Re: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

In misc.news.internet.discuss, JAB  <here@is.invalid> wrote:

The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books
 
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
 
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

 
1955, Time Magazine, "Why Johnny Can't Read" (book review).
 
https://time.com/archive/6609444/education-why-johnny-cant-read/

Look/Say method.  Stupid.

Elijah
------
kids were so much better a previous generation, right?

I think my narrow tranche of contemporaries -- Desperados, in between
Beats and Hippies, between the war-time generation and the boomers --
grew up on a cusp of seismic changes in education.

Several of my high school teachers were older than conventional
retirement age.  The chemistry teacher, in his 70s, had taught Greek
until the school dropped it a decade before I arrived.  My senior year
English teacher was 80 that year had taught there ever since getting
his PhD and had us read whole, sometimes difficult books.  His elder
brother had died the preceding year, still teaching English.

When I got to university, the newest big building on campus was the
education department.  Presumably anticipating a the impending flood
of baby boomers into the school systems, educators (Dissociated-press
came up with "edualizers") and ed administrators saw a glorious
future of growth in their domains and, prefiguring the web, just
needed content to fill all the curricula.

I have a notion the phenomenon now known as "physics envy" may also
have played a part as it has in many other non-hard-science
disciplines: "We need a body of theory, things we can count and do
statistics on and erudite theoretical publications."  I haven't
scrutinized the subject closely but I suspect that has led to a whole
generation of edualizers concerned with Education as a Thing, not with
teaching kids in the varigated ways in which they learn and become
engaged.  That may even have been the seed, watered with certain
French philosophers, that engendered the whole appalling Postmodernist
thing.

I didn't really learn to write well until middle age but was never
far from books.  I chose to read Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three (in
English) for a 9th grade report even though I had no idea how to
pronounce the French names nor of the politics of the time.

A fellow artist blacksmith, 20 years my junior so 1970s schooling,
recounted that having been assigned The Count of Monte Christo to read,
he just couldn't get into it. So he bought the Coles Notes version but
was still stalled.  Then he hit in the comic book version, read that
and wrote a book review that was accepted.  Great guy, excellent
craftsman, neither illiterate or dim, but somehow not entrained in the
tradition of reading books.

So it's not just Xitter, tech and cell phones.

--
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada