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
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 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.
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!
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!
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