5 ms·

The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

55 points by BerislavLopac 2y ago

talonx 2y ago
Non-paywall link https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fmagazine%2Farchive%2F2024%2F11%2Fthe-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books%2F679945%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...
tiahura 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Rinzler89 2y ago
"If those kids could read, they'd be very upset." - Principal Moss, King of the Hill Mike Judge's satire ages like fine wine.
- tiahura 2y ago
  Many teachers and administrators love the anesthetizing effects of technology. Kids, and parents, are so badly behaved, and teachers’ hands are so tied, that any noble intentions about actually teaching go right out the window.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Brawndo's got what plants crave, it's got electrolytes. Don't think, just consume product, then get excited for next product.
quacked 2y ago
This trend could be fought against by doing away with the (in my opinion) absurd practice of constraining school English classes to "deeply analyze a few select texts at a very slow pace and then write essays on pre-selected topics", and changing the requirements to "read as many books as possible and write down your real thoughts about them." Of course for the select few students at the very top, it may be important to drill deep analysis, but the bulk of the citizenry will be better served by developing a personal predisposition towards reading and writing freely [0], as opposed to having someone prod them through facsimiles of literary criticism for a few hundred hours every year. [0] (Edit: changed from "... toward reading" to "... toward reading and writing freely". The original wording makes it sound like I want to advantage reading over writing.)
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >"read as many books as possible and write down your real thoughts about them." What's gonna stop kids from just asking ChatGPT to do it for them so they can get back to doom scrolling social media or playing videogames? If kids today have access to much higher quality (and addictive) entertainment than books, how are you gonna convince them to read anything?
  - tayo42 2y ago
    only read books that came out after chat gpt was trained
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    At least have them read better books. Why do high school kids need to be afflicted with Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man? Is that going to make them want to read more? Or is it going to make them think that even the "best" books are pretentious drivel? Does "great literature" have to be boring? Can't they find non-boring examples and read those?
    - quacked 2y ago
      I agree with you. I think also that kids today, and possibly for the past 50 years, don't have enough of a real grasp of history, culture, and civilization to really appreciate the classic novels they're currently exposed to as part of the curriculum. As an example, I didn't realize Pride and Prejudice was hilarious until I was 26 and thinking of getting married. At 16 I refused to engage with it or any novels like it. Given the current disaster brewing in terms of general literacy, I see no issue with bolstering the current curriculum with less-prestigious books that students actually find interesting. If that means kids are reading The Shining as part of high school, so be it.
    - gs17 2y ago
      It's more about having choice IMO. You could see the downward trend of my interest in reading as it went from elementary school's "read whatever you want, as long as it has chapters" to high school's "read what we give you and repeat the themes we tell you". Some kids like the classics. I wanted something that entertained me.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
I grumble a lot about how people don't read books anymore, and smartphones are an obvious culprit, but I wasn't fully aware how educational administrators and policy-makers shared direct responsibility: > But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.” > Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.
- pintxo 2y ago
  Isn’t this a perfect example of the side-effect of the introduction of KPIs? Once you introduce KPIs, your observed cohort will adapt and optimize on these KPIs alone and on nothing else, as there is no incentive for them to do so.
  - cma256 2y ago
    Goodhart's law in action. Though in this case it seems to be the "strong version" of it where targeting a proxy worsens performance.
marcodiego 2y ago
Many people now actually have difficulty even reading this article in its entirety. Quick access to information, easy to change from on thing to another makes reading anything long an extremely boring task. Why read the next paragraph if there something interesting just a click away?
loughnane 2y ago
The article mentions screens as you'd expect, but it also mentions school's focus on reading short "informational texts" like the sort you'd see on a exam that tests reading comprehension. I think that's the main problem. There's no way around it: to be able to read books you have to get practice reading books. You have to be able to distinguish between the barren sections that you can go over a bit quicker and the fruitful sections you might need to reread. Above all to read actively.
metaphor 2y ago
https://archive.is/9NlT0 https://archive.is/9NlT0 https://web.archive.org/web/20241001121010/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241001121010/https://www.theat...
narrator 2y ago
Does anyone with any power to change the situation in the common core or whatever governmental department even care? If the rubber never hits the road anywhere with the people who have the power to change the situation, absolutely nothing will happen or the situation will continue to deteriorate as the same motivations and methods that led to the current sad state of things will continue as they have.
superhuzza 2y ago
Perhaps the expectations on students are a bit unreasonable? "Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next." Reading Crime and Punishment alone is estimated to take about 11-12 hours at 300WPM. Then consider your average student is taking 4 or 5 classes per semester? If they all assigned that much reading, that would be 60 hours a week of just reading, not even including time to process what's being read, or write assignments, revise etc.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  It was common to get at least a book's worth of reading a week for the humanities oriented classes at my undergrad. Always fun seeing the freshman morale sink a few weeks in when they realized they had to either skim aggressively or do ~10-20 hours of reading. Of course, those suckers got to avoid the hard science lab time, so good for them.
  - 7402 2y ago
    Rule of thumb for my college classes was 3 hours of outside work for every hour in class. So 3 hours of lecture per week = 9 hours of problem sets, reading, etc. That was 50 years ago.
  - superhuzza 2y ago
    Certainly not a sustainable amount if every class is giving a similar workload. Crime and Punishment alone is over 500 pages. With 5 classes assigning a book each, that's 2500 pages a week, or 357 pages every single day. I certainly did not read that much during my undergrad nor my master's degree.
- quacked 2y ago
  Were those classes actually reading all of Pride and Prejudice in a single week, or were they skimming and then using prior skill and knowledge to conduct discussions on the book?
daeros 2y ago
I'm going to go with as a rule if they can't read books they're not elite. Period.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  But can they still be at an elite college? Or is it still an elite college if the students there can't read books? A few centuries ago, the difference between "elite" and "not elite" was the ability to read. And it may become that again. If you have kids, I don't care what the schools do. You make sure they can and do read.
laurex 2y ago
Seems like the increasing push to rely on AIs trained on pretty terrible shallow data alongside the negligible reading happening among young people does not bode well for the David Deutsch hypothesis about our capacity to use knowledge as a form of species evolution that will be able to solve all problems, though it might produce enough gullibility to believe in such a story.
kkfx 2y ago
Oh reading here in EU it's not an issue, UNDERSTANDING what one read it is. Most read fiction books and alike, but do not understand what they read. Let's say you give Phaedrus, the Fox and the Grapes novel and ask about what's the meaning. Most students will answers as a summary "the is a talking fox yelling at some grapes ..." and you can dig as much as you want the answer will regularly looks like an LLM summary.
NoNameHaveI 2y ago
I am by no means elite, although I did graduate Magna Cum Laude from a low ranked state university. I found it nearly impossible to read. My mind would wander. A single page took me 30 minutes, and I often retained almost nothing. Never found out if it was anxiety, ADHD, or what. But somehow I got my work done and made it to 2 MS degrees.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Hartford Public High School grad can't read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41699584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41699584
hindsightbias 2y ago
This problem was solved decades ago with Cliff Notes. I guess what they're saying is even those are too long.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  > Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet. [which is a 14-line poem]
bell-cot 2y ago
The article's "everyone is helpless to fight this trend" tone is extremely annoying. If the so-called "elite" colleges actually gave a crap, they could easily use their extremely selective admissions process to fight back. Perhaps the author is a product of the system she is criticizing - so minimal attention span, and no ability to do critical thinking?
renegade-otter 2y ago
Writers have notices this almost two decades ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog... I reference this in my blog post about focus. https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back.html https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...

55 points by BerislavLopac 2y ago

Non-paywall link https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fmagazine%2Farchive%2F2024%2F11%2Fthe-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books%2F679945%2F https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...

tiahura 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Rinzler89 2y ago

"If those kids could read, they'd be very upset." - Principal Moss, King of the Hill Mike Judge's satire ages like fine wine.

tiahura 2y ago
Many teachers and administrators love the anesthetizing effects of technology. Kids, and parents, are so badly behaved, and teachers’ hands are so tied, that any noble intentions about actually teaching go right out the window.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Brawndo's got what plants crave, it's got electrolytes. Don't think, just consume product, then get excited for next product.

quacked 2y ago

This trend could be fought against by doing away with the (in my opinion) absurd practice of constraining school English classes to "deeply analyze a few select texts at a very slow pace and then write essays on pre-selected topics", and changing the requirements to "read as many books as possible and write down your real thoughts about them." Of course for the select few students at the very top, it may be important to drill deep analysis, but the bulk of the citizenry will be better served by developing a personal predisposition towards reading and writing freely [0], as opposed to having someone prod them through facsimiles of literary criticism for a few hundred hours every year. [0] (Edit: changed from "... toward reading" to "... toward reading and writing freely". The original wording makes it sound like I want to advantage reading over writing.)

Rinzler89 2y ago
>"read as many books as possible and write down your real thoughts about them." What's gonna stop kids from just asking ChatGPT to do it for them so they can get back to doom scrolling social media or playing videogames? If kids today have access to much higher quality (and addictive) entertainment than books, how are you gonna convince them to read anything?
- tayo42 2y ago
  only read books that came out after chat gpt was trained
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  At least have them read better books. Why do high school kids need to be afflicted with Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man? Is that going to make them want to read more? Or is it going to make them think that even the "best" books are pretentious drivel? Does "great literature" have to be boring? Can't they find non-boring examples and read those?
  - quacked 2y ago
    I agree with you. I think also that kids today, and possibly for the past 50 years, don't have enough of a real grasp of history, culture, and civilization to really appreciate the classic novels they're currently exposed to as part of the curriculum. As an example, I didn't realize Pride and Prejudice was hilarious until I was 26 and thinking of getting married. At 16 I refused to engage with it or any novels like it. Given the current disaster brewing in terms of general literacy, I see no issue with bolstering the current curriculum with less-prestigious books that students actually find interesting. If that means kids are reading The Shining as part of high school, so be it.
  - gs17 2y ago
    It's more about having choice IMO. You could see the downward trend of my interest in reading as it went from elementary school's "read whatever you want, as long as it has chapters" to high school's "read what we give you and repeat the themes we tell you". Some kids like the classics. I wanted something that entertained me.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

I grumble a lot about how people don't read books anymore, and smartphones are an obvious culprit, but I wasn't fully aware how educational administrators and policy-makers shared direct responsibility: > But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.” > Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

pintxo 2y ago
Isn’t this a perfect example of the side-effect of the introduction of KPIs? Once you introduce KPIs, your observed cohort will adapt and optimize on these KPIs alone and on nothing else, as there is no incentive for them to do so.
- cma256 2y ago
  Goodhart's law in action. Though in this case it seems to be the "strong version" of it where targeting a proxy worsens performance.

marcodiego 2y ago

Many people now actually have difficulty even reading this article in its entirety. Quick access to information, easy to change from on thing to another makes reading anything long an extremely boring task. Why read the next paragraph if there something interesting just a click away?

loughnane 2y ago

The article mentions screens as you'd expect, but it also mentions school's focus on reading short "informational texts" like the sort you'd see on a exam that tests reading comprehension. I think that's the main problem. There's no way around it: to be able to read books you have to get practice reading books. You have to be able to distinguish between the barren sections that you can go over a bit quicker and the fruitful sections you might need to reread. Above all to read actively.

metaphor 2y ago

https://archive.is/9NlT0 https://archive.is/9NlT0 https://web.archive.org/web/20241001121010/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241001121010/https://www.theat...

narrator 2y ago

Does anyone with any power to change the situation in the common core or whatever governmental department even care? If the rubber never hits the road anywhere with the people who have the power to change the situation, absolutely nothing will happen or the situation will continue to deteriorate as the same motivations and methods that led to the current sad state of things will continue as they have.

superhuzza 2y ago

Perhaps the expectations on students are a bit unreasonable? "Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next." Reading Crime and Punishment alone is estimated to take about 11-12 hours at 300WPM. Then consider your average student is taking 4 or 5 classes per semester? If they all assigned that much reading, that would be 60 hours a week of just reading, not even including time to process what's being read, or write assignments, revise etc.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
It was common to get at least a book's worth of reading a week for the humanities oriented classes at my undergrad. Always fun seeing the freshman morale sink a few weeks in when they realized they had to either skim aggressively or do ~10-20 hours of reading. Of course, those suckers got to avoid the hard science lab time, so good for them.
- 7402 2y ago
  Rule of thumb for my college classes was 3 hours of outside work for every hour in class. So 3 hours of lecture per week = 9 hours of problem sets, reading, etc. That was 50 years ago.
- superhuzza 2y ago
  Certainly not a sustainable amount if every class is giving a similar workload. Crime and Punishment alone is over 500 pages. With 5 classes assigning a book each, that's 2500 pages a week, or 357 pages every single day. I certainly did not read that much during my undergrad nor my master's degree.
quacked 2y ago
Were those classes actually reading all of Pride and Prejudice in a single week, or were they skimming and then using prior skill and knowledge to conduct discussions on the book?

daeros 2y ago

I'm going to go with as a rule if they can't read books they're not elite. Period.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
But can they still be at an elite college? Or is it still an elite college if the students there can't read books? A few centuries ago, the difference between "elite" and "not elite" was the ability to read. And it may become that again. If you have kids, I don't care what the schools do. You make sure they can and do read.

laurex 2y ago

Seems like the increasing push to rely on AIs trained on pretty terrible shallow data alongside the negligible reading happening among young people does not bode well for the David Deutsch hypothesis about our capacity to use knowledge as a form of species evolution that will be able to solve all problems, though it might produce enough gullibility to believe in such a story.

kkfx 2y ago

Oh reading here in EU it's not an issue, UNDERSTANDING what one read it is. Most read fiction books and alike, but do not understand what they read. Let's say you give Phaedrus, the Fox and the Grapes novel and ask about what's the meaning. Most students will answers as a summary "the is a talking fox yelling at some grapes ..." and you can dig as much as you want the answer will regularly looks like an LLM summary.

NoNameHaveI 2y ago

I am by no means elite, although I did graduate Magna Cum Laude from a low ranked state university. I found it nearly impossible to read. My mind would wander. A single page took me 30 minutes, and I often retained almost nothing. Never found out if it was anxiety, ADHD, or what. But somehow I got my work done and made it to 2 MS degrees.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Hartford Public High School grad can't read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41699584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41699584

hindsightbias 2y ago

This problem was solved decades ago with Cliff Notes. I guess what they're saying is even those are too long.

bell-cot 2y ago
> Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet. [which is a 14-line poem]

bell-cot 2y ago

The article's "everyone is helpless to fight this trend" tone is extremely annoying. If the so-called "elite" colleges actually gave a crap, they could easily use their extremely selective admissions process to fight back. Perhaps the author is a product of the system she is criticizing - so minimal attention span, and no ability to do critical thinking?

renegade-otter 2y ago

Writers have notices this almost two decades ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog... I reference this in my blog post about focus. https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back.html https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...