In the Age of AI, Reading May Matter More Than Ever

Summary for Educators

Based on Stephen Fitzpatrick
“It’s the Reading, Stupid”
Teaching in the Age of AI, July 10, 2026

THE BIG IDEA

Much of the debate about artificial intelligence in schools has focused on student writing: Will students use AI to generate essays? Will teachers still be able to tell what students actually know? How should schools handle AI-assisted composition?

Stephen Fitzpatrick argues that schools may be overlooking the more fundamental problem:

reading.

Students cannot use AI well if they cannot read its output carefully, skeptically, and with enough background knowledge to recognize when something is incomplete, misleading, oversimplified, or simply wrong. Strong readers can skim, compare sources, question confident language, and decide when deeper reading is necessary. Less experienced readers often cannot.

Fitzpatrick’s core argument is striking: in the age of AI, the ability to read deeply and critically may become more important, not less.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AI use depends on reading ability. Students may be able to generate sophisticated AI responses with a simple prompt, but they still need the vocabulary, knowledge, and judgment to understand what comes back. Fitzpatrick argues that this is where many students are least prepared.

• Secondary schools often assume reading has already been taught. Once students can decode text, many content-area teachers shift almost entirely to subject matter. Fitzpatrick argues that students still need explicit instruction in how to handle difficult history, science, literature, philosophy, and primary-source texts.

• Not all reading is the same. Reading a novel for plot differs from reading history for argument and evidence or philosophy for reasoning. Students need to learn how different kinds of texts demand different kinds of attention.

• “Read it again” is not instruction. Fitzpatrick recalls the story of a teacher who repeatedly told a struggling student simply to reread a passage before realizing that the student did not know how to read it for comprehension. The problem was not necessarily motivation; it was strategy and knowledge.

• Productive struggle matters. Difficult texts build vocabulary, persistence, knowledge, and interpretive skill. But difficulty must be calibrated. When a text becomes so inaccessible that students cannot construct meaning, struggle stops being productive and students disengage.

• AI can solve the content problem while worsening the reading problem. Fitzpatrick describes using AI to lower the reading level of a difficult text for a student. The student learned the content—but he wondered whether simplifying the text also removed the very struggle that could have strengthened her as a reader.

WHY IT MATTERS

This is an especially important issue for school leaders because reading is frequently treated as the responsibility of the English department or elementary grades.

But reading is the gateway skill for almost everything students do.

A student who cannot read a science textbook well will struggle in science.

A student who cannot unpack a historical document will struggle in history.

A student who cannot follow a mathematical explanation will struggle in advanced mathematics.

And a student who cannot critically evaluate an AI response may accept fluent language as accurate knowledge.

Fitzpatrick notes that students increasingly inhabit an information environment built around speed: short posts, instant search results, AI summaries, and immediate answers. That environment works against what reading researcher Maryanne Wolf has described as cognitive patience—the willingness to stay with a difficult passage long enough for meaning to emerge.

AI intensifies that tension.

If a student can instantly ask a machine:

“Summarize this chapter.”

“Rewrite this at an easier level.”

“Give me the three key points.”

“Explain what this author means.”

then the temptation to bypass the text itself becomes enormous.

And every time the original text is bypassed, students lose an opportunity to build the reading muscles they will need later.

LEADERSHIP ACTIONS

Make reading everyone's responsibility.
Secondary teachers across disciplines need support in teaching students how to read the kinds of texts characteristic of their subjects.

Teach students how experts read.
History teachers should model how historians interrogate sources. Science teachers should model how scientists read technical explanations. English teachers should model how readers attend to language, structure, ambiguity, and meaning.

Protect opportunities for difficult reading.
Do not automatically replace challenging texts with summaries or simplified versions. Sometimes students need support through the difficult text rather than around it.

Use AI after reading, not instead of reading.
AI can help students question, clarify, compare, or extend a text—but schools should be cautious about allowing it to become the default substitute for encountering the original.

Teach verification.
Students using AI should routinely track down cited sources, compare claims, and read primary material rather than accepting summaries at face value.

Build reading stamina deliberately.
Students need regular experiences with sustained texts that require attention, rereading, annotation, questioning, and discussion.

LEADER REFLECTION

Schools often speak about preparing students to become sophisticated users of artificial intelligence.

But sophisticated AI use requires something much older:

the ability to read.

The stronger the reader, the better equipped the student is to challenge AI, evaluate its claims, recognize weak reasoning, locate missing context, and decide what deserves further investigation.

The weaker the reader, the greater the danger that fluent AI output will simply be accepted.

Fitzpatrick's conclusion deserves attention from every school leader:

Reading carefully and critically may be the most important protection we can give students in the age of AI.

The question for schools, then, is not merely:

“How are we teaching students to use AI?”

It may be:

“Are we still giving them enough opportunities to become the kind of readers who can use it wisely?”

Original Article

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Prepared with the assistance of AI software OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (5.2) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com