The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

[Passages]

Last edited Tue Oct 8, 2024, 04:20 PM - Edit history (1)

October 1, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

SNIP
And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/?gift=z70s7ttKskppsRsCp84x4tvAXgpCCiAI8y9bBMGFXF8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

[Vegan4life]

1. I went to high school in a small town

In the 1970s. We were assigned multiple books per semester, had to write reports, were tested on them.

We had 6 week sessions devoted to Shakespeare, to Medieval English literature, to modern English lit, to early and modern American lit. We also had required composition classes with research papers.

A few students struggled, but most of us loved the reading, the exposure to great books and plays. My town is Southern, still very small, yet we had phenomenal English teachers.

If they're not reading actual books in high school, what are they doing?

[Passages]

6. They prepare them for the standardized tests.

Sad, but true.




Snip:

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests.

[brush]

2. Oh boy. The nation is in trouble. Students can't/don't want to read...

and with AI doing their work for them, we'll have a generation of know nothings who can't even read instructions.

[appalachiablue]

3. About 10 years ago or more I read an article where novelist Philip Roth

commented that novels and long form journalism may be on the way out due to new short form writing influenced by the internet and social media. For what that's worth.

It's a huge change if true and a loss for longer writing forms. I also think it's linked to shorter attention spans.

[Passages]

5. It is troubling.

Part of the problem reaches back to the Bush era and I was pleased to see it covered here in this article.

My nephew who teaches at the college level is in his late 30s and sees the combination of standardized testing, iPhones, the constant connection of social media and then covid disruptions did not help at all.

It is a mess.


SNIP:
But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests.

[Jim__]

4. It sounds like they may have been taught to focus too much on minute details.

From the cited article:

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

If they are reading a novel, and say there is a description of a dinner party. If, in their previous schooling, they would be tested on the details of the party: how many people attended, what color dress did Susie wear, etc, and then they try to read a novel thinking they have to recollect all these details, I can understand how they would feel overwhelmed.

[FakeNoose]

7. Many of today's teachers got their education under Dubya's "No Child Left Behind" program

Last edited Wed Oct 9, 2024, 11:10 AM - Edit history (1)

Does anyone see the connection?

Those of us in the Boomer generation - and even most of our kids - graduated high school before Dubya. We grew up knowing how to read actual printed books - both for learning AND for enjoyment.

Any child born after 1990 or so, can't say that because they were all taught to pass tests and nothing else. Now those kids are teaching the next generation.

[LymphocyteLover]

8. It's very sad. So many factors at play here. My wife and I used to read so many books, we have huge bookshelves

with hundreds of books. Now she doesn't read books at all. I read books but not as much. Everything is on the computer and there are so many more distractions. We are overloaded with info. Also both of our jobs require extensive technical reading so partly we don't have the energy for much reading outside of work.

[Igel]

9. I was a Russian major in the very late '70s and early '80s.

Started learning Russian at age 16, self-study; first actual exposure to a native speaker was at age 17.

As a junior in college I had 2 weeks for Crime and Pushment--in Russian. This after an onslaught of Lomonosov, Pushin's Onegin, a lot of Lermontov, Tiutchev, and followed by a Saltykov-Shchedrin novel (Oblomshchina) and I don't know what all. Again, in Russian. Lectuers in Russian tests and essays in Russian. 30 weeks, and I had to read thousands of pages of "stuff" in a language I'd been learning for 4 years in an English-speaking country and understand it.

I have kids who take 45 minutes to read a page--but at the end, it's marked up in 8 different colors of highlighters ... And they understand nothing. (Granted, it's pop-science, but still--it's *after* all the vocab's introduced and just before or even after the test.)

Years ago I was shocked to hear tell that some English teachers assigned novels but then played audiobooks of them in class to spare their students' actually reading all those words. And yet they focus on "what do you think the characterization is?" or "Does this use mostly logos or pathos?"

Some of my juniors and seniors consider Cliff Notes-type things to be too long and daunting. They watch a Youtube or TikTok video and hope for the best. (And yet others, all girls, wade through long romances or young-adult novels ... And seem stuck there; the guys prefer to watch sports videos or random-scroll through videos or play video games.)

[NJCher]

10. There is someone who wrote a book about reading books

He was featured on our local NPR in the last few days. I tried to find the link to the interview but couldn't. I might think of it and if I do I will be back to post it.

Anyway, they talked about this Atlantic article and also this person's effort to get people to go back to reading full-length books.

It was very, very interesting, especially to me as an English teacher.

A long time ago, and I mean only about 4 years after we'd had the internet, the NY Times published interviews with professors who had noticed their own reading curtailed because of the way the internet disrupts attention. It has to do with the little seratonin boost the brain gets from doing a click. As soon as I read that, I began a program for myself of sustaining attention to long written pieces. It's been very, very hard.

[Passages]

12. Thank you, I would appreciate the link.

[Elessar Zappa]

11. How about these professors choosing more relevant, modern books?

There’s a lot of snobbery in the literature community regarding certain genres. There’s nothing about what’s traditionally considered “literature” that makes it better than many other novels. Jane Austen and Dostoevsky aren’t the only authors out there.