The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on two books examining college students. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt I want to highlight:
Yet “My Freshman Year” is inadvertently revealing. Most of Ms. Nathan’s young peers, for instance, choose their classes based on what best fits into their schedules. Hint: nothing early in the morning and nothing on Friday. When she asks her fellow students, during registration, which course “made a difference in their lives,” she finds that three of them mention the same course. So she quickly signs up for . . . “Sexuality.” Readings include two collections of erotica.
In fact, though, students don’t read much. Between going to class, holding off-campus jobs, sleeping and engaging in extra-curricular activities–you can guess a few of the obvious ones–reading really isn’t a priority.
This is not news to me. In a Course of the Month column I wrote a year ago, I wrote:
Now many students attend college because they think it’s something they must do, and they make up what Prof. Paul Trout called the “disengaged” students, seeking only vocational training and bereft of intellectual curiosity. They find the great-works surveys boring and difficult. So they especially benefit from the notion of equality of texts, because now the texts are much more approachable and the answers are pat.
In such an environment, it’s wiser to choose a topic interesting to students, then select among the myriad omnipresent “texts” to fit the topic. Popular TV shows therefore become excellent choices upon which to base a literature class. The same goes for sports, movies, fads, the nation in general, etc., and one subject of particular interest to college students: sex.