Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided…
Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books, which they probably do not own and definitely did not read.
(Steven Hales, Bloomsburg University)
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
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The tendencies he’s describing are all perfectly real, so real in fact, so obviously real, that we should be well past the point of describing them by now, or of debating whether they in fact exist, not to mention past the point of blaming the students for their existence. We should by now have moved on to the much harder task of accounting for the economic, political, and technological causes behind them, so that we can figure out, soberly, what to do next.
It is not simply that the students “can’t read”; it’s that the students live in a post-literate world. They are using their anatomically modern human brains to execute different cognitive tasks than had been valued for some generations prior, though by no means since the dawn of humanity, and it behooves us now, very urgently, to pay attention to what these new cognitive tasks are, and to learn how to shoehorn the entire humanistic tradition into the vast set of objects they are focused on. It’s not going to be easy, but it has a much better chance of succeeding than simply scolding the lazy kids for not doing the reading. We have no more hope of getting literacy back, at least not as we had long understood it, than an early modern polymath had of convincing his disciples to become masters of the medieval ars memoriae. It’s over.
(Justin Smith-Ruiu, Université Paris Cité)
https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/can-the-humanities-survive
https://dailynous.com/