From Skimming to Deep Reading: Why Our Middle Schoolers Need Books This Summer

By Elaine Griffin

I first learned about Maryanne Wolf’s excellent book "Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World" when a school parent told me that Princeton University chose Wolf’s book as its summer read for the class of 2030. While published in 2018, "Reader, Come Home" has gained new relevance as educators consider the impact of artificial intelligence on student learning. Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, selected the book because he wants students to understand why wrestling with long, challenging texts still matters. Eisgruber believes that even though AI can summarize books instantly, deep reading is the cornerstone of a college education.

An Antidote to Screen Saturation

"Reader, Come Home" also stands as a powerful counterweight to warnings about children’s screen time issued in the U.S. surgeon general’s recent bulletin entitled “Harms of Screen Use.” The report reveals a glum reality: adolescents now spend more hours on their devices than they do in school or sleeping.

The report linked excessive screen time to poor sleep, weaker academic outcomes, attention issues, anxiety, and depression. Ultimately, it made one central recommendation: young people need to “live real life.” To support this, the surgeon general recommends that schools and families dramatically limit screen time and instead promote athletics, time outdoors, hands-on activities, and reading.

Maryanne Wolf is one of the world’s leading researchers on reading and is a professor-in-residence at UCLA. Her work shows that when reading replaces screen time, kids increase cognition, focus, memory, and empathy. She calls herself a “reading worrier” because her research indicates that time online erodes children’s reading and critical thinking skills.

However, Wolf doesn’t just admire the problem. A radical optimist, she fervently believes that if we can get kids reading again, we can address many of the problems students are having with attention and comprehension. 

The Science of the Reading Brain

Wolf begins her book by pointing out that human beings are not naturally wired to read. Unlike speech, reading is a cultural invention that must be intentionally taught and nurtured. Because the reading brain’s neural pathways are shaped by the medium we use, how we read really matters.

Wolf argues that digital reading inherently encourages skimming rather than the sustained attention that paper materials cultivate. Online, we tend to skim in a zigzag pattern, searching for key ideas while skipping over details. Wolf cites a study showing that readers using paperbacks were significantly better at reconstructing the plot of a novel than those reading on Kindles.

This discrepancy comes down to geography. Reading on paper provides spatial landmarks; words, sentences, and paragraphs have fixed, physical locations on a page. These visual anchors strengthen memory and comprehension, allowing readers to pause, underline, reread, and reflect—habits that online scrolling actively discourages.

The Erosion of Memory and Internal Knowledge

Furthermore, deep reading strengthens memory. To understand a complex sentence, readers must hold earlier ideas in mind while integrating new information. To follow a novel, they must remember characters, plot developments, and themes over several sittings. Yet modern technology increasingly conditions us to outsource memory. Why remember a fact when we can just Google it? Perhaps because of this practice, “the average memory span of many adults has diminished by more than 50 percent over the last decade.” 

Wolf worries that children may become too dependent on external sources of information before building their own internal platforms of knowledge. She writes, “It is not that I prefer internal to external platforms of knowledge; I want both, but the internal one has to be sufficiently formed before automatic reliance on the external one takes over.” Reading slowly and thoughtfully on paper helps build that internal foundation—that warehouse of knowledge—in a child’s brain. 

While Wolf wrote this prior to the explosion of AI tools like ChatGPT, her concerns perfectly mirror my own when it comes to introducing AI to students too soon. These technologies make it easy for students to bypass the productive struggle that deep learning requires. Middle school kids still have developing brains and need to build the intellectual skills required to analyze, question, synthesize, and reflect independently. Those habits deserve cultivation and protection.

Balancing the Literary Diet

What we read does matter. Since the internet’s influence on reading, Wolf notes that sentences in contemporary works are markedly shorter than classics—about 50% shorter. Contemporary writers are increasingly producing shorter manuscripts with simpler vocabulary to accommodate the shallower reading practices we’ve developed through online reading. While there is nothing inherently wrong with accessible writing, students need opportunities to wrestle with complexity. 

Wolf describes deep reading as a “use it or lose it” skill, so we should balance contemporary choices with classics. The classics force readers to slow down, grapple with difficult vocabulary and syntax, and interpret figurative language. Classics quite literally offer a workout for the cortex.

Cultivating Empathy in a Screen-Mediated World

However, deep reading is not just an academic skill. It is also an exercise in empathy. It reveals that the world is “full of grays.” Through literature, readers encounter perspectives different from their own and gain an understanding of other people’s emotional complexity. Wolf believes that empathy “is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading process,” as “we move from our inherently circumscribed views of the world to enter another’s and return enlarged.” Middle school students are at the stage when they are trying to understand themselves and connect with peers, so gaining emotional intelligence through reading supports their development in significant ways.

Gaining empathy through reading feels especially important when paired with research from MIT scholar Sherry Turkle, who has documented a staggering 40% decline in empathy among young people over the past two decades, with the sharpest drop occurring in the last ten years. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, reading may be one of the few remaining activities that consistently asks children to sit quietly inside another person’s thoughts and feelings.

Finding the Right Balance with Technology

None of this means we should reject technology altogether. Wolf certainly does not advocate returning to quill pens and candlelight, and neither do I. Technology can empower students when it puts them in the driver’s seat: coding a robot, composing original music with GarageBand, or developing a documentary for their National History Day project.

The challenge for schools and parents is not deciding whether technology is “good” or “bad.” The challenge is discerning when analog methods or digital technologies are best for teaching a particular skill at a particular stage of a student's development. When it comes to building a young person's core reading circuit, we know that paper books offer clear cognitive advantages over technology. The data prove it.

Concluding Thoughts and a Summer Invitation

Wolf closes her book with a warning that feels remarkably timely: “We live in a historical ‘hinge moment.’”

She worries that constant exposure to fast-moving, easily digestible information may gradually reduce our motivation to think deeply and to think for ourselves. If we are not intentional, we risk raising children who consume enormous amounts of information but struggle to engage with it critically.

As conversations about AI continue to accelerate, schools and families will understandably feel pressure to ensure students are “AI ready.” But before we rush ahead, we should pause to consider the fundamental intellectual and emotional capacities young people need first. 

The ability to focus, reflect, empathize, question, and think independently will only become more valuable in an age of instant answers. Here’s the takeaway on AI: For our students to be “AI ready” as adults—using it appropriately and effectively—they need to avoid AI tools that allow them to off-load cognition during middle school. Ultimately, they will be better users of such technologies in the future if they avoid using them today.

Whether as children or adults—and in the present as in the past and the future—reading is always in season and will always make you and your kids better and deeper thinkers. My hope is that Wolf’s work inspires your family to make time for reading this summer. Visit your local library. Let your child choose a stack of books that genuinely interests them. Participate in a summer reading program. Most importantly, let your children see you reading, too. Modeling deep reading in the home is the single most powerful way to raise a lifelong reader. 

By putting down our screens and picking up a book, we can help our children step away from the digital noise and step back into the deep, transformative world of their own amazing minds. Newsflash for Silicon Valley: Nothing it tries to sell us will ever be as magical as that. 

About Elaine Griffin:

Elaine Griffin has worked at University School of Milwaukee since 1998, serving as the head of Middle School since 2019. Previously, she served as the assistant head of Upper School and taught Upper School English. She has both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in English, and serves on the board of the United Community Center and the administrative board of Independent Schools Association of the Central States.