There are three layers to what I'm presenting in this post.
The first is the cover story in the current issue of The Atlantic titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books."
I'll let a fairly generous excerpt serve to make the pieces point:
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.
in 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.
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.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand . . .
The second layer is a National Review piece by Ian Tuttle which expands on the larger cultural implications of what the Atlantic story presents.
Tuttle begins with a look at precipitating factors on the education level. What he comes up with is a damning indictment of what post-America considers education to be:
Horowitch notes, correctly, that the problem begins long before college. “In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.” Reading for pleasure is even seen as a niche interest: “A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records — something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”
No single cause is behind such a trend, but it is not hard to see that nearly every aspect of our educational culture discourages patient, attentive reading. High schools and middle schools have spent years phasing out books, often in response to the imposition of standardized testing. (As one teacher tells Horowitch: “There’s no testing skill that can be related to . . . Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?”) This trend is abetted by the widely adopted “college- and career-ready” educational program that has left many students prepared for neither.
And then there is post-American society's warped notion of "getting ahead":
Among students headed to elite colleges, there are additional pressures. Ferocious competition for acceptance to prestigious institutions, driven by a sense that long-term success is impossible without an Ivy League degree, promotes GPA obsession. For the same reason, students are subjected, often beginning in elementary school, to a punishing regime of extracurricular activities in the attempt to compose a résumé that can survive the gimlet eye of the nation’s last true gatekeepers: admissions counselors.
But, okay, why is reading dense books such a big deal?
Reading, a bit like faith, admits of many justifications — it increases empathy, enhances imagination, provides pleasure — but none of them is especially compelling to the nonreader. Yet we tend to take seriously what we see the people we love or respect taking seriously. Which is why Horowitch’s article is not primarily a story about kids but about adults. The observation that students, even at elite institutions, are struggling to read books implicates not just a few schools or school systems but an entire educational culture, along with families and parenting practices that, albeit well meaning, have trained students in a narrow, instrumentalist view of education.
That's right. Mom and Dad - and K-12 teachers - are major factors:
The students Horowitch writes about are not failed learners. On the contrary: They have learned exactly what they were taught. Children are growing up, perhaps more than ever before, in environments where reading books is simply not a priority. At school, their teachers assign only excerpts from books and of necessity “teach to the test.” Children come home to parents who spend much of their leisure time responding to after-hours emails, scrolling their phones, or watching television. Their own leisure — what little they have after clubs, practices, rehearsals, volunteering, tutoring, and the rest — is easily co-opted by the distractions and addictions of TikTok and YouTube.
We prioritize what we see being prioritized. And for many, that is the grinding labor of getting ahead. Where thoughtful, attentive reading cannot be bent to this task, it goes by the wayside. But estrangement from that kind of reading makes it even more difficult to see that this all-consuming economy of achievement is ultimately intolerable to the soul, which exists in a different economy altogether.
Tuttle's mention of the soul is of paramount importance. He fleshed it out further:
Reading literature is one point of entry to a world not judged by test scores and résumé items. But teachers and parents and mentors must be the ones to make that invitation attractive. We can say to students, “Tolle, lege!” But we have to do it ourselves, first.
Okay, now for the third layer: my own observations.
The whole families-don't-sit-down-to-dinner-anymore conversation has been happening for decades, and for good reason. For reasons enumerated by Tuttle above, families with school-age kids are pressed for time.
I've written before about how my relationship with my father was fraught. He was a willful, demonstrative, and pretty much absolutist man. Because I was raised right on the cusp, right when the tectonic shift took place in our society, I bristled at what he was trying to impart.
But he also had an intellectual bent. Our family had quite an impressive book collection, which I've inherited. (Great record collection, too.) He was the first to expose me to the giants of Austrian economics - Mises, Hayek - and the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son. He also impressed upon me why pivotal points in history were so.
Our dinner table conversations were more often than not about the Big Ideas. Those repasts were an essential element in my formation, I now realize. They honed my reasoning powers and my commitment to taking all facets of a situation into consideration before drawing a conclusion.
There are still undoubtedly some family dinner hours that are enriching in that manner. But it's pretty clear they are now a rarity.
I'm not an elite-institution professor. I'm an adjunct lecturer in jazz history and rock and roll history at the local campus of our biggest state university. But I'm experiencing what the sources in the Atlantic piece had to say.
And even beyond my students' poor compositional skills or obvious lack of acquaintance with reading full-length books, what dismays me is the blank looks on their faces. It's clear they cannot just sit still and solely focus on my lecture or presentations. They look uneasy, as if they can't wait for the hour and fifteen minutes to be over. They don't exude the kind of social comfort on which a stable classroom environment is predicated.
Reading - and other forms of communication and expression, such as music, visual art and drama - are how we humanize ourselves.
Maybe there ought to be a mandatory high school course, taught in the junior year, when students are first looking at what comes after graduation, called "Why Would the Brass Ring Be Valuable?"
It seems to me to be rich with possibilities. It could be the door-opener to what the great minds of Western history have had to say about how we ought to go about appraising possible paths for our lives.
What we can say is that this is a problem that bodes very ill for our prospects.
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