The Humanities Aren’t Obsolete. We Stopped Teaching Them

I assign books. A growing share of my students don’t read them. My students aren’t unique—the decline in full-length reading is well documented , especially at elite institutions nationwide . That’s not a complaint; rather, it’s the starting point for any honest conversation about what’s happening to the humanities and social sciences and the observation which Sam Kahn builds on in his powerful piece in Persuasion . Kahn lays out the damage plainly. Syracuse just shuttered 93 academic programs , classics among them. Hampshire College is closing its doors . Intended humanities majors at Harvard have fallen from 30 percent in the 1970s to under 10 percent today. Students at Columbia report never having read a book cover to cover in high school ; students at elite universities openly admit running much of their work through AI , often with faculty looking the other way. Kahn’s diagnosis is that a cognitive shift has occurred. The perceived utility of longform reading has declined in a world shaped by digital tools and artificial intelligence. Students are responding to that shift and so are institutions. His prescription, in part, is to move serious humanistic life outside the university, into reading groups and lifelong communities of readers, because the schools, as businesses answerable to student-clients, will keep drifting toward whatever students want. That is a description of incentives, not a justification for surrender. Institutions shape incentives. They are not helpless before them. He is right about much of it. He is right that the usual fixes—digital integration one decade, blue books the next—are evasions. He is right that the intrinsic case for the humanities has been crowded out by instrumental ones, and that they are worth pursuing for their own sake: as a way out of the ego, as continuity with minds across centuries. I would sign my name to that. Where I part company with him is on the role of the schools. The problem is not that universities have been overtaken by forces outside their control. The problem is that the schools have stopped requiring the habits that make the humanities possible and have done so as a matter of choice. For a decade or more, faculty and administrators have quietly adjusted downward. Syllabi moved from books to excerpts. Assignments were redesigned for accessibility. Reading loads were cut on the theory that we should meet students where they are. We did. This is where it leads. Education is not supposed to meet students where they are. It is supposed to move them somewhere they would not have gone on their own. When students do not read books, they do not build the cognitive architecture sustained reading requires. They cannot hold an argument across 200 pages because they have never been asked to. They write in fragments because they read in fragments. And they arrive at college—I see in classrooms nationwide—perfectly capable of having opinions, but not of testing them. This is not only a pedagogical issue, its civic. Tocqueville understood that self-government requires citizens capable of forming independent judgments, and that capacity is formed slowly, through the habits a serious curriculum enforces. Strip out the habits, and the capacity goes with them. What you are left with is a citizenry fluent in reaction and illiterate in argument. That capacity does not regenerate on its own once lost. The schools were the institutions designed to form it. Nothing else in American life is positioned to replace them at scale. AI sharpens the stakes. The machines are already excellent at producing the kind of output many humanities courses now reward: a competent five-page essay on an assigned text. If that is what college is for, the game is over, and the universities lost it. But that was never what the humanities were for. Reading a full book is an encounter with a structured mind, at length, on its own terms: the capacity hardest to build, easiest to lose, and one a free society cannot do without. Kahn’s reading groups are a genuine good, and I wish them every success. Adults who want to keep reading seriously at 40 and 60 deserve better than what the internet offers. But the case for reviving humanistic life outside the university does not require giving up on the university. Most young Americans will encounter serious reading in college or not at all. That is the ground on which this fight is actually lost or won. The harder answer is to restore what the schools gave away: faculty willing to assign difficult books, administrators willing to back them when students push back, and an institutional culture that treats formation as the point and satisfaction as a byproduct. If students don’t read books, it isn’t because books stopped mattering. It’s because we stopped insisting that they do. The post The Humanities Aren’t Obsolete. We Stopped Teaching Them appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .