Struggling to read

Adam Kotsko writes about the decline in college students’ reading ability:

Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade — except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.

Read it all: “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted” (Slate ).

The “we” means something: Kotsko says that he’s never met a college prof who didn’t share his sense of things. I‘ll quote from a post of mine that reproduced an e-mail that I sent in 2022 to three architects of the “balanced literacy” approach to teaching reading:

I wonder in retrospect about so many elements of college life. I wonder about the extent to which the dreary professorial practice of outlining the textbook on “the board” is not merely a matter of professorial laziness but a way to compensate, consciously or unconsciously, for students’ weaknesses as readers. 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.

The decline is real, and it’s everywhere — even at Harvard, where in 2023 a professor reported that her students struggled to figure out subjects and verbs in the sentences of The Scarlet Letter.

Which reminds me to ask, whither grammar?

Thanks, Kirsten.