Kabbani, J. (2026, June 3). English professor warns: Today’s students cannot read or focus on lengthy assignments, College Fix.

This is a good example of an article that identifies a national problem: students can't read. Students have terrible attention spans. Tablets have ruined education.

I am at ground zero in this fight. I have two children, nine and ten, who are our twelfth and thirteenth. They are foster kids. They are absolutely normal except damaged by an exploding family and unable to live with parents who simply couldn't bring them up. They spend a lot of time on tablets while I'm up here trying to write books that I've wanted to write all my life. But now I'm 72. Time is running out. I need to write these books now or never. If I had to say get lost to the children, though, I can't do it. So they're on screens.

We have a house full of books. Lots of them are perfectly good for children. Still, given the choice, they'd take the tablet every time.

One thing obvious is that it's a worldwide problem. I could say to them: if you could develop your attention span so that you can read a whole book, you'll be better than 90% of your classmates, they might do it Some will do it. They'll do it just to get ahead. The driven ones will figure out how to get better than the rest. It'll be the way to get ahead, to succeed in this world. In a job interview you can say, "I can read a book," and if you can back that up, you'll get the job.

It's not like they don't have the time. Time is all they have. It's summer, it's hot outside, there's nothing to do. And they're not reading.