Tuesday
Recently I wrote about a Rose Horowitch Atlantic article that direly predicted, “The end of reading is near.” In some ways it was a follow-up to an article she wrote two years ago decrying “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
“To read a book,” the headline sarcastically continued, “it helps to have read a book in high school.”
Staking herself out as the prophet of doom when it comes to reading, Horowitch researched her article by interviewing 33 despairing literature professors. Nicholas Dames at Columbia told Horowitch that his students “now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.” Lamenting that they no longer engage “in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next,” he asserted that “they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.”
Princeton’s Anthony Grafton complained that most of his students “arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have.” Virginia’s Chinese literature professor Jack Chen found his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand. Georgetown’s Daniel Shore told Horowitch “that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.” Berkeley’s Victoria Kahn, who used to assign 200 pages each week, now
assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”
I’m not entirely sure what to do with these complaints. I had professors at Carleton make similar complaints when I was there in 1969-73. A classics teacher, for instance, told us that he used to teach many more Greek tragedies than he now did, although we still read a healthy number. When I quizzed my parents, who had attended Carleton 25 years earlier, my father told me that was correct but noted that he didn’t get much more than the plot from all that reading. The goal was to recognize the plays, not explore them in any depth.
My mother, meanwhile, recalled riding a train from Peoria to Minneapolis trying to read War and Peace, which had been assigned over spring break. Instead, she spent the trip helping a French bride with no English, who was going to join a Minnesota farmer that she met during the war. My mother didn’t face any consequences for not finishing the novel.
While I myself was diligent, I do remember skimming some works. My Brit Lit I professor assigned all twelve books of Paradise Lost but most of it bypassed me utterly, with only the passages of Satan in hell and the temptation in the Garden of Eden making any impression. (I only taught Books I, II, V, IX, X and the end of XII when I taught it in my own survey.) And I remember one embarrassing moment when I was sitting next to my French “20th Century Novels” professor and him noticing that I hadn’t yet used a paper cutter on the pages that we were supposed to have read that day.
That being admitted, I also add that I had a very different experience than the professors interviewed by Horowitch. I taught many novels and got good discussions out of them, including Pride and Prejudice (which we read in a week). I also had my students read the 900-page novel Tom Jones in my Restoration and 18th Century Literature class; five Jane Austen novels in my first-year seminar; One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children, Beloved, Like Water for Chocolate, and Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in Magical Realism; Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Great Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Catch-22, The Things They Carried, Handmaid’s Tale, and The God of Small Things in a 20th and 21st century survey (and those were just the novels); and comparable reading lists in other courses. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Maryland’s public liberal arts college, is no Columbia, Princeton, Georgetown or Virginia, but there are ways to teach that will excite students, whatever their background.
As I read Horowitch’s article, I wondered whether the landscape has changed that much since I retired in 2018.
Let’s imagine for a moment that it has. In that case, it’s worth looking at the reasons Horowitch gives for the decline in long-form reading. She mentions
—the rise of social media;
–grade inflation, which means that college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work;
–economic pressures leading to a shift in values (“while students can still read books, … they’re more concerned about job prospects”);
–high school teachers teaching towards the test and opting for informational texts to do so (“There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?”);
—since the pandemic, teachers no longer teaching “novels they’ve long revered,” like My Ántonia and Great Expectations, but settling for shorter works;
–kids no longer reading for fun (“In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.”)
Summarizing the work of neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, Horowitch points out that staying with a character through a novelistic journey “cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt.” As Wolf sees it, sustained immersion in a text (“deep reading”) “stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.”
If there is a decline, then, parents, high school English teachers, and college literature professors mustn’t give up the fight. It’s possible to excite students about lengthy fiction—I’ve seen non-readers become readers in my 37 years of college teaching—but it takes enthusiasm, imagination, and a hell of a lot of work. Work is involved in listening—really listening—to each individual student.
Perhaps the advantage I, as a public college professor, had over Columbia, Princeton, etc. is that I didn’t assume students automatically came in with a respect for literature. I knew I had to persuade them that reading was a worthwhile activity.
Given that literature reaches deep into the human soul, it’s not like we lack good material to work with.
