Ian Tuttle writes for National Review Online about a disturbing trend at elite American universities.
The Atlantic’s November cover story, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” is a chronicle of generational wreckage: “Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books,” Rose Horowitch reports. She means whole books, cover to cover. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.”
Expectations that were once routine — that students could competently and sympathetically read and discuss whole volumes, from Pride and Prejudice to Crime and Punishment — are now unsustainable. Many students no longer command the powers of concentration, or possess the linguistic skills, to engage the standard texts. Professors, yielding to the situation, are shrinking and cutting assignments.
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.
