I am not particularly surprised by this piece (gift link):
Gift link: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books - The Atlantic
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Ugh. This is so depressing.
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Indeed very disappointing if not exactly surprising. The decline of humanities and the move toward more pre-professional or career-focused majors misses a critical benefit of higher education: the exposure to new ideas and the ability to research, synthesize material, and communicate an informed position.
The high costs of college has an unintended outcome of encouraging people to think more transactionally. Don’t get me wrong, we all want our kids to have good job prospects post-college, but as a History major (and the parent of an English major), I can attest to the strong job opportunities that exist for humanities majors, even in today’s economy.
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Depressing-- in so many ways.
But I had never framed the problem in this way so the article is helpful. In the workplace (and no, we aren’t reading novels) it is not uncommon to assign a junior staffer the task of creating an executive summary of some sort out of a pretty dense piece of writing. An analysis- last years results (sorting through 30 metrics) compared with five years ago, ten years ago. Some predictive narrative- based on what we’ve seen in the following 5 key markets, we expect to emphasize these issues and trends. The folks who produce the long version of these are true subject matter experts – so the reports are filled with the relevant data and analysis. We see outside reporting- each of the Federal Reserve banks around the country have economists who track labor trends, spending; census reporting, etc.
But other people need the information- not the entire analysis, just the highlight reel. And over the last several years, it’s become apparent that for a lot of junior staff, summarizing something like this is a high mountain to climb! They understand the task more or less- read, extract the information that your particular audience needs (which varies; the Chief Human Resources Officer has different interests and needs than the SVP Procurement) but the how-to’s of it all seem confusing.
It’s really not that hard. You don’t need to do actual analysis-- that’s already been done. You don’t need to validate the data- that’s already been done. And you don’t need to do complex regressions- that’s already been done.
This is the corporate version of a 6th grade book report. Read carefully, identify the important findings, summarize them in a terse, grammatical, coherent fashion. That’s the job. But I guess if nobody is reading Tolstoy anymore, summarizing something dense seems really hard???
Thanks for sharing this.
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Perhaps true, but that is not what the article said, which is really an indictment of K12.
not only lit/hume made easier in HS, but also math. I asked our HS Geometry teacher how they can actually learn critical thinking skills by doing proofs on scantron (multiple choice and fill in).
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Well, that’s pretty depressing. I’m not surprised though (unfortunately). Most kids don’t read anymore and that starts long before HS and Tolstoy. I was so worried about this trend when my kids were little that I refused to have TV in the house for many years - until the kids were solid readers. Although their avid reading dropped off as they entered HS (and video games and phones became the de facto entertainment choice), their early exposure has borne fruit. Both are strong readers and my older son is a really excellent writer. I fear for kids that are school aged today - many are getting super early exposure to devices (including babies/toddlers) and I feel like it is going to make it very difficult for them to have the stamina to really get into reading. How can books compete with the easily digestible, eye catching stuff on a tablet?
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It is also an indictment of parenting (in my view). I live in an affluent, well educated town and if I had a nickel for every time I saw a tablet or phone in the hands of a baby/toddler, I’d be well on the way to being rich. How can we expect schools to make up for what isn’t being modeled at home? When adults aren’t reading themselves (and many are not) how do we expect our kids to?
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You’re right; the article focused on the deficiency in K12 education, but it becomes a downward spiral. If kids arrive from HS ill-prepared, professors adjust their curriculum accordingly, and then middle and high schools see that there is less reading in college so assign less rigorous reading and writing assignments, and on it goes. One could argue that standardized tests attempt to capture a student’s reading comprehension, but that seems to be going by the wayside, too.
I think the point about public vs. private schools is interesting.
My kids did mostly private schools, including all of middle and high school. D24 didn’t have to read Chaucer in AP English like I did, but she read Crime and Punishment, which got her into reading a lot of Russian literature for fun. She’s a humanities major and is now in a selective program where they end up with a minor in the liberal arts and she is reading things like Aristotle and Augustine in small seminars and then writing about it. A minor in the liberal arts is not itself a super marketable asset, but the students in the program do very well with graduate school placement.
D27 is not a big reader, but as a sophomore read the Iliad this year and they are now finishing up Macbeth, but he did a stint in public school as well, during a year that was one of the important state testing milestones and I absolutely saw the teaching being precisely to the skills tested.
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This article is fascinating, at least in the sense that by the end of the article, the author thoroughly disproves the thesis stated in the headline and introductory paragraphs of the piece. (the entire time I was reading it, I was imagining Michael Hobbes, the deconstructor of moral panics, absolutely screaming).
The headline and the first paragraph start out with the assertion that college kids arrive on campus unable to read whole books, and that their professors are stunned.
In the next section, the author concedes that there’s no data to back up his thesis, but nevertheless cites a Georgetown professor who claims his students aren’t even capable of reading 14 lines of text in a row without getting distracted. (he has also, by this point, talked about a girl who claims never have been asked to read a book in her entire k-12 education).
Deeper into the article, though, the author notes that the vast majority of k-12 classes are centered on reading whole texts or whole books in combination with other materials – only a quarter of classes, it turns out, aren’t (and even in those classes, there’s no claim that no whole books are being assigned, just that they’re not central to the curriculum). It turns out that the vast majority of k-12 students are, in fact, reading whole books, just maybe not as many as before (this is a generous reading, btw, because we have no data about how many curricula in the past centered entirely on reading whole books).
Deeper still, and a new admission emerges: college professors are still assigning whole books, just different (and possibly shorter) ones than they had before. At one school that had expanded its list of required texts, they’re going back to the size of list they’d had before. But still, the author notes, we should be worried because maybe kids aren’t reading the books they’re assigned anyway, because grade inflation.
By now, of course, it’s perfectly clear that kids can, and do read. So the author picks a new worry: It’s not that kids can’t read, it’s that they don’t want to. It turns out kids are perfectly capable of reading long texts, they just don’t enjoy it and/or see the point of doing so because it won’t help them get a job.
The author then switches to worrying that today’s college students won’t read for pleasure as much as adults have in the past (even as he acknowledges that adults don’t actually read much in the first place).
It may well be that today’s college students will turn into adults who don’t read for pleasure. And that may well be a problem. But that’s a far, far different claim than “kids can’t read!”
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Your facts are well taken.
But one only has to look at the number of people in our society who “do their own research” to observe (not being political here, just an observation) that the ability to assimilate information and draw a logical conclusion appears to be diminishing.
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agreed. Our kids attended a large CA public, but did read several novels each year in Honors/AP Lit.
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Great if depressing article.
I’ve been teaching courses on Tolstoy at my university (an R1 state flagship), and they’re still quite popular. About 5 years ago, though, it was the first time that some students complained in the course evaluations about the amount of reading. This one was a gem: “For someone who doesn’t read, it was a lot of reading.” I’m thinking, “If you don’t read, why did you sign up for a Tolstoy class, of all people”? :). Overall, yes, my colleagues and I have noticed the problem; while we still assign whole books, and some students handle this very well, we know we can’t expect that students will read at the rate that was a normal expectation, say, 10 years ago.
It was interesting to read about Lit Hum (I taught it for 2 years while finishing my Ph.D. at Columbia over 20 years ago). It’s an incredibly intense course, and maybe it needed to slow down a bit. Still, I’m sad to see they let Crime and Punishment go (but I’m biased, of course).
As for high school teaching of literature, I’ve noticed a difference with my 2 kids who went to the same highly selective high school 6 years apart. The same English teacher in the sophomore year, but a radically different curriculum: my older daughter had a survey of the classics, such as Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, while my younger one read short stories, poems, and zines… Thankfully, they’re reading novels in other English classes, so it’s not completely gone… Sigh…
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True, though this seems to be a problem that spans generations right now.
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In my observation, quite a few adults approach reading information in a newspaper or magazine article in the same manner that a rushed literature student approaches reading a book (followed by writing a literary analysis). That is they decide what they’d like to argue (or what they already believe) and they skim the novel or poem to find quotes to support their preconceived idea. On the surface, it can seem as if they read and understood the information, but in reality they are just cherry-picking quotes to support their argument without doing the deep and active reading that is necessary to form a more nuanced or sophisticated understanding of the topic.
The two quotes that I found most interesting in the Atlantic article were these:
“There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it.
I am not sure if the above statement is correct, but the answer seems relevant to the ongoing conversations on CC about standardized testing and what is really being measured by the ERBW section of the SAT.
Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”… Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.
I find the above idea fascinating, and as an avid reader, I would like to believe it is true. But is it really? Don’t other forms of storytelling (such as films and oral stories) also cultivate empathy? I do think that reading an excerpt of a longer novel won’t give the reader the same sense of character development or narrative arc, but a short story can becuase the arc is contained in the form itself --that is the characters and plot are fully developed and there is a beginning, middle, and end in a short story or novella just the way there is in a longer novel. And why is storytelling through reading more likely to create empathy than something like a film or TV series or even a lengthy personal blog post? Is there actually research supporting this idea? I don’t have time now, but I should read the linked NPR piece on sustained reading in case it talks more about that topic.
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I’m not an expert but I’ll take a stab at the difference between reading the book and seeing the movie.
In the book, all the atmospherics and visuals are provided by the written word- the physical substance has to be supplied by the reader. In the film, you can identify with/love/hate the actor playing the protagonist; you can be immersed in the furniture, decor, costumes even without realizing it; the music and sound effects create the environment for the narrative to play out.
It’s harder to read. No question. I think if you asked a kid who lived in a desert climate to describe the setting of “The Secret Garden” you’d get a different answer from the kid who grew up in the British Midlands. Both are correct of course- but the reader has to do the heavy lifting to interpret the words.
There are longitudinal studies on “Reading at Grade Level by 3rd Grade” which suggest that SO MANY things that appear tangential or irrelevant are predictive. If I have time, I’ll try to dig one up. It’s tempting to dismiss anything that happens post 3rd grade as gilding the lily- and in fact, it’s a rich person’s problem that Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky are less satisfying to read vs. downloading the movie. But grade level reading at age 9 is about the mechanics; grade level reading at college is about the abstract thinking. So not so easily dismissed…
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At first this made me chuckle, but then I thought that this is really quite a revealing statement betraying perhaps a learned expectation that large texts can be (and will be) condensed and abridged for easier consumption by students.
I had the same thought. I also know that the writing section has pretty much been done away with (even by colleges that require scores), so I wonder if that provided another way of determining if students could read a passage and formulate and express a coherent idea.
You make a good point that literature isn’t the only way to access and cultivate empathy. As another avid reader, I think having access to the inner world of characters as can be conveyed through literature might give people more “hooks” to see themselves or others in the work.
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I would love to know more about this. I’ve also heard that 3rd grade is a pivotal time for reading, but don’t know the details. If you have time to expand, I’d be very interested.
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I remember a one-sentence summary of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” on the billboard for the film version of it (the one starring Saoirse Ronan): Man kills bird.
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