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”
Thank you for linking to the article, and the follow-up comments. I'm glad one of the follow-up comments emphasized other possible causes, e.g., the effects of the COVID lockdown on young people. But one thing I did not see mentioned was the increase in mental health issues among young people -- anxiety disorders, depression, etc. This is a well documented trend, with some studies claiming up to 40% of this age group having diagnosable mental health challenges. I would expect mental health challenges to affect academic performance. Not that mental health challenges can serve as the sole explanation for this phenomenon, but I would expect it to be a contributing factor for at least some students.
ReplyDeleteYes, it has to affect significant numbers of students and make for many difficulties with attention and energy.
ReplyDelete