The Dartmouth Green is the heart of Dartmouth’s campus. It’s quintessentially college: on a warm, sunny day, students populate the Green playing various games, doing homework and catching up with friends. Lately, however, it feels one activity has been missing: reading. Even though I have been at Dartmouth for just over a year, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen students reading physical books.
It’s a well-known fact that college students read far less than they used to. According to a Gallup poll last year, 35% of K-12 Gen Z students dislike reading, and 43% claim to “rarely or never” read for fun. This shift away from books is incredibly detrimental to our generation. Reading is fundamental to fulfilling our natural curiosity and helps ensure our desire to learn does not cease after college.
How did we get here? A big reason is technology, which has made a boundless amount of information instantaneously accessible right at our fingertips. The recent rise of artificial intelligence has greatly exacerbated this issue, introducing a myriad of reading shortcuts such as summaries and outlines that make bypassing required readings easier than it ever has been.
On the other hand, many students claim that they gave up reading for pleasure simply because they do not have the time. Others cite a paucity of mental energy. School is often exhausting, especially at an institution as academically rigorous as Dartmouth. Outside of academics, most students are extensively involved in extracurricular activities; with rapidly rising grade inflation, extracurriculars have become ever-more important in differentiating students in job and graduate school applications. After a long day of mentally and/or physically exhausting work, doing something productive that resembles schoolwork is unappealing to many students, especially when you could, instead, scroll infinite short form content or binge the new season of Stranger Things.
Despite technology’s drastic expansion of knowledge accessibility, reading for pleasure should not be rendered obsolete. There is value in learning things for ourselves, molding us into more intelligent and capable human beings while providing us with the necessary skills for the workforce, such as a lengthy attention span and the ability to follow complex arguments. Instead of simply encouraging students to regurgitate information, as much of the educational system currently prioritizes, reading for pleasure encourages original thinking, prompting us to develop our own ideas.
As universities have become increasingly professionalized, this genuine love of learning has been lost among many students. Discussions of the next coffee chat, networking call, or internship application deadline have replaced those of the newest discovered mathematical formula, the merits of the most recent executive order, and the philosophical meaning of human existence.
Reading does not necessarily need to be for learning; there are plenty of books that tell stories of characters in faraway lands and many others that simply remind us of the fundamental aspects of being human: love, loss, fear, hope. Reading can be anxiety-relieving, providing an escape from the stresses of everyday life by transporting readers into alternative worlds.
So open Google Maps, head to the nearest library, and crack open a book. Who knows, maybe you’ll even enjoy yourself.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
