Skimming Our Way to Ignorance

Having the world’s information at our fingertips is making us intellectually lazy

A high school student walked into my office last week, completely frazzled about her final paper in English. She needed to write about literature from the Levant, and she was paralyzed. "I don't know where to start," she said. "I don't even know what the Levant is."

I could have rattled off the basics, but I wanted her to figure it out for herself. I reminded her that she was carrying around with her a tiny device that has access to all the information in the world. "You can do this!" I said, half-cheerleading, half-sarcastic.

She dutifully pulled out her phone and typed "levant" into Google. The AI overview popped up right away: "The term 'Levant' refers to a region in the eastern Mediterranean, encompassing parts of the Middle East, including modern-day countries like Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Historically, the Levant was a major area for the development of ancient civilizations and has been a crossroads for trade and cultural exchange."

Perfect, I thought. Now she'll dive deeper, click some links, start building real understanding.

Instead, she scrolled through the search results, speed-reading the little text previews under each link. "I still don't know what to write about," she complained.

I was stunned, though maybe I shouldn't have been.

Much ink has been spilled recently about kids not knowing how to read anymore, and there's plenty of blame going around. Teachers for focusing on test prep instead of whole books. Curriculum designers for prioritizing short passages over deep literature. But the problem runs so much deeper than what's happening in classrooms.

First, there's our fundamental laziness. We've become so accustomed to having immediate access to answers without expending any cognitive effort whatsoever. The idea of spending even five minutes following a trail of information feels unreasonable. Why dig when you can skim?

Then there's the complete abandonment of critical thinking about source reliability. Schools still attempt to teach kids to spot bias and avoid Wikipedia, but the bigger ideas aren’t sticking. We're raising a generation that treats AI overviews as truth, never questioning how it was generated or what agenda might be lurking beneath the surface. And, honestly, it's not just the kids; we're all guilty of believing whatever pops up in our feeds, sharing articles we haven't read, and forming opinions based on headlines and memes.

But perhaps most troubling is the overconfidence that comes from this shallow engagement with information. We speak with authority about topics we "learned" about through a superficial Google search, repeating inaccurate information from questionable sources as if we'd spent years studying the subject. We've confused access to information with actual knowledge, and we're paying the price in discourse that grows more misinformed by the day.

The tragedy is that, as information becomes easier to find, we've lost the hunger to truly find it.

***

Sorry for being repetitive but they deserved every single award they won!