There’s a certain kind of anger that slowly builds up in a college professor over years or even decades. It doesn’t make itself known. It just builds up—into blank stares during class discussions and office hours where students ask not what something means but how little they need to read. Some faculty at Amherst College noticed this change a long time before anyone wrote a think piece about it. This is because the college has a strong humanities tradition and heavy emphasis on serious reading.
A British professor’s card game slowly but surely making its way across American liberal arts campuses feels like more than just an interesting side note because of this. It’s a sign of something bigger, and it might be a simple answer to that problem.
The game isn’t very exciting. It was made to be used in the classroom to start real philosophical and moral debates. It comes from a tradition that T.H. Huxley would have known right away: the idea that education isn’t just passing on facts, but also developing a thinking mind. During most of his Victorian career, Huxley pushed for this kind of active, questioning interaction with ideas. He didn’t just want his students to know things; he also wanted them to question them. In a small way, the card game tries to do the same thing.
Where it fell is what’s interesting. Liberal arts colleges in the US were created with the idea that students should be able to argue across disciplines, follow a complex argument, and be uncertain without getting upset. However, these colleges are now facing a strange contradiction. The new students are smart, often driven, and have credentials that previous generations didn’t have. Something has, however, quietly shrunk. A survey done in 2024–2025 found that high school English teachers gave out less than three full books a year on average, down from four in 2008. Some college students have never read a book all the way through before they start. It’s tough to say straight out, but it’s getting harder to ignore.
Similar things can be said about reading proficiency scores. In 2025, almost a third of 12th graders did not read at a basic level. Martin West at Harvard says that Americans’ reading and writing skills peaked around the middle of the 2010s and have been going downhill ever since. When you’re in a seminar room and wondering why the conversation isn’t as lively as it used to be, these aren’t just numbers.
In this case, the card game isn’t just a distraction; it’s more of a test. For example, when students play it, they have to work through arguments, define terms, and answer instead of reciting. This lets professors see right away where the thinking stops. Plus, it fills in the blanks that long reading lists couldn’t. Some people think that teachers who use it aren’t replacing rigor, but rather finding a new way to get to it.
Huxley used chess as an example. He said that Nature was like a chess player: it was impersonal and cruel, and the point of school was to learn the rules well enough to get through the game. That picture still makes me feel something. It’s not the same as chess, but the rules are the same: you have to be there and react to what’s in front of you; you can’t bluff your way through it.
It’s still not clear whether these kinds of tools are really a shift or just a good-faith way to get around problems. It won’t change 20 years of habits from K–12 just because you teach a short course on why reading is important or add a British professor’s card game to a seminar. The structural problems, like a school system that stopped making students finish their books, won’t go away just because a new, clever teaching tool came on campus.
Still, it’s hard not to notice that the game keeps spreading from one syllabus to the next, quietly and without much fuss. When adoption is that slow, it usually means that something is working.
