Ezra Klein says even Ivy League professors can't assign the books they've taught for decades anymore. Their students just can't do it.

Ezra Klein says even Ivy League professors can't assign the books they've taught for decades anymore. Their students just can't do it. "Here's a statistic I've been thinking about recently. In 1976, about 40% of high school seniors had read six books or more for fun. Only about 11% hadn't read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed. About 40% haven't read a single book for fun. "If you are looking for this, you see it everywhere right now. There are all these headlines about how kids are not reading the way they once did. There are all these stories quoting professors even at Ivy League universities about the way in which when they try to assign the reading that they've been assigning their entire careers, their students, they just can't do it anymore. "We're losing something. We can see it on test scores that over the last decade we just see the number of kids reading at grade level slipping. Then of course the pandemic accelerated that. So if you were simply asking how are the kids doing on some of these intellectual faculties that we once thought were the core of what education was trying to promote, they're not doing well. "And then as if we summoned it, as if we wrote it into the script, here comes this technology, generative AI, that can do it for them." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Ezra Klein, journalist, on The Ezra Klein Show

— Toan Truong (@LearningToan) October 16, 2026