecticut, and studies government and creative writing.
On campus, Eli is an active member of the Dartmouth Political Union and Dartmouth Army ROTC. He attends Dartmouth on an ROTC scholarship, and upon graduation, he will commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He has been an active writer and political organizer from a young age, working on over 15 political campaigns varying from local to presidential races, and publishing both fiction and nonfiction on various platforms.
First and foremost, Eli loves to write, and he intends to make some form of it his full time career after his time in the Army.
