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October 3, 2024 - 4:10pm
It’s become commonplace for conservatives to complain about the books assigned in schools and universities.
But according to a piece published by The Atlantic this week, the bigger issue isn’t which books are read by students, but instead whether they read them at all. Journalist Rose Horowitch spoke to 33 professors from leading US universities — and the picture she pieces together is a disturbing one. Students today are increasingly unable to manage entire books. In response, courses are cutting down on reading requirements and teaching through excerpts .
Is this a case of modern academia pandering to fragile — but very lucrative — students? Perhaps, but this isn’t just happening in the ivory towers.
According to America’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, there has been a long-term decline in the number of 13-year-olds reading for fun. In 2023, 14% reported doing so almost every day compared to the 27% recorded in 2012. Meanwhile, in the UK a study for the Reading Agency found that half of adults do not regularly read for pleasure — a total composed of 15% who never did and, more ominously, 35% who used to.
Or you can just look around the next time you’re on a train. How many of your fellow passengers are reading a book? Many fewer than in previous decades, despite the greatly reduced competition from newspapers.
The obvious explanation is the smartphone, and everything it plugs us into. It’s not that we don’t read anything anymore — in fact, we live in a world of continuous textual availability. However, this is the written word in fragments, bound up with broken images. As an informational landscape, it bears no relation to where we were a generation ago.
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SubscribeThere’s nothing in this fine short article that isn’t 100% correct or of vital importance. I’d just add, that it’s not the “reading for pleasure” aspect that’s important but that it’s a means of then being able to “read for seriousness” and acquire the immense insights into human culture which flows from that.
The Comments which we read regularly from subscribers who’re immersed in reading books is testament to this.
I’m a retired English teacher, and I saw this in my classes. When I polled my students , only about two students, out of classes of 40, said they read for pleasure.Some teachers only taught one novel a year. Our new (Common Core) textbooks only had excerpts and some seriously bad poems, apparently found on a website dedicated to awful poems. I refused to use the textbook for my seniors and taught my two novels and two nonfiction books. At least half of students in my junior class were functionally illiterate, and I struggled to get them to write a paragraph. I blame this on teachers in the lower grades who failed to teach longer narratives. Yesterday, I read an article in The Atlantic magazine that described how college students struggle to read books. Professors have resorted to assigning fewer books and excerpts. This is why half of adults read young adult fiction. One thing that really shocked me was that 79 percent of the grades at Harvard are in the A range. What a joke. I’ll finish with my cellphone rant. They are destroying student’s’ attention spans. At my school, nothing was done about cellphones in the classrooms, and they were the bane of my existence. Universities have the same problem. As one teacher on campus said, “We’re doomed.”
Not just books, we will soon be a post-paper society. Where you can be erased in a heartbeat.
The trend with books has actually reversed. Paper books are quite a bit more popular than E-books. As rare as seeing someone with a book is, seeing someone with an E-reader is even rarer.
Students today are increasingly unable to manage entire books.
Well, no kidding. Every communication has been distilled to the lowest common denominator with the shortest attention span. Technology combines the need for instant gratification with the ability to replicate that outcome over and over throughout the day. It’s endless dopamine. There is even a phobia about being disconnected from the digital universe for anything longer than 15 minutes.
This development is scary. I’m still one of those people with their nose in a book on public transport, and proud of it! When I look around, I find I’m a rare breed. When I look over other passengers’ shoulders, they’re mostly watching TikTok videos or other such things that are destroying their ability to concentrate or think in a sustained, joined-up fashion.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will return to my current book, Ben MacIntyre’s “SAS”. (Very good, but I liked “Colditz” and “Agent Sonya” better.)
You need to read books to be able to step outside the regime Narrative. But I notice that most bookstores push regime narrative. You need to go to used bookstores like HalfPrice Books to get the off-narrative stuff.
Now, when I was a kid in Britland I read books like the Swallows and Amazons sailing books and the Biggles flying books. With Biggles, he was flying a different kind of airplane in every book. Very satisfying.
I read news on my phone and books on my tablet. I don’t actually read physical books any more. Not sure what this means.
It means that you read news which has been selected for you, although you would probably find that insulting.
If you shun social media, as I do, no one ever suggests what you should read. I got to sites that I trust and consume the content I choose.
Books are a great refuge from screens. Not sure why anyone would subject themselves to yet more time staring at a glowing screen.