Elite colleges shocked to find students ‘can’t read’ books: ‘My jaw dropped’

Several university professors expressed concern in The Atlantic about students coming to college unable to read entire books.

Associate editor Rose Horowitch spoke with several teachers from elite schools like Columbia, Georgetown and Stanford, who each described the phenomenon of students being overwhelmed by the prospect of reading entire books.

Columbia University humanities professor Nicholas Dames described feeling “bewildered” when a freshman told him she had never been asked to read a full book at her public high school.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames said.

Some professors find some students capable of the task, but describe them as “more the exception” than the rule, while others “shut down” when faced with difficult texts.

“Daniel Shore, head of the English department at Georgetown, told me that his students have a hard time staying focused on even one sonnet,” Horowitch wrote.

“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” she said. “It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped requiring them.”

Horowitch reported how a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of nearly 300 third- through eighth-grade educators found that “only 17 percent said they mostly teach whole texts,” with nearly 25 percent saying the textbooks themselves are no longer the focus of their curriculum.

While private schools are not immune to this issue, the problem is more pronounced with students who have attended public schools, where standardized test preparation is to blame.

“Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, appear to have been slower to move away from reading full volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a troubling gap in reading skills among freshmen,” Horowitch wrote.

In response, colleges have reduced their reading loads, albeit with some allowances for diversity.

“Columbia instructors who set the Lit Hum curriculum decided to shorten the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even as students struggled with reading, as new books by non-white authors were added.) ),” Horowitch wrote.

Psychologists told her they suspected the proliferation of social media apps like TikTok and YouTube had overtaken recreational reading.

“It’s changed expectations about what’s worth paying attention to,” said Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA. “Being upset has become unnatural.”

Another reason, Horowitch suggested, was the state of the economy with students more concerned about jobs than reading for fun.

“Some experts I spoke to attributed the decline in book reading to a change in values ​​rather than skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. “Students today are much more concerned about their job prospects than in the past,” she wrote.

Although professors have willingly begun to scale back their curriculum in favor of shorter texts or passages, many still lamented the loss of the cultural enrichment that comes from reading.

“A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” said UC Berkeley English professor Victoria Kahn. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it broadens your sympathies.”