For years, Yezen Hashem ’27 carried his Kindle everywhere. Whenever he had time to himself, he would eagerly jump into his latest read, letting the stories completely occupy his attention. 

That all changed when the pandemic hit, and school moved online. Confined to his computer for a large portion of the day, Hashem set the Kindle aside and began spending more of his free time playing video games instead. 

He didn’t fall out of love with books. Casual reading simply lost its place in his day, routinely overpowered in the constant competition for his attention. “Video games just deliver more dopamine to my brain,” he said. Books, by comparison, feel outgunned. “It’s just words on a page versus flashing colors and extreme audio with quicker dopamine spikes.”

The role that reading played in Hashem’s life had fundamentally changed. Shaped by a media landscape engineered to constantly divert attention elsewhere, books surrendered their status as his go-to leisure activity and became synonymous with school assignments and tedious effort.

Hashem is not alone in his experience. Nationwide, American teenagers are reading for pleasure less than ever before. 

According to September 2025 data from the American Time Use Survey, more than 80% of Americans now read for five minutes a day or less. Compared to 20 years ago, the share of Americans who report reading for pleasure on a given day has dropped by 39%, even as books have become more accessible through phones, e-readers, and audiobooks.

In 1984, 31% of 17-year-olds reported reading for pleasure almost daily. Today, that number has dropped precipitously to 19%, according to the 2020 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Meanwhile, social media use has become a daily habit for more than 80% of teens.

Given Nueva’s reputation as an academically rigorous private Bay Area high school whose curriculum emphasizes critical thinking and curiosity, its students might be expected to show stronger reading habits than the national average. In a recent survey conducted by The Nueva Current, 29.8% of the 189 respondents said they voluntarily read long-form texts daily outside of school. This figure places Nueva well above the current national percentage of 19%, yet still below the level of the average American teenager four decades ago.

For many Nueva students, pleasure reading has been slowly crowded out by increasingly full schedules: 68.4% of respondents reported being “too busy” in their day-to-day lives to read sustained text for fun.

Even students who enjoy reading on their own time, such as Hannah Fang ’27, say it’s become a precious rarity rather than a habit. 

“I used to read a lot as a child, to the point where my parents would say, ‘You can’t read anymore until you do your homework,’” she recalled. “My love for it [has stayed] the same, but the amount of time that I get to spend reading has decreased.”

Eric Wang ’26 pointed to a simple tradeoff: reading requires sustained concentration, while devices offer instant gratification. When students need to decompress, they naturally reach for the easier, more frictionless option.

Ronit Das ’27 has felt this tension firsthand: “I have free time to read—I just don’t use it to read,” he admitted. “It is a lot easier to enjoy something online than it is to enjoy a book.”

Teachers have also observed the shift. Upper School English teacher Brianna Beehler begins each semester by asking students for one thing they read or watched over break; this year was the first time she’d gotten “TikTok” or “an Instagram Reel” as an answer.

“A lot of teachers often ask, ‘What’s your favorite book?’” said Hubert Chen ’27. “And I just feel more and more people are becoming not just disassociated from that question, but it’s like, ‘Oh man, what have I read in the past year?’”

Short-form content, especially Instagram Reels, has turned ingesting any type of information into a question about maximizing efficiency and reward. “The payoff is so much faster than sitting down and reading a 300-page book,” said Mars Resser ’27. 

This kind of media consumption comes at a cost, however. Studies have shown that intense social media use is also linked to deleterious effects on attention: a 2026 study published in Pediatrics Open Science found that increased social media use was associated with reduced attention over time, even as other forms of screen use were not. This seems true at Nueva, too, where 59.1% of respondents said devices or social media content made it harder to read long-form text.

In contrast, reading books has been shown to strengthen the very capacities that social media erodes. Various researchers and studies have found innumerable positive effects of reading on cognition, from improving brain connectivity and short- and long-term memory to alleviating stress and even preventing cognitive decline.

There’s a psychological element to it, too: researchers from Harvard, Princeton, and McGill University found that frequent fiction reading resulted in strong “social cognition performance” of participants, as a result of fiction’s ability to simulate “social content.” A 2013 study in Science similarly showed how reading fiction, specifically, helped adults navigate ideological diversity. 

However, many of these benefits depend on sustained, uninterrupted attention—something that students report is increasingly difficult to maintain.

“[When] I’m reading a book, I can almost get into [a] flow state. But the second I get back on my phone, or I get a notification that causes me to open my phone, I end up getting sidetracked,” William Harms ’28 noted. 

Even teachers are noticing a similar trend in their own technology habits. “I know that I can’t sit still anymore the same way that I used to just sit in silence. I need to pick up my phone; I need to busy myself somehow,” Upper School English teacher Amber Carpenter said.

For that reason, Carpenter worries when she hears from students about their multitasking habits: eating while doing homework, flitting between unrelated tabs, or using a split-screen to watch videos in the background. 

“It was shocking to me,” she said. “They’re not really focusing on one thing. I think that skill is something that students have lost.” 

Das partially attributes the shift to a generational gap in how students and teachers relate to technology.

Gen Z has only ever known a world of smartphones, streaming, and algorithmic feeds. As a result, teens have been made prone to relying on their devices for both information and escape. High school students who spent formative years online during the pandemic have carried those digital habits forward.

But it’s not just devices and algorithms that are changing students’ relationships to reading. When students read mostly for class rather than pleasure, they begin to approach texts with their eventual essay grade, rather than enjoyment, at the forefront. 

Mila Wanek ’27 notes that when reading is assigned in an English class, “[students] are only engaging with the books to find materials for their essay, and because of that, they’re incapable of reading normally.”

Resser echoed Wanek’s observations. “The way that we [as students] see reading is like we are mastering the text, we are subjugating the text,” they said. “Whereas, when I was much younger, it was kind of like the text was taking me on a journey.” 

Upper School English teacher Jen Neubauer understands that students experience a disconnect when their reading is framed as an academic task rather than a personal one. “I think we place a lot of emphasis on experiences and presentations, and not just [on] the joy of reading, which is maybe more personal and independent,” she said. 

Teachers also recognize that reading can feel more forced and less enjoyable when it’s assigned rather than chosen. Carpenter, for example, acknowledges that students may feel less engaged when they are not invested in the particular texts included in the reading curriculum. “I think part of that is on us to make things a bit more exciting,” she said. 

At the same time, English teachers want to remind students that reading a text for fun and analyzing it for deeper meanings are two fundamentally different skills—both equally valid, but suited for different contexts. “Reading doesn’t necessarily have the most linear outcome. Responding to ambiguity or complexity often requires you to tune in a little bit more rather than lie back,” Upper School English teacher Sarah Muszynski said. 

“That seems counterintuitive to a lot of people, and I can get why that would produce some frustration,” she added. “Sometimes it’s difficult to square those different, context-bound forms of reading.”

“I think that some texts are just innately challenging,” Carpenter said. “And so that’s part of the pushback. [Students] don’t always want to be challenged.” 

This disillusionment has real consequences. When students approach their academic reading as a hurdle rather than an experience, they begin to see shortcuts as a more appealing option.

Indeed, Harms acknowledged that students tend to turn to online or AI tools in place of reading when their primary goal is to “just complete the assignment and get a good grade.”

“Is there truly much of a payoff for that time commitment for [students]?” Harms asked. “If they can have ChatGPT or SparkNotes summarize this whole book for them, is there a benefit for them actually reading it versus them getting the summary?” 

Some teachers, such as Muszynski, see the proliferation of AI summary tools as correlative to the fragmentation of modern attention spans. 

“Why sit with something when an answer can be right at your fingertips?” she said. 

Beehler agreed, seeing the AI summaries that now preface every Google search result as emblematic of the modern desire to distill any block of text into its main points. “If that’s how we’re being trained to read the world around us, it’s hard to encounter a full text,” she said. 

Even so, Upper School English teacher Pearl Bauer believes that a system where students bypass their own learning isn’t inevitable. “If you get a student excited about what they’re thinking about and what they’re writing, they’re not going to turn to AI,” she said.

Still, the English department tries to ensure that students can handle weekly reading loads without shortcuts. Teachers must work within Nueva’s homework policy, which recommends homework not to exceed 45 minutes of work per class period. This limits the amount of reading the English teachers can allot, and, as a result, how many books one course syllabus can contain.

“We have students who read at varying speeds, and accommodating for an entire class, trying to be in sync with pages, actually often really limits the reading that we assign here—more than any school I’ve ever worked at,” Neubauer said. 

Some students, however, wish for a faster-paced English curriculum that would make space for more challenging books. 

“I do think that Nueva prides itself on being really contemporary with the things we read, [and so] sometimes I think there are books we read that have a really low barrier [to] entry,” Nancy Graham-Martinez ’26 said. 

She noted that although maximizing the accessibility and modern relevancy of a text is important, the communal aspect of an academic English class makes it well-suited for the exploration of more challenging texts.  

Evelyn Kuan ’28 shared a similar sentiment. “I understand it’s hard to balance reading levels, but I feel like I’d get a lot more out of [English] courses if we read one or two more books a semester.”

Still, some teachers have found ways to accommodate a desire for more extensive exploration within the constraints of the curriculum. Rather than adding more books, they’re carving out spaces where reading can exist without being tethered to an assignment or rubric.

In Upper School English teacher Allen Frost’s classroom, that effort takes the form of a single poem read together at the beginning of each class, without annotation or discussion prompts. For Wang, the exercise feels almost radical in its pure simplicity. “It’s a nice way of reminding me that reading isn’t always about analysis,” he said.

The Senior English curriculum, where students select English classes tailored to specific subjects, offers an additional opportunity to prioritize personal interests in reading. Some seniors have told English teachers that their senior seminar was one of their favorite classes at Nueva, Bauer noted. “That’s a huge testament, that [students] are saying the best class they’ve ever taken is an English class,” she said.

As a senior herself, Graham-Martinez pointed to the opt-in component of senior English as a high point of her Nueva experience. “I feel like everyone’s really engaged in the readings because a lot of us chose to read [them],” she said.

Anya Ostrovsky ’26 similarly relished the few times she got to choose her English books as an upperclassman. And others, like Kyle Wan ’27, are looking forward to the change they’ll experience when they become seniors. 

Outside the classroom, the WRC has taken on a subtler but increasingly deliberate approach to incentivize student reading. “We’ve aimed to encourage reading at both of those zones,” WRC coordinator Jen Paull said, referring to the two “zones” of academic and personal reading. 

So far, the WRC has jump-started a variety of initiatives: the staff “Blind Date with a Book” giveaway before the holidays; the Book Plates project showcasing faculty and staff’s favorite books; public readings of novels like The Great Gatsby; and displays of student-written poetry chapbooks. 

The team also oversees the Book Club and the recently announced Student Library Board, a group that aims to incorporate student voices into the library’s collection and outreach programs. All of these projects celebrate reading, hoping to build community among readers across a spectrum of ages and preferences.

Paull also co-chaperones the annual, book-centric 11th-grade trip to Boston and NYC, where students explore the cities’ rich selection of libraries, archives, and bookstores. 

“It’s all part of just keeping it in the air,” Paull explained. 

Beyond institutional programs, the students who continue to maintain active reading habits do so for reasons that have little to do with academics. “There’s something about reading that really recharges your battery, and it’s nice to be spending time alone doing something that’s not on the internet,” Graham-Martinez said.

Reading offers Pearl Yeh-Lee ’26 something unique: “[Reading] is a way of experiencing a whole different world from the day-to-day grind, and I can read about these people who are completely different from me.”

Sofia Robison ’28 agreed. “I like the escapism of it,” she said. “I enjoy fiction for [its] grand fantasticalness.” 

Paull wants to remind students who are looking to incorporate more reading into their lives that it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing commitment: “You might not have the time for an entire novel, but maybe there’s an audiobook, maybe there’s a novella, maybe there’s a graphic novel that grabs you. It’s not a huge investment before you get something great out of it.” 

Reading, she emphasized, should not have to be a burden, or just a form of academic tedium. “There’s this hilarious, fun, provocative, energizing, social part of reading too.”

For many teachers, reading is a means of developing robust skills of thinking and inquiry. Upper School Math teacher Ted Theodosopoulos—who also teaches Linguistics and often incorporates readings into his math, economics, and interdisciplinary classes—thinks of reading as a means of sustaining a deeper habit of cognitive flexibility. 

“We become conceptually poor in being able to discern different meanings if we don’t engage with deeper readings,” he said. 

Without continuous encounters with complex texts, the ability to sit with ambiguity and layered ideas will erode. That loss is easy to miss, especially among Nueva students who continue to read well and perform academically. 

Reading hasn’t disappeared at Nueva. It has been diminished by the same forces reordering attention everywhere: busier schedules, an internet and social media optimized for immediacy, academic structures that reward efficiency, and the lingering habits of a childhood shaped by the pandemic. 

None of these factors tells the whole story, nor are they unique to Nueva. Books remain at the heart of English classes and are loved and valued by many students. What has changed is the extent to which they are central to students’ daily lives. Books are losing their place as students’ preferred leisure activity, competing alongside faster, more effortless forms of entertainment. 

The question is thus not whether Nueva students are capable of deep reading, but how much space it can realistically occupy in their increasingly crowded, accelerated, and interrupted lives.