The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

BookMonkeyDude · 2024-10-01T14:39:15+00:00

As my username might suggest, I work in a school library. In my school the principal has ended all classroom visits to the library for kids to check out books, she believes it wastes instructional time. Given these kids are rushed along in the halls between classes, given less than 30 minutes for lunch and ushered out of the building within 10 minutes of the final bell.. they simply have no opportunity to come to check out books. The few who do literally skip a meal to do so. So this isn't coming out of nowhere.

lydiardbell · 2024-10-01T13:09:17+00:00

This is probably the problem:

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.

Because it leads to:

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.

Reading books all the way through is a skill that fewer schools are teaching.

belongtotherain · 2024-10-01T13:50:25+00:00

I work in the education field and you’d be surprised how much admin love when English teachers take novels out of the curriculum and focus more on short stories and excerpts so that we can be more “standards” and “skills” focused.

It’s actually really depressing lol.

Artistic-Bread-1870 · 2024-10-01T13:23:53+00:00

As a college instructor, I can confirm this. The issue is not that they can’t read per se. It is that the incentives throughout their schooling has been that they will be told what to study and what to cram before exams (nearly had a riot when I didn’t have time to put together a detailed study guide last term).

You give them a study guide or a slide deck and tell them they will be tested on it, you better believe they are reading it, asking questions. But if you give them a book or article, 9/10 will check the spark notes or ask Chat GPT to summarize it.

ctrldwrdns · 2024-10-01T13:11:58+00:00

I can both believe- and not believe, at the same time- that this is where we are. I can name ten, maybe fifteen, that I had to read in school before HS graduation. Hell, one of my most rewarding classes was contemporary lit. I still remember how strange the Metamorphosis seemed, and crying through Steinbeck novels in 11th grade. It's a perspective every human needs- deep exploration of the lives and thoughts of others. It's as good an explanation as any of our modern crises- inability to empathize, misunderstanding of the big issues our species is facing.

Appropriate-Duck-734 · 2024-10-01T13:14:14+00:00

I teach at a public school. Most of my students never read a book, in a class of 30, just two or three may have a habit of reading. I try bringing a variety of short stories to them (the school don't give us books and the library doesn't even work), some get engaged by the stories, but lots of them get unfocused very quickly and have no interest at all on reading. They also complain about the size of the story, if it's one page, they don't say anything, but when it's 3 pages onward 'this is too long'. It's quite challenging, yes. They themselves admit that unless it's a short video they have difficult paying attention.

The article talks about schools not stimulating reading as a habit, but I also wanna remark how parents contribute majorly on this, kids learn their habits first at home (schools most of the time are dealing with that aftermath). So parents just shoving kids at screens, don't read or buy them a single book and miraculously want them to pick up on reading....

I think in general reading is increasingly seen as having little value, with people preferring other ways to either learn or have fun. Which to me is very sad.

OptimalTrash · 2024-10-01T13:45:23+00:00

I worked with first year students when I was a TA during grad school. It was through the educational opportunity program, so it was all low income, high-risk students.

On the first day, I said, "Okay, zero judgment, I'm just curious. How many of you have read a novel front to back?"

Not a single hand raised.

Reading is a skill. It has to be taught and practiced.

Uptons_BJs · 2024-10-01T13:27:42+00:00

A podcast I keep recommending is Sold a Story - a short limited series investigating how much of the English speaking world was duped by grifters and bad science into essentially not teaching kids how to read properly.

Schools were teaching cueing theory - you might also know it as reading recovery or whole language, where instead of teaching kids phonics, or insisting that they memorize words, teachers were teaching kids to guess based on context cues, letters and pictures.

This creates kids who can bluff their way through simple readings with a good enough understanding of what's going on, but cause disasters when they try to advance to books with harder readings and no more pictures.

It's funny how the science of education is so, so bad sometimes. Massive decisions are made on bad science and tiny sample sizes. The podcast even mentioned a story where,the publishers of one of the most popular curriculum had funded a well done proper study that they linked on their website, but it showed the opposite of what the publisher claimed, and nobody examined it or even questioned it.

Bdubasauras · 2024-10-01T15:14:15+00:00

I’m a teacher. Read books with your kids at home. The education system is not in a great place. But the kids that have parents/guardians/family that read with them at home are exposed to over a million more words before kindergarten than their peers that never read at home. Read and talk to your kids about the reading. We’re stuck playing catch-up with so many kids, the curriculum is being managed by people that don’t teach, and legislature in many states are banning books.

TLDR: Please, read to your kids.

cliff_smiff · 2024-10-01T14:37:12+00:00

[deleted]

leglump · 2024-10-01T13:59:53+00:00

I was told by a stranger they are dropping out of college because they couldn't comprehend a word, even after reading the definition as it had more words they didn't understand. He is mid 20s and the word was "instance". He is extremely good at video games though, after admitting he doesnt read abilities and just figures them out by playing or watching a video. This is real and it is a problem only going to get worse.

SuperCrappyFuntime · 2024-10-01T13:29:22+00:00

I read a lot. I could not read Crime and Punishment in a week.

JungBlood9 · 2024-10-01T14:45:00+00:00

I just finished a 7-year career teaching high school English, and the expectations around reading in my career v. when I was in school were vastly different.

The biggest contributor to the end of reading novels at school, without a doubt, is that we essentially can’t ask kids to read at home anymore. And if you aren’t reading some of the book at home, then what the hell does class look like? It takes months to read a book in 45-min class period chunks, and those 45-minutes get so monotonous and boring. But if you break it up with discussions and activities, it takes even longer to finish. It’s such a catch-22.

I’ll outline all the reasons why we “can’t” assign reading at home any longer:

1) The kids straight up won’t do it bc the “no homework” movement has caught on so much that they have 0 stamina or expectation to even spend 5 minutes on a task at home. It will not happen. And when no one reads assigned homework reading, you can’t do any fun activities or discussions in class because no one did the reading. So class quickly turns into reading time.

2) Admin and teacher training programs are squawking “equity” as another reason to kill any type of homework. And honestly, this point is pretty fair? When you assign reading at home, the kids with quiet, encouraging home environments get the work done, and the kids with the shit end of the stick (loud chaotic home, working/babysitting) don’t, and it furthers the divide.

3) The expectation for the kind of executive function we can expect out of a teenager has plummeted. It’s considered ridiculous, if not cruel, to ask a kid to remember to bring an item to class. The books going back and forth between home and classroom? HA! Yeah 45% of the class at any given time has either forgotten or lost it. A massive portion of my job as department chair over the last 7 years has been desperately trying to clamor together the money and the time to restock the literally hundreds of books the kids destroy and lose each year so that we can have enough for the kids the following year.

I hate to say it, but unless something radical happens with admin and parents, I just don’t see how it’s feasible to assign (longer) novels in class. I got away with doing 1 a year, but it was always long and grueling as a result of the above issues. It’s simply a different world now.

2024-10-01T13:19:25+00:00

It seems like the students assume reading should be a breeze, like reading a text or meme, and not realize that reading takes time and effort. It's a skill that can be improved, but only through reading meaty content.

TotallyNotAFroeAway · 2024-10-01T16:32:27+00:00

I know we like to blame the public schooling system, and of course they hold a large amount of the blame, but I would like to point out that parents need to be the ones reinforcing their children's reading habits outside the classroom.

I never read a lot because it was assigned in class, I read a lot because my mother read with me a lot until I was old enough to read on my own, and it became a hobby I enjoyed. If I hadn't had my mother, I would have only sat behind my TV or DVD player and never read a single book not required for school.

Hell, even now as an adult, I'm not reading as much as I should because my phone/computer is too big of a distraction. What chances do children have without supportive role models?

Iuris_Aequalitatis · 2024-10-01T14:32:26+00:00

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

Stop the planet, I want to get off.

ohfrackthis · 2024-10-01T16:27:33+00:00

I have four kids and I require them to read every single day and read books. I've literally had other parents tell me that I'm too hard on my kids making them read for an hour per day in the summer and I'll never forget how pissed off I was hearing that. I explained to my kids this was the height of mediocrity that some adults would think a kid can't read one hour per day- it says more about that adult than anything.

All my kids read books due to me doing this- I discuss plots- what they enjoyed or didn't, I don't censor, and I talk about "what are you reading next?".

It has to be a well developed habit by the time you're in high school imo.

Idk anyone else who even reads books irl.

Except me.

IWillLive4evr · 2024-10-01T13:57:59+00:00

This sounds like an issue, but there's way too much reliance on anecdotes in this article and in the comments here. The article admits:

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences.

So it's fair for a journalist to notice evidence of a trend with this kind of research, but not to pretend this is anything other than either 1) grounds for forming a hypothesis, which demands further testing, or 2) superficial speculation. If not treated as the first, it is the useless second.

2024-10-01T17:19:48+00:00

Well most of the college professors I work with can't read an email...

generally_unsuitable · 2024-10-01T20:27:21+00:00

After reading this, it's kinda funny to be told that my English degree was easy and worthless.

6-10 novels per class every 11 weeks. There were quarters where I read more than 20 novels.

happyrainhappyclouds · 2024-10-01T14:33:29+00:00

[deleted]

ham_solo · 2024-10-01T14:21:17+00:00

It's a garbage article. Not a lot of detail or data. There is no investigation into modern literary pedagogy, and why it's failing. There are no interviews with students. It's one-sided anecdotal reporting, which is lazy. I am sure there are many good reasons why kids seem to have lost this crucial skill, but this reporter made no attempt to find them.

Elegant-Set1686 · 2024-10-01T20:14:23+00:00

I’m a little confused here, are they saying that kids are struggling to read and study dense novels in the space of a week? Crime and punishment is over 600 pages, and these students aren’t just sitting and reading all day, they have work and family life and other classes. It actually seems INCREDIBLY unreasonable to ask students to read 500+ pages a week in addition to other work

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