Profs at Elite Colleges Shocked to Learn Students ‘Don’t Know How’ to Read Books
“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”
We have a major literacy problem in the country right now and very few people are talking about it.
FOX News reports:
Elite colleges shocked to discover students ‘don’t know how’ to read books: ‘My jaw dropped’
Several university professors expressed concerns to The Atlantic about students who come to college unable to read full-length books.
Assistant editor Rose Horowitch spoke to several teachers from elite schools like Columbia, Georgetown and Stanford, who each described the phenomenon of students being overwhelmed by the prospect of reading entire books.
Columbia University humanities professor Nicholas Dames described feeling “bewildered” when a first-year student told him that she had never been required to read a full book at her public high school.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames said.
Some professors do find a few students up to the task but described them as “now more exceptions” rather than the rule, with others “shutting down” when facing difficult texts.
“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet,” Horowitch wrote.
“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” she said. “It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”
Horowitch reported how a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators found “only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts” with nearly 25 percent saying whole books themselves are no longer the focus in their curriculum.
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Comments
This is an indictment of the education industry in the United States from top to bottom.
Results so bad, it’s hard to believe it wasn’t intentional.
Looking at you, DoEd
Maybe we need some sort of an agency at the national level to assure that our school children are being educated properly. Oh, wait…
It was once absolutely essential to be able to ride a horse.
Not so much any more.
It was not long ago when almost-nobody knew how to “touch type”
Now it’s unusual if a young person can’t.
I believe it was John Quincy Adams who once lambasted higher education in the mid-1800s when Harvard University conducted its commencement in English; (!!Good Heavens!!!!) not in Latin.
Times change
If you want to hit a baseball, you gotta swing where the ball is pitched. (Not where you wish that the ball would be pitched. Not where the ball was pitched last time you were at bat.)
The fact is: Most American colleges and universities do not teach what most American 17-23 year-olds need most for their future success……..
And they charge way too much for what they do teach.
(Don’t believe me? Ask yourself when were these courses and curricula designed.
You want to live in the past? Fine, if you’re wealthy — it is unfortunately a luxury that most families can ill afford.)
Wake up, people.
No do-overs are given in this Game Of Life.
“… If you want to hit a baseball, you gotta swing where the ball is pitched. (Not where you wish that the ball would be pitched. Not where the ball was pitched last time you were at bat.) …”
Indeed. And the pitcher is not the student, but the all of the instructors the student has had, who have failed to teach said student what they needed to learn, vs what the student wanted to learn. The student doesn’t know what they need to learn.
“The student doesn’t know what they need to learn.”
If you would enroll in college without knowing what you want to learn , then you would give Amazon.com $25,000 without knowing what you want them to send you.
Your condescension to the poorer students is intolerable. The interest in reading and the ability to concentrate enough to finish a book is the foundation of learning and teaching. It has nothing to do with the ability to ride a horse or dance minuets. In the developing world, in India, e.g. children from poorer families often apply themselves harder than students from richer families. The same is true for China and other countries in the region.
“The fact is: Most American colleges and universities do not teach what most American 17-23 year-olds need most for their future success”
It depends on how one defines “success”.
The funny thing is that some of the most woke people on the planet are librarians. Wokism isn’t going to be so trendy when libraries start to close because reading books is a “luxury” for the oppressors. Funny, because the concept of a public library was to ensure literacy for the masses. But that’s just fine because the elite wants the masses dumb, addicted, and dependent.
my local library – in order to avoid following the law that obscene books are to be out of reach of children – has just banned children under the age of 15 without a parent. Gone are the days of a kid browsing the stacks looking for interesting books.
As you said, shooting themselves in the foot, as this generation will grow up not needing a library, and then refusing to fund it in 20 years.
and – I live in north central Idaho….
Times change. Years ago when I was in the 5th grade one summer I decided I wanted to memorize the bones in the body and begin memorizing the nerves. I went to the library to ask to take out Gray’s Anatomy. OMG. It caused a meltdown at the reference desk. I was too young to understand the problem or even to get embarassed. I was flummoxed.
Don’t you understand? Every second teaching antiquated skills like reading takes time away from the really important subjects like the climate emergency, the evil of capitalism and critical race theory! And that is just not acceptable!
And, apparently, if you’ve read one critical race theory paper you’ve read them all, because they all just plagiarize from each other.
They are surprised? Oh puhleeze! They are cramming down useless DEI garbage instead of basic reading, writing, and grammar skills and Egghead is *surprised*? They are teaching “Lesbian Themes in “Alice in Wonderland”” and Professor Absentmind cannot fathom why student comprehension of the poem about fleas: Adam, Had ‘em, is lacking?
Que va!
If students are being admitted to Columbia and Georgetown and Stanford without ever having read a book, then what does that say about the Admissions Office at these places?
“Elite” academic students ought to have some interest in things academic — like reading.
Rather like elite musicians ought to have some demonstrable track record of interest in ……….. music, no?
college admissions are no longer based on merit or understanding or ability; dat’s rayciss
I remember when I first learned to read a book from beginning to end. We spent weeks going over the process in high school. You read the first word … then the second … and you just keep going to the end. It was a struggle.
History is Kryptonite to modern day educators and books are history.
If you don’t read books then the mind is easy pickings for the all new revisionist Woke History and the taking over of our educational system.
Yes, exactly. The students can be ‘unburdened by what has been.’
This is ‘equity’ in action.
I am not surprised. My daughter’s high school, which boasts very high levels of AP class participation making it arguably in the top 100 nationally, had a senior English class with few (compared with my rural high school decades ago) reading assignments and devoting one third of the curriculum to a study of queer and critical race theories. The sad irony is that although the Anglo sphere has accumulated an ever increasing body of excellent fiction, our students know less about it than previous generations.
“Advanced Placement” is a fraud. It benefits the government school more than the student.
“Dual enrollment” (i.e. taking courses at a community college at the expense of the government school district) wastes less of the student’s time and is considered more desirable by colleges.
High schools with senior English classes which devote “one third of the curriculum to a study of queer and critical race theories” should be avoided like the plague. I hope your daughter was not affected by the brainwashing.
An English class that spends a lot of time on “queer and critical race theories” is concentrating on literary criticism, not on literature. The English course your daughter took is not asking what the author say in his work, but what do academic critics say about the work.
I am reminded of my dislike of the way my English classes in high school taught writing. We were taught writing by being trained to be junior literary critics. The problem with being trained as a junior literary critic is that most of what we wrote as literary criticism was guessing or conjecture. Better to be assigned writing about what you know, not on what you think the teacher wants you to know.
Concentrate on literature, not on literary criticism.
Twenty years ago when my sister was still a 3rd grade teacher and I owned a company, I copied assignment pages of her text books and worksheets for free for her class. (That ended when they quit attempting homework.)
The students in her school were not allowed individual textbooks. They were passed out when needed and collected and counted before the next subject.
They would be lost, stolen, bullies would destroy them. No consequences could be placed on a kid who couldn’t afford lunch.
Dolly Parton has donated over 250 Million books to children. She understands this may be the only book they have ever owned.
Government schools are not the answer.
It would seem to me that if today’s college students do not have the reading skills of previous generations, there would be a corresponding reduction in SAT-Verbal scores.
Or maybe today’s students can do the two-minute analysis required to navigate a SAT-Verbal question, but are unable to do so for an entire book. Microanalysis versus macroanalysis, perhaps.
This should be on the front page.
Sadly, many professors are no more capable despite the letters after their names.