Imagine graduating from high school and going to college having never read a single book.
According to a recent investigation by The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch, that's the reality for many students today, even at the most elite universities.
Nicholas Dames teaches Columbia's Literature Humanities course, which requires students to read several books. The Atlantic reports,
[Literature Humanities] often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. However, one student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book from cover to cover.
Went to a public high school and didn't read a single book!
And Dames was not alone.
The Atlantic spoke to professors at 33 elite universities and heard the same sad tale.
Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who 'read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,' he said, 'but they are now more exceptions than the rule.'
Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students 'shutting down' when confronted with ideas they don't understand; they're less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be.
Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown's English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
This phenomenon is so terrible, one University of Connecticut student is suing her K-12 system for not providing a legally mandated education.
She graduated without knowing how to read … at all.
Let me emphasize this point.
Aleysha Ortiz realized that being unable to read was an issue because she was admitted to a university.
Perhaps the issue presented by The Atlantic is not merely the lower standards of the K-12 systems, but also the lower standards of the universities which aspire to attract admissions and keep their bloated campuses open.
There are a lot of administrative mouths to feed after all.
Another thing: Today's students might not be able to read a book all the way through, but they are familiar with critical race theory, gender fluidity, and Christian nationalism.
Here's a term I learned in a book once, and I think it applies here: "Useful idiot."
We're so focused on progressive politics in some of our schools that we forgot to teach kids how to read.
It's no wonder more and more parents are turning to homeschooling!
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