The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Zzzz

Go back to school Op.

Replies like r2 perplex me.

The elite colleges - if they want to stick to their pedagogy about extensive reading, must tell high schools they will NOT admit students who have not taken courses requiring extensive reading. Proven on the transcripts.

Or, I dunno, the elite college could evolve.

My Swiss university is changing rapidly this year to accommodate AI and Gen Z - digital natives. Some domains must change more than others but all must change because these kids are WIRED and don't have the attention spans of previous generations. The aren't stupid, though. Intelligence is at least somewhat hard-wired.

Really? Can't read a book? It sounds like an admissions problem to me. Isn't there a question on the application, "What books have you read?" If not, put one there. Problem solved.

I would be stoked to read this, but I’m an elite college student.

[quote]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.”

These days, it's almost required that you take multiple AP exams to get into an elite college. In turn, I find it difficult to imagine that you could take high school AP courses, let alone take and get a 5 on an English AP exam, if you haven't read a fairly extensive reading list.

What this really says to me is that these people who've never read a book should never been admitted in the first place to any college, let alone an elite one.

Books are so wordy

Can’t they make the SATs about TikTok?

[quote]Books are so wordy

But also so decorative!

How do they get into any college except the ones desperate for money? What are they talking about Ivy league colleges? Like what was that one run by that very very stupid person put there by Penny Pritzker a billionairess who probably couldn't make a nickel herself at a lemonade stand if her life depended on it.

A friend's friend is a teacher at Syracuse U and says current students are incapable of critical thinking and she is as liberal as they come.

Syracuse is a party school so zzzzz no surprise. But I'm sure there is a range - from quite clever to quite dull.

Last week I explained to my students that they can and maybe should use AI to help them brainstorm oral presentation topics (business ethics). But they can NOT use AI as an "information source" for their presentations. Only information from published sources, by credible experts. In fact we have very specific new academic integrity rules about the use of AI. So they know the rule and accept the instruction but I KNOW they do not accept it in their bones. I guess 1/3 of them are going to ask AI to produce the contents. They are in a for a shock. We were told by deans to fail them and report it as plagiarism to the academic deans. I guess I am going to have to do the work of a HS teacher and ask them to show me their notes from their sources. Also we have forbidden power point hidden comments. They may only have paper note cards during their presentations, just like when we eldergays were in college.

I think I might show them how we did this in the Stone Age. Take notes on note cards. Arrange them and rearrange them, and rearrange them again, and then write a paper or plan a presentation. It actually worked efficiently.

They have very few strategies for all digital research. They don't know how to extract information with their own minds. Knowing what to extract, and what not to bother with. Their brain synapses are not lubricated to do this.

On the upside, they are very open minded and progressive for the most part. They are very kind and sensitive to each other and they are polite and respectful to professors. They are creative thinkers and they are optimistic. Some are gorgeous.

Ok - their first example in the article needs more context. In the kids' defense - I took LitHum first year at Columbia - everyone has to - it's a requirement, although you can take it 2nd year instead.

The first week is the Iliad and the second week is the Odyssey. You usually have quizzes in each class - twice a week - over the material so you can't NOT read it if you want to get a good grade.

The Iliad is around 550 pages and the Odyssey is around 600 pages. They're both very dense and long. You have 4 other classes and to read over 500 pages for one class is a LOT - then turn around and have to do it again the following week.

More importantly - you usually only have 2 days between the next class, so you have to read 275-300 pages in 2 days in order to pass the quiz coming your way the second class that week.

It's a shit way to start your college experience. EVERYBODY struggles with it and complains. It then gets better with smaller books throughout the semester - but it's a huge time suck.

Columbia already has a lot of reading and homework for each class - so it's not like you don't have a shit ton of work in other classes too. So yeah, I understand the feedback from the students in that section of the article.

It's an incredibly stressful way to start college - but it's been that way for 80 or 90 years at Columbia?

I retired from teaching 5th grade in January. I totally understand where that professor is coming from. The truth is, the current reading curriculum in California (Benchmark) is woefully lacking. In 5th grade students read a 2-page article several times, then an "extended" reading for 4-6 pages. There are no chapter books or novels studied in class. I stuck to older standards and always taught my students how to write a five-paragraph essay and other longer forms -only to have them come back at tell me they never wrote more than a paragraph or two, and never read a single novel, in middle school. Yes, the kids can read. But they only read fluff for entertainment. They are not taught how to read and discuss literature, unless they have old-fashioned teachers who are willing to throw out the curriculum and teach what they know is worthwhile. Another part of the problem is that we are no longer allowed to give reading homework. You can't send the book home and say, "Read chapters 4-6 tonight." Students' home time is supposed to be "respected" and school is not allowed to infringe on their social and athletic activities.

I teach college students, and what amazes me is how many think that "novel" is a synonym for "book." Hamlet? A novel. The Quran? A novel. The Odyssey? A novel.

They have no conception of genre, and it makes me think that many of them have never read a book, let alone a novel.

R16's firsthand experience made me curious to see the syllabus for Lit Hum. To my eyes, and as someone with a lit degree, it looks quite daunting:

Lit Hum's rofessor Howley is a dreamboat!

^ Professor.

[quote] Lit Hum's rofessor Howley is a dreamboat!

No wonder people can’t read - they’re blind.

[quote]never read a single novel, in middle school

Hell, that's all I did in middle school! But I did it on my own time, and I read whatever I liked.

When I was seven years old, they kicked me out of the adult library which was two blocks from out house. They told me I was too young to read anything in there. I was so embarrassed.

I made up for it later, when I hit 12.

^^ our house

Maybe they need to start on something more basic, like "My Pet Goat." I highly recommend it.

The Pet Goat!

r16 Students entering Columbia haven't already read [italic]The Iliad [/italic] and [italic]The Odyssey[/italic]?

Ye gods.

[quote]To my eyes, and as someone with a lit degree, it looks quite daunting:

Seriously? Where did you obtain that degree?

That list is a pretty standard list in a course like this. I had a course with a similar reading list without the bible stuff, but throw in some Euripides, Sophocles and, of course, Plato.

I got through high school with straight As, never reading a single book. I was just a master bullshitter. College was a disaster, though.

And I went to a school for gifted children btw

I also read everything and anything, r23/ Senior Lesbian. Reading was and still is my superpower.

[quote] The Iliad is around 550 pages and the Odyssey is around 600 pages.

The Iliad is actually longer than the Odyssey.

The Iliad is @15,000 lines long.

The Odyssey is @ 12,000 lines long.

Our youth are not that smart. Let's just admit it.

Even my own daughter (who is 33) constantly spells "ridiculous" as "rediculous."

[quote] She has other skills.

Cock sucking.

No. Social work (homelessness and addiction counseling), r34.

They're not mutually exclusive, r35!

R34 = Frances Farmer!

I happened yesterday to see a clip of the great Gore Vidal in conversation with Susskind. Vidal noted en passant that when he visited colleges he was surprised at the dip in literacy and articulacy compared to previous times. This was in 1980! Vidal thought TV was a culprit, and I agree. Too passive and busy a medium, which can scramble a developing mind, and work against immersive reading and critical skills. Doubtless such scrambling and distraction is increased by smartphones. An irony here though is that Vidal, deeply well-read and articulate, never attended any college, elite or otherwise. And there I was, watching the sage, propounding his theories - on TV.

I think this is what one person thinks DL catnip is rather than all of us. There is quite a contingent of non-grumpy old men here.

R38, Snob Gore Vidal had a lot of mental trauma and self-loathing to unpack.

My neighborhood has a bunch of those “little free libraries” around. The books are usually terrible. Nobody took the books I left, I just started putting gas station hot dogs in them.

I took AP lit in freshman year of public high school. we were required to report on at least one thousand pages of reading per semester. I recall reading 1984, brave new world and Tess of the durbervilles in that year.

People cheat their way through school. A lot. A fucking lot.

This used to be just the football team

It’s a family thing too. I was an advanced reader because my parents read all the time. My mother loved flea markets and would give me a couple bucks to buy books. Later, in middle school, a friend and I would try and read all the Stephen King books we could get.

[quote] My neighborhood has a bunch of those “little free libraries” around. The books are usually terrible.

Two years ago, in Rogers Park, Chicago, I saw Ann Coulter's How to Talk to a Liberal in one of those free libraries. I was tempted to yank it out and throw it down the sewer.

R16 Having to read like this in uni fucked me up (only temporarily - it's getting better again now.) I have always been an enthusiastic reader, but the sheer mass of stuff I had to read in uni (studying philosophy) was tough. It's not as if you read philosophy papers and books like novels. Before, I had no problem to immerse myself and to concentrate. At the end of my study term, it was as if the permanent skimming ruined any deeper understanding. It was ridiculous, suddenly had a problem reading and taking in 20 pages, when unforced I would have easily read 200 a day without anyone telling me to, nearly all my life. It was not "not wanting to," it was like a learning disability. And it wasn't that the texts were in any way too complicated for my smooth brain. Teaching by dumping books on students, along with a tight schedule is not a good method, at least it hasn't been for me.

R47, not R16, but I totally get what you mean. My friend was an English teacher and now she hates reading. The thought of reading deeply triggers her. And I don't blame her.

R27/R28 - yes, most of us had read most of the Odyssey and Illiad before entering college, but it's not like it stays fresh in your mind. To pass the detailed quizzes of the reading, you were definitely going to have to read it again.

It's still a LOT to cover in 2 weeks - and Columbia has a heavier reading load in general for your other classes, so piling those 2 books on at the beginning of the semester was brutal. With your other classes, it wasn't unusual to have 800-1,000 pages total each week for the first 2 weeks.

R28 - the link to the latest LitHum course reading list shows that it has been updated a LOT since I was there 30 years ago - it's a bit more 'woke' to include female authors and literature from other civilizations. We absolutely read Euripides and Sophocles in LitHum back then - but Plato is in there - see The Symposium listed. The Republic was reserved for the other course, which was a year long required philosophy course. That year long philosophy course was also difficult - lots of reading and it's DENSE - it's not like it's literature where you can breeze through it.

I'm glad they kept the list of Bible books in there - reading the Bible as literature and not as a religious text was always funny in terms of the reaction you'd get from the few religious students we had. Discussion of why there were 2 different creation stories in the first 2 pages of Genesis was always funny - and also how the language shifts from a polytheistic to a monotheistic POV. Or that there was no historical evidence that Jews were slaves and how most inhabitants of Egypt were conscripted to work on projects, but were paid.

Most 18 year olds never read the Bible in an objective way - and it would drive the few religious ones crazy. I wish that was required everywhere.

^ r16, Thank you for your candor. This article is pure snark. Rose Horowitch, probably known as Zombie since middle school, looks like my pedantic, mean, lesbian, English teacher who favored the girls, tortured the gay boys and gave the jocks a free pass. I'm not bitter, it's not like I looked her up on Find A Grave, so I could piss on it.

I particularly loathe the illustration, depressed kids with nothing to do because they can't read? One girl of color, one dumb -Hello Kitty- Yeti -tumbler- carrying white girl and a darker hued Aspie, incel who can't make eye contact. They should be ADHDing all over the place, drinking frappuccinos and gaming or something.

I don't like the pedagogy nor the selection. If I ran Columbia I would can this in favour of some other strenuous exercise of cognition that is more collaborative, too.

R51 - Columbia has a very large (for today) required list of courses for undergrads - it's called the Core Curriculum. There are many other classes besides this - including Logic/Rhetoric which is now called University Writing (?).

The classes are all designed to be small - around 20-25 max - so believe me, it's very interactive and collaborative. These are not lecture hall classes and you can't get away with not being engaged or not showing up. The undergrad population is relatively small - there were only 850 in my freshman class but now I think it's like 1000 or 1100. That excludes the engineering school and the women's college undergrads (Barnard college).

Donald Trump made it to the White House having never read a book. I am not even sure he can read, and he went to UPenn 60 years ago.

[quote] It's not as if you read philosophy papers and books like novels.

???

I was an English major, and read "books like novels."

[quote]Donald Trump made it to the White House having never read a book.

Except Mein Kampf, which he memorized...

Recently (sort of) retired teacher. Close to half a century in the classroom. Yes, there are still some students who can read deeply, think critically, and so on. But it’s no longer the norm. The decline in standards has been horrifying.

I could share hundreds of stories but I’ll just share a few.

First one is trivial but etched in my brain. I had a volunteer teacher’s aide who at the time was a senior at UC Berkeley. He asked if I could look at one of his essays. In it, he repeatedly used the word “mellow-dramatic.” He was an English major.

I’ve had more than one student who - when presented with the idea that we’d read a few plays in class - responded: Like Grand Theft Auto?

Most significant: When I began teaching eons ago, we used to be able to have hour-long or two-hour-long discussions on one topic, one news article, one short story. In more recent years, I’ve had to plan lessons in ten- or twenty-minute chunks. There are a few exceptions. But in my experience the majority of students have the attention span of gnats.

And worse, or just as bad, when they read fiction, for example, they have no general fund of knowledge with which to support their comprehension or help them interpret what they’re reading.

If that seems vague, one example. We read about a character who’s grown up in Bangkok and now lived in Kansas. I asked: What’s her native language? The response? The story did not include that information!!! Omg. No ability to go beyond what is absolutely explicit. Worse than that, some students would point to a Chinese student in class and say Ask him He speaks that language. Omg.

[quote] In it, he repeatedly used the word “mellow-dramatic.” He was an English major.

This reminds me of when a girl in my business frat used the non-word "funner". But, to your point, I blame spellcheck for the problem you mention here. I can say that I had much better spelling before I just started defaulting to spellcheck.

R54 - do you think you can plow through philosophy books as quickly as a novel? Seriously?

That's like saying you can read and absorb medical studies as quickly as People magazine.

R28, R19 here. That's a bit harsh, I think. "Daunting" does not mean unmanageable or frightening--just intimidating to anticipate. And although the college I graduated from was not as competitive as Columbia, it was selective.

I'm not embarrassed to admit the Columbia Lit Hum syllabus looks daunting to me. Impossible? No. But if you're a freshman taking a standard 4-5 course load and doing extracurriculars, it's going to require superb time management skills and discipline. That's all I meant.

[quote] R54 - do you think you can plow through philosophy books as quickly as a novel? Seriously?

I read modernist books for my classes like Joyce's [italic]Ulysses[/italic] (which took an entire semester for the class to get through), Woolf's [italic]The Waves[/italic], Beckett's [italic]The Unnameable,[/italic] and Proust's [italic]Swann's Way.[/italic]

Get the fuck over the mixed self-pity and self-congratulation about the difficulty of your philosophy degree. You're not the only person in the world who chose something difficult to study.

R18: many also refer to any piece of music, whether it's instrumental or vocal, piano, guitar, etc. as a "song." Satie's "Gnossienne 1"? "I love this song!"

R52 I know what a core curriculum is, hunty. And I know Ivy League freshmen curricula. Mine was at Cornell. And I've taught freshmen seminars at Brown, Sorbonne and EPFZ and Lausanne universities.

I find Columbia's old hat and their old school stance, stubborn and bourgeois. I think Columbia is engaged in wishful thinking and elitism wet dreams. Let's get real. Many of those works should have been handled by an elite college prep programme, private or public. For any kid with grand aspirations. And if you want to be a snot about it, by the university level, go all in and make them read a classic French or Spanish work in the original for crissakes. Freshman year. Give them the choice but require some proficiency. After all, Latin went out the window. What about standards! Aren't we producing elites? 😵‍💫 Freshmen at French and German universities can and do read English literature and have been doing so since they were young teens.

People today have very limited vocabularies. That comes from not reading -esp. not reading literature. Schools today place too much emphasis on reading non-fiction ("infotext"), which teaches students to look for factoids and other concrete data in the text, rather than connecting to the text or searching for meaning that is not explicitly stated. An interesting study showed that younger people are unable to visualize what they read. Strong readers form images in their mind -they imagine the characters and scenes as they read. They have an idea of what each character's voice is like. But poor readers just read from word to word or sentence to sentence without making those connective images. In the study, students were asked to draw a scene based on three paragraphs that were read aloud to them repeatedly. Most were unable to come even close, leaving out essential details or adding in entirely-imagined details. The only way to combat this is to read more, and most school programs aren't providing that opportunity. This goes a long way toward explaining the rise in graphic novels and manga...

It's post-colonial canonical window-dressing that probably turns off the elite minds among the freshmen detritus. It seems both mean and generous. Mean for those who are uninterested or can't manage it. Generous to the mediocre who believe the accomplishment of this tattered canon turns them into elite humanists.

Beloved Lady of An and Uraš! Hierodule of An, sun-adorned and bejeweled! Heaven’s Mistress with the holy diadem, Who loves the beautiful headdress befitting the office of her own high priestess!

Puleaze.

r54 He meant that one doesn't read books on Philosophy and papers on Philosophy in the same manner/spirit as one reads novels.

They can't read? I know what that's like.

R62 - you don't have to be such a cunt. Many schools have very few or no requirements (e.g. Brown) - so I had to put that in there. In terms of modernizing it - the critique of Columbia's core curriculum has been around for many decades, far before I went there.

But Columbia was one of the first colleges to develop it, so they are loathe to change it. Call it 'bourgeois, stubborn, and elitism wet dreams' but it is part of the school tradition and they fight to keep it time and time again.

And you type like a pompous snobby asshole. Get over yourself.

My original post was merely to explain that the article talks about complaints in the LitHum class - and I gave the reasoning due to the overload the first 2 weeks of class.

Brown has "requirements", Mary.

OK I was just being exaggeratedly snarky. Nothing personal. I find the pedagogy and post-colonial canon tacky and yes that is elitist. That's the point, to out snob Columbia's snotty gesture. Ibn Arabi wasn't even hot.

R68 - there are no specific course requirements, idiot. Every school has requirements for graduation - two different things.

You didn't write "course requirements" you wrote "Many schools have very few or no requirements (e.g. Brown)".

Brown has course requirements and degree requirements. So what exactly did you want to express?

R70 - you yourself were talking about the core curriculum and how outdated and bourgeois it is, so you know what was being discussed.

You just can't help being a cunt, can you?

You have not explained wtf you mean by "requirements". But you say Columbia has them but some schools don't? What are you talking about?

Do you mean required freshmen courses? REQUIRED courses? Then I follow. God fucking forbid you be precise in your language with your Ivy League education.

[quote]We read about a character who’s grown up in Bangkok and now lived in Kansas. I asked: What’s her native language? The response? The story did not include that information!!! Omg.

I answered that way because they didn't specify whether she spoke a regional tongue such as Lanna and Danbro, or one of its Malay dialects. I'm also not the one using triple exclamation points for emphasis. Pot kettle much?

My Queen, You are all-conquering, all-devouring! You continue Your attacks like relentless storms! You howl louder than the howling storms! You thunder louder than Iškur! You moan louder than the mournful winds! Your feet never tire from trampling Your enemies! You produce much wailing on the lyres of lamentations!

r63 as an adult, I taught myself to read a little German. I find that reading fiction in German is more pleasurable now than reading fiction in English, because, for whatever reason, my visualizations when I read in that language are stronger.

We know that David Hogg is as dumb as a bag of rocks but that didn’t stop him from graduating from Harvard.

That core curriculum at Columbia, does each student have to take all those core classes? the Art one and the Civilization one and the Science one, etc etc.

R78, we “know” that?

R78, Hogg got a combined score of 1270 (80th percentile) on the SATs. He's very bright and capable. Good grief. What were your SATs?

That’s not so grand for the re-scaled SAT. 1270 would have paved the way for a top tier school in 1980, under the scale used at that time. Not so much in 20xx.

R82, agreed--you're right about that. Hogg was definitely fortunate to be admitted to Harvard. But he's a bright kid with a bright future. The 80th percentile is very credible, and the shit he took in the media was brutal. The world needs more socially conscious, dynamic young people like him.

And no, I 'm not saying that because he's good-looking!

He was a “Harvard likes celebrities” admit. Nothing more.

1270 is way below average for elite schools. Most kids have tutors and other bullshit to help them get in. I am sure there's more to Hogg than celebrity or a score.

His celebrity SAT score was 1470.

If you don't have the SAT score, you can always fall back on sizemeat.

Reading novels brings me great pleasure. I really dive into them during vacations. I read about 15 in as many days last winter in Palm Springs. If I'm in a busy work period in my life, then 2 or 3 a month. However, I don't read poetry for pleasure as a rule, nor do I usually read plays. I will occasionally read a non-fiction book if the topic grabs me. I'm more likely to read a non-fiction book that brings to life a particular historical era or event. I will also read books about my field, but, in a way, I regard that as "continuing education". My required English course in college was a survey of English poetry, from Chaucer to 20th century poets like Wallace Stevens. The point of the course was to do close-reading, and I got very good grades on my papers, but I didn't finish the course with a burning desire to read poetry instead of novels.

[quote]R78, Hogg got a combined score of 1270 (80th percentile) on the SATs.

While I'm definitely not going to argue that Hogg "didn't belong" at Harvard – yes, he was obviously admitted because of his fame, but I'd MUCH rather people like him get in versus the crotchfruit of millionaire alums – 1270 isn't exactly a great SAT for a top 10 university. My little brother got a 1540 and was rejected by Harvard, Yale & Princeton, on top of being third in his graduating class & having a stellar CV. (He got into other schools, but still. Upper-middle-class white boys without connections – or an infamous history – simply aren't what they're looking for nowadays.)