In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes about “The End of the English Major.” Here’s Amanda Claybaugh, a Harvard professor, speaking:
“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”Which reminds me of something I wrote after listening to the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong :
I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.Just one factor among many, but a factor.
[One aside: An English department is at odds with itself if its students get tote bags that say (or brag?) “CURRENTLY READING” but its professors think the department “should do more with TV.”]
comments: 5
as the days go on, i am really beginning to feel out of touch with education. why is there no interest in learning/reading authors of old? if anything, we probably need english majors more than ever.
we have a generation that quite honestly can't read nor comprehend what they have read and has no interest in learning unless the information is pushed to them. i am on several forums and totally amazed by the number of people who ask questions that can be found on the web. maybe they don't know how to question or research because they were never taught.
the only hope that i have is that the next generation will wonder why didn't people learn this?
kirsten
It’s disheartening to see the shape of college changing so quickly, and not for the better. Younger people I know make me hopeful (I’m always hopeful), but the people who run the institutions seem to me to have capitulated.
And Kirsten, I hope you agree, the nineteenth century was not that long ago — a point that often gets made in conversation about American history and the legacies of slavery.
I wonder if that issue led to the fact that some graduate programs no longer require GRE scores... The Sentence Completion was challenging (but rather fun.)....circa 1975.
Our daughter read _The Scarlet Letter_ in HS, as did I. Now it's college material? Or not....
I have even heard arguments that students don’t have time to read long books. Not just too hard. Too long!
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