The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Of course for the select few students at the very top, it may be important to drill deep analysis, but the bulk of the citizenry will be better served by developing a personal predisposition towards reading and writing freely [0], as opposed to having someone prod them through facsimiles of literary criticism for a few hundred hours every year.
[0] (Edit: changed from "... toward reading" to "... toward reading and writing freely". The original wording makes it sound like I want to advantage reading over writing.)
What's gonna stop kids from just asking ChatGPT to do it for them so they can get back to doom scrolling social media or playing videogames?
If kids today have access to much higher quality (and addictive) entertainment than books, how are you gonna convince them to read anything?
Why do high school kids need to be afflicted with Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man? Is that going to make them want to read more? Or is it going to make them think that even the "best" books are pretentious drivel?
Does "great literature" have to be boring? Can't they find non-boring examples and read those?
Given the current disaster brewing in terms of general literacy, I see no issue with bolstering the current curriculum with less-prestigious books that students actually find interesting. If that means kids are reading The Shining as part of high school, so be it.
Normally, I'd prefer that young scholars read difficult, culturally relevant novels, and assume they'll read for fun on their own, but as this clearly isn't the case anymore I think that it's worth reworking middle and high school English curriculums to include modern books that are gripping and lurid, which is the only way that books can compete with the algorithm. I'd pick a kid reading 25 Halo novelizations over pretending to read The Great Gatsby and then returning to his phone.
That would have to be done in class, with drafts, etc. Even pre-ChatGPT I knew people who rewrote essays they may or may not have written themselves, especially for teachers that demanded they be handwritten instead of typed. And it must be pretty old as a concept, 1955 Biff was doing it in Back to the Future.
However, the problem with "learning to structure your thoughts in an essay" is that most schools teach one style of essay, which is a "baby thesis" (or a five-paragraph essay with in-text citations, written without use of the third person.) It's incredibly boring, and what's more it's not a convention that the majority of great essay writers in the past stuck to. Furthermore, the choice of subject matter is decided by the teacher, which means that there isn't any chance to develop your skills based on subject material that you actually care about. If the only exposure to essay writing that kids have is "mandatory topics on mandatory novels in a mandatory framework", it's highly unlikely that any but the top 5-20% will actually develop any real taste for reading and writing that persists into adulthood.
I would prefer to blow open the playing field and allow students to submit any kind of writing, including first-person and personal opinions, and then have the option to publish the essays centrally so they can read each others' work and respond, as occurs in adult society. The writing quality and volume should be mandatory, but the form and content should not.
Seems like the best approach to me, but i'm partial.
[0] just realized my teacher was better than I thought she was, and we, like Mr Jourdain speaking in prose, deconstructed books without realising.
I think in this case it's important to remember that nearly everyone on this forum was a top 5-10% student. The "general literacy crisis" is not falling on commenters on HN or their children, but rather the children of the rest of society. What I believe we're seeing is a widening bifurcation between the intellectual "elite" and everyone else. As an example, I would be surprised if more than 50% of American adults can put all the major wars America has engaged in in order and to within a decade of their occurrence on a timeline. This makes me less confident in the modern approach of "book reviews transitioning into stylistic deep dives". I don't think continuing to hold onto that model will spark a general return to literacy among the American public.
My education was patterned similarly to yours: in middle school we could review any book that we wanted, and then in high school we did more deep dives and stylistic studies. I found this to be outrageously boring, and in retrospect I think it was a bad approach. As I see it, the problem is that although you can read whatever you want (at least in middle school), the style in which you respond is mandated to take on a certain "academic" style, and the dialogue is one-way between you and the teacher, who then assigns you a highly partial grade that doesn't actually communicate anything about your writing ability.
In adult society, especially in arenas where writing and publishing essays is common (like internet forums or archaic amateur discussion and study groups), you can write whatever you want, and your work is evaluated based on its merit and how well it delivers its point in a way that pleases or challenges the audience, rather than how well it adheres to a sterile model outlined by a central academic bureaucracy. I think this model is what the approach to writing education should be patterned around.
Here are two interesting essays about this exact topic:
My experiences: My college experience prepared me very well to analyze texts—to understand their mechanics, to discuss the ways in which they develop meaning out of those mechanics, and to argue for an interpretation on the basis of that. What it did not prepare me to do well was to conduct literary research, which was the point of the PhD program. Nevertheless, most of my grad school professors valued my ability to conduct a close reading of a text because many other students who came from more research- and theory-oriented undergrad backgrounds had difficulty in explicating texts without resorting to extra-textual frameworks.
I ended up leaving the PhD program for various reasons, but I will say that the close-reading skills I developed in college have been widely applicable for me outside of academia. Close reading forces you to interact with a text at a granular level and to be attentive to the assumptions that it is smuggling in through its construction. Some lit folks now prefer to talk about “slow reading,” but it’s mostly the same thing.
I would argue that, given the deluge of text with which any of us is confronted on a daily basis, the ability to slow down and to be attentive to a text is a necessary interpretive skill. Maybe students don’t all need to learn to identify figures of speech and poetic devices, but they should learn how to sit with a text and analyze how it’s put together. For one thing, this makes them more sensitive and acute readers. For another, it ideally can make them clearer and more forceful writers. (It is no accident that many of the greatest canonical writers honed their skills by producing parodies of other great writers: the exercise requires getting into the mind and comprehending the style of another writer in order to understand the choices that (s)he has made.) Good reading is a prerequisite for good writing, and that is partly a function of reading widely, yes, but it is also a function of reading deeply.
Rather than jettisoning analytical approaches entirely, we might be better off teaching students how to read, in the sense of showing them that different texts require different levels and forms of engagement. (Insert here the Baconian adage about the different kinds of books.) Some texts can be skimmed simply to mine for information, while other texts require much more deliberate and analytical reading. Students should develop the skills to perform both kinds of reading. And then there’s also reading that isn’t done for a purpose other than sheer enjoyment, and that should be encouraged too (perhaps by having students, as you say, read some stuff just to share their responses to it). But I think a disservice is done when we treat reading as a univocal act, whether that means we make it all about analysis or all about generating responses to texts.
> But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”
> Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.
Once you introduce KPIs, your observed cohort will adapt and optimize on these KPIs alone and on nothing else, as there is no incentive for them to do so.
It all boils down to the quality of the proxy one chooses, right?
Hartford Public High School grad can't read
I reference this in my blog post about focus. https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...
"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."
Reading Crime and Punishment alone is estimated to take about 11-12 hours at 300WPM. Then consider your average student is taking 4 or 5 classes per semester? If they all assigned that much reading, that would be 60 hours a week of just reading, not even including time to process what's being read, or write assignments, revise etc.
Of course, those suckers got to avoid the hard science lab time, so good for them.
Crime and Punishment alone is over 500 pages.
With 5 classes assigning a book each, that's 2500 pages a week, or 357 pages every single day.
I certainly did not read that much during my undergrad nor my master's degree.
If the so-called "elite" colleges actually gave a crap, they could easily use their extremely selective admissions process to fight back.
Perhaps the author is a product of the system she is criticizing - so minimal attention span, and no ability to do critical thinking?
A few centuries ago, the difference between "elite" and "not elite" was the ability to read. And it may become that again.
If you have kids, I don't care what the schools do. You make sure they can and do read.
There's no way around it: to be able to read books you have to get practice reading books. You have to be able to distinguish between the barren sections that you can go over a bit quicker and the fruitful sections you might need to reread. Above all to read actively.
- Principal Moss, King of the Hill
Mike Judge's satire ages like fine wine.
Kids, and parents, are so badly behaved, and teachers’ hands are so tied, that any noble intentions about actually teaching go right out the window.
Don't think, just consume product, then get excited for next product.