I think a major consequence of the lack of reading non-fiction other than textbooks is that when in late high school or college teachers want research paper type things, the students have a lot of trouble largely because they've never read any. They aren't familiar with the basic model. This gets interpreted as "they don't know how to write," which I guess is somewhat true, but they don't know how to write in a particular style because they have spent so little time reading that particular style.
Obviously this is good enough for a blog post, and not "I am an education expert," but I do, at least, have experience teaching at the college level....
