Elite colleges shocked to discover students ‘don’t know how’ to read books: ‘My jaw dropped’

Several university professors expressed concerns to the Atlantic about students who come to college unable to read full-length books.

Assistant editor Rose Horowitch spoke to 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 first-year student told him that she had never been required to read a full book at her public high school.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames said.

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Some professors do find a few students up to the task, but described them as “now more exceptions” rather than the rule, with others “shutting down” when facing difficult texts.

“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a 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 asking them to.”

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

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While private schools are not immune to this issue, the problem is more prominent with students who attended public schools, where standardized test prep is blamed.

“Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes — leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen,” Horowitch wrote.

In response, colleges have been reducing their reading load, albeit with some additions for diversity.

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

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

“It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, said. “Being bored has become unnatural.”

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

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

Though professors have willingly begun scaling back their curriculum in favor of shorter texts or excerpts, many still mourned the loss of cultural enrichment that comes from reading.

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

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