Why students can’t read

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tyler Jagt says that his students cannot read — read well enough, that is, to do the work of a rhetoric and comp class:

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

And Chronicle readers responded.

I’ll say again what I’ve often said: the crisis in the humanities is a crisis of reading.

A few related posts
Reading or not : Struggling to read : “The End of the English Major” : To Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell : “Warning from the Trenches”