An article in the Atlantic about college students not reading books got a lot of circulation this month. Even at top schools such as Columbia University, undergraduates struggle with works of more than short-story length. Some of them tell their professors that in all their high school years, they never had to read a hefty book from beginning to end.
I’m not sure of that claim, but I would bet that if high school teachers did assign Gatsby or the Autobiography of Malcolm X, many students got away with reading only snatches of the book. Or, if their social studies or history teachers did require a thick textbook, the assignments were so spread out, breaking the textbook into independent sections, that the students didn’t experience the work as a unified whole. In any case, book reading as such didn’t happen much, not for the current crop of students.
Shocking, yes, but you’d have to be pretty out of touch not to see this coming. Book reading of any kind—not for school or work—has been falling for a long time among young Americans. The iPhone and social media only accelerated a trend that began in the 1950s with the advent of television. The deterioration was slow at first, sped up in the 1980s with the arrival of cable television, which expanded the networks from four or five in a local market to 15 or more, increased with the proliferation of adolescent-oriented shows, and then hit overdrive with the invention of Web 2.0 in the 2000s. That the avoidance of books has now reached most academic youths in elite institutions only shows the screen’s power and the peer pressure it feeds.
The decline in book reading in high school classrooms is more an effect than it is a cause. High school teachers removed books from their syllabi a few years before college educators faced the same issue. This change occurred because high school teachers were already dealing with the problem of students not reading, which would inevitably carry over into college and older age groups. Teachers of 16-year-olds faced the results of kids getting phones at age ten, as they started to do in large numbers by the early 2010s. Now that those 16-year-olds are 19, a-literacy—the disinclination to read—is a habit, and piling books upon a freshman’s head won’t break it. A professor can’t assign readings the way he used to.
A new class needs to be created and added to the general education curriculum; one focused on the linear reading of long books. Call it a form of remediation, though different from the usual assistance with reading comprehension skills. Students must engage in long, uninterrupted sessions with a single book in this class. No cell phone nearby, no TV blaring in a nearby room—as is often the case with undergraduates. Schools could reserve certain lounges and classrooms for regular visits and spaces that block Wi-Fi and allow no conversation and no napping. Minutes would be logged and certified. By the end of the term, kids will have read complete novels, biographies, histories, and treatises, piling up 60 hours or more at an assigned level of 3-4 hours per week in a semester. It would run like an old P.E. class, where the grade rests upon how many laps a kid ran, chin-ups completed, pushups done.
I know this sounds like a juvenile model, one unsuitable for higher education. But as the ed-school saying goes, “We must meet students where they are.” Youth culture is an aliterate universe. Kids live on the screen, studying or reading on and through it. They must be disengaged from it. Secondary education has had to accommodate the digital age, which has meant shortening the number of pages assigned or crafting tests and homework that do not punish students overmuch for taking shortcuts. Higher education now faces a remedial duty, a countercultural task. Professors who want to teach only advanced topics are denying reality. What used to be handled in middle and high schools now falls on the shoulders of the elite and non-elite college professors. We know the complaint, and we know it’s real. Enough moaning—do something about it.
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No. The problem is heterogeneous grouping and the elimination of “College Prep” courses in high schools. In decades past, all of the students in an English class would either be bound for college or not, with the teacher then able to teach to the ability of the group. Now it’s a mixture of everyone and that’s what made it impossible to assign full length books.
What I tell professors is to get elected to your local school board and then start asking about the curriculum.