Literature students once read three books a week but today they struggle to make it through one in three weeks, an Oxford professor has warned.

Sir Jonathan Bate, a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and a foundation professor of environmental humanities at Arizona State University, said that students’ reading abilities had declined significantly.

Bate told the BBC’s Today programme: “I’ve been teaching in British and American universities for 40 years and when I began in Cambridge you could say to students, ‘This week, it’s Dickens, please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House.’ Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.” Many young people entering university to study literature have not read extensively, and they often have difficulties doing so during their time at university. This is a growing trend that many academics have observed, although it wasn’t always the case. The currently fashionable answer is that it’s to do with the attrition of attention span due to smartphones, six-minute YouTube videos and instant TikTok dopamine hits,” he said.

“It all begins in schools. You only have to look at the thinning of the GCSE and A-level syllabuses and the tendency to prescribe works because they’re shorter. I think of it as the John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men effect — they would never prescribe the Grapes of Wrath any more but Of Mice and Men is nice and short.” Students from state schools in Britain typically have not been exposed to nor developed a habit of reading a wide range of lengthy books, as opposed to their privately educated counterparts, Bate said.

He added that it was “an unintended consequence of the push in both the elite British and American universities towards diversity and access … because of course, those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teachers’ main task is crowd control, and so the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there.”

Bate attributed the drop in the number of books students read to shorter attention spans, which he linked to the use of smartphones. State-funded charter schools in the US were an interesting phenomenon, however. “There’s a big revival within these schools [of] so-called classical education,” Bate said. Charter schools in the US are publicly funded but independently run schools which have more flexibility in setting their curriculum and policies.

Bate explained that his son, who has just graduated from a charter high school, was exposed to an extensive variety of works. “My teenager has just graduated out of a high school called Great Hearts and there they read the Iliad, the Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare, Crime and Punishment. He came home from school one day saying that they had been given bagels for studying Hegel because it’s really difficult … I couldn’t understand Hegel when I was a graduate student. I’m amazed that 17-year-old American kids are reading Hegel. So there is some hope.”