Trevor Butterworth

Cofounder, VP Digital Strategy & Governance @indicioID, decentralized identity; Irish/American/USA/IRL

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

I heard similar from a friend who teaches philosophy in Spain. A sharp decline over the past decade in the capacity to read books; a desire to "learn" through watching a video instead.

[Karen Vaites @karenvaites]

“We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

Another college professor adds to the chorus of concern about student capacity.

In @chronicle:

“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@anelsona @60Minutes Harold Ross and Jane Grant were high school dropouts.

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@BrandonWarmke @RonaDinur Even more true of literature professors who embraced theory: all rejecting philosophical positions by default rather than by reading or engagement. Same for science. Intellectual history in grad school was the history of several intellectuals…

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@nickgillespie CBS’s Eric Severeid wrote in “Not So Wild a Dream” that the war reporter - of which he was one, a Murrow boy, never experiences combat as a soldier experiences combat, not least because he is an observer and there by choice - and this is a deeply humbling fact.

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@PubliusCoScAf @HistoryBoomer It's extraordinary how far removed many in the media are from everyday norms, and I say that as a former journalist.

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@johnarnold The cultural dimension should not be ignored. Human authenticity will be a new source of value and perhaps a rallying cry to greater rejection, especially as AI will disrupt the lives of the young the most. One interesting bellwether: the sudden popularity of Angine de Poitrine.

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@bradford_skow A Marxist could critique Gatsby as an indictment of class; a Hayekian critic could celebrate Gatsby as a free marketeer. Both risk being reductive. The problem in criticism is the incentive to force a work into a pre-existing frame of interpretation whose premises are assumed.

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@bradford_skow If the work (either the literature or the criticism of the literature) reveals Marxist premises about power, class, central planning etc, then it would seem logical to critique it on that basis, no?

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@DAMendelsohnNYC F.L. Lucas: Style. War hero, Literary critic, anti-fascist, Bletchley Park maven. The only book on writing worth reading, I believe Robertson Davies said. Either way, I concur.

[Will Self @wself]

"This occurs because the large language model optimises statistically for plausibility at sentence level. What it cannot sustain is style in the deeper sense: the circulation of pressure, contradiction, temporality and embodiment across an entire work. Real literary style resembles a living body. Pressure exerted in one region is registered elsewhere. Damage to one part reverberates through the whole. Even amputation leaves phantom sensation. Style possesses exactly this distributed organic character. Machine prose, however fluent, remains fundamentally modular."

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@mark_cummins The difference between produce on the West Coast and East is staggering. The first time I went to Washington State and Oregon from DC (2002-ish), I was stunned. It was like entering the Garden of Eden.

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@JacobAShell Concur. Otherwise he’s the thinking person’s (sic) George Lucas. At some point, there’s going to be an Ewok…

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@UNDRR Tsunamis are long form waves; this flank collapse produced a short form wave, which is it largely dissipated by the time it reached the sea

[Oliver Traldi @olivertraldi]

@julngrv Odyssey
Turning round into the sea
Swimming through sick siren songs
Choking cause my friends are hogs

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@bendreyfuss @RyanNewYork 1. Every reinterpretation of a classic text has invited controversy. This is why Samuel Beckett’s ghost rules every performance: no directorial changes allowed. 2. oral cultures relied on epic poetry to understand who they were & how they should behave. Not nonsense to them.

[Musa al-Gharbi @Musa_alGharbi]

I'm perhaps biased, but in my humble opinion @JonHaidt > Hilary Duff for a commencement address

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@benryanwriter My final academic course was with Edward Said: Politics and Aesthetics. Here you had theories of language and cognition advanced with no awareness of linguistics, cognitive science, or philosophy of language. Pushback was blasphemy!

[Trevor Butterworth @Butterworthy]

@benryanwriter I also studied analytic philosophy and European philosophy from within a conventional philosophy department (critical theory was in UG English lit and grad history). There was little love for critical theory and the English prof doing theory was widely regarded as a fool.