The impact of social media and other technologies on younger generations is profound, especially with AI tools like ChatGPT now available to write essays and answer complex questions. While these technologies offer easy access to information, they risk shortcutting the mental effort crucial for cognitive development. Reading challenging material is like weightlifting for the mind - you need to tackle difficult books to build critical thinking skills. “This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover. “My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.” https://lnkd.in/eWQqCTUb