[Rastus]

I read a lot as a kid. I hated the books I was assigned to read—often because I’d wait until the last minute and have to read a full book in one night—but I was still reading my own choice of books on my own. One of the ones I read in a night and despised was War of the Worlds, which turned out to be a good read later when I read it because I wanted to. I don’t read much any more, though I did reread Dracula and Frankenstein last year. I can’t even remember the last time I read a book I hadn’t already read. I just can’t even come up with an idea of what to read. Modern fiction looks to be as bad as modern film.

[EinNYC]

Absolutely disgraceful, but hardly surprising. Not since the libtards have gained the catbird seat for themselves in all levels of education. I started out teaching biology in high school---the anatomy of the body, how muscles/nerves/bones/organs work, biochemistry of living things, reproduction of various organisms (including humans), DNA, ecology, etc.---and ended my teaching career teaching something which could have been called "How Do You FEEL About Biology", consisting mostly of ecology, DNA technology, and a smattering of the stuff that really is the heart of biology, listed above. Just a tiddy bit, to say we "learned" about it. No wonder most of them had to take remedial courses in nearly everything in college. Then we taxpayers get to foot the bill for their education in K-12 and then for the college subsidies covering the EXACT SAME MATERIAL until they can manage an actual college level course.

Of course, I was reading before I entered kindergarten and glommed the 3" thick Collected Works of Shakespeare my brother got for his bar mitzvah, since he never touched it. I read that big fat book from cover to cover, hooking me on Shakespeare for life---at the age of 8. If I ran into a word I didn't know, we had things laying around called dictionaries. Today's kids look up words on their phone, if they bother at all. Their vocabularies consist of those few hundred texting abbreviations---LOL, BRC, LMAO, etc. They actually tried to turn in term papers using those! And it was always the TEACHERS who got slammed for trying to reject such pathetic work or give authentic grades--those truly earned.

Yep, we will soon be ripe for conquer without the enemy having to fire a single shot, thanks to the libtards.

[Slyfox]

To gain admittance to college in the 17th century, students had to be able to read and translate various Latin authors on sight.

They also had to be able to read Greek and at the end of their college they had to be able to debate their professors in Latin.

This was what was required of our Founding Fathers who graduated from a colonial college, which was about half of our Founders.

Most of the other Founders who did not go to college did study Latin and Greek, like Ben Franklin.

Our Constitution could have been written in Latin and debated in a Latin.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

They are part of a cohort of students known as “book virgins.”

"Book virgins" - the snowflake way of saying "fools with the attention spans of field mice".

[Eagle Forgotten]

The author is a math virgin.

From the linked article:
And how many “book virgins” are there among entering college freshmen? According to NAS' David Randall—who drew upon NEA and Pew statistics—about 4 million, which represents about 20% of the entering freshmen class.

If 4 million is 20% of the freshman class, then the entire freshman class is 20 million. The linked article is from June 2016, so the freshman class would be, roughly speaking, drawn from people born in 1998 -- a year in which the total number of births was just below 4 million. Cite: https://www.infoplease.com/us/births/live-births-and-birth-rates-year (That was typical. The number of live births was, to the nearest million, 4 million in every year from 1980 through 2009.) Of course, not all of those 4 million would go to college.

Now, I know that many foreigners come here to study, but I refuse to believe that the freshman class consists of 16 million foreigners and only a quarter as many native-born.

[trebb]

Started going to libraries when I was 9 and became a voracious reader. Took a pre-college word comprehension test in high school.and it claimed I had the vocabulary of a senior.

[Pippa]

I homeschooled my children and used this website as a guide to pick books from. This is an example of the 10-12 grade reading list.

10-12 Literature

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
All Creatures Great and Small and others by James Herriot
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
Amazing Adventures of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton
American Leonardo by Carleton Mabee
Americanization of Edward Bok by Edward Bok
And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
Animal Farm; 1984 by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini
Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt
Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton
Barchester Towers and others by Anthony Trollope
Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
Bible in Spain by George Borrows
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys by John Buchan
Borden of Yale by Mrs. Howard Taylor
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Burning Bush and others by Sigrid Undset
Byzantium by Stephen R. Lawhead
Cabinet of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac
Captain Cook’s Explorations by James Cook
Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset
Charterhouse of Parma and others by Stendahl
Chivalry and others by James Branch Cabell
Conquest of Granada by Washington Irving
Contender by Robert Lipsyte
Covenant and other historical fiction by James A. Michener
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Cripps, the Carrier by Richard Blackmore
Crisis by Thomas Paine
Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson
Cruise of the “Nona” and others by Hilaire Belloc
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
Darwin’s Black Box by Michel Behe
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Death of Ivan Ilyitch by Leo Tolstoy
Death of the Gods by Dmitri Merejkowski
Diary & Autobiography of John Adams edited by L. Butterfield
Diary by David Brainerd
Diary of a Country Priest and others by George Bernanos
Dream Thief by Stephen R. Lawhead
Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
Emma by Jane Austen
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
Every Living Thing by James Herriot
Experience the Depths of Jesus Christ by Madame Jeanne Guyon
Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography by Hans Christian Anderson
Fathers and Sons and others by Ivan Turgenev
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Four Voyages to the New World by Christopher Columbus
Foxe’s Christian Martyrs by John Foxe, edited by W. Grinton Berry
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Green Mansions and others by William H. Hudson
Heart of Darkness and others by Joseph Conrad
Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland H. Bainton
House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, translated by D. H. Lawrence
House of Seven Gables and others by Nathaniel Hawthorne
How I Found Livingstone by Sir Henry Morton Stanley
Iceland Fisherman and others by Pierre Loti
In This Sign by Joanne Greenburg
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Jerusalem and others by Selma Lagerlof
Journal by George Fox
Journal by John Wesley
Lalla Rookh by Tom Moore
Lavengro by George Borrows
Life of Columbus by Washington Irving
Life of George Washington by Washington Irving
Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
Lord Peter and other mysteries by Dorothy Sayers
Lorna Doone by Richard D. Blackmore
Man Called Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
Martin Chuzzelwitt by Charles Dickens
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Moby Dick and others by Herman Melville
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
My Antonia by Willa Cather
My Confession by Leo Tolstoy
Old Creole Days and others by George Washington Cable
Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
On Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and others by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Paradise War and others in trilogy by Stephen R. Lawhead
Peace Child by Don Richardson
Pere Goirot by Honore de Balzac
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Pillar of Iron and other historical fiction by Taylor Caldwell
Power & the Glory and other historical fiction by Graham Greene
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Prisoner of Zenda and others by Anthony Hope Hawkins
Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Rabble in Arms and others by Kenneth Roberts
Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson
Raven: a Biography of Sam Houston and other biographies by Marquis James
Red and The Black by Stendahl
Romany Rye by George Borrows
Roots of the Mountains by William Morris
Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone
Scott’s Last Expedition by Robert Scott
Sense and Sensibility and others by Jane Austen
Servant of Slaves and others by Grace Irwin
Sevastopol Sketches and others by Leo Tolstoy
Shadows on the Park by Willa Cather
Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs by William Morris
Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
Song of the Scaffold by Gertrud von Le Fort
Tale of the South Downs by Richard Blackmore
Taliesin and others in series by Stephen R. Lawhead
Thirty Nine Steps and others by John Buchan
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Tom Jones and others by Henry Fielding
Travels in Arabian Deserts by Charles Doughty
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
Virginians and others by William Makepeace Thackery
Voyages to the New World by Hakluyt
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
War of the Worldviews by Gary DeMar
Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Witness by Whittaker Chambers

The website has a lot more suggestions and I would even say it would be great for people of all ages to read from.

[Hoffer Rand]

I interviewed a young lady a few weeks ago. She has a JD degree, but hasn’t ever used it (I don’t think she was able to pass the bar, but that’s my personal opinion). Now, she thinks she might want to go into instructional design (no background in that, either). We asked what type of books she enjoys reading. Her answer was “Harry Potter books.” She’s in her mid-30s.