Posted on 12/05/2024 6:21:52 PM PST by Rummyfan
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I’m so very sorry, Tired. That’s tragic. I, too, hope that your book are somewhere cherished by someone old enough to remember how good a book feels in your hand. And the smell of an aged one. I won’t mention taste, as that brings back too many memories of Triskit’s fixation with the glue binding of some of my older volumes.
"They must know about characters, the pattern of a story, they are otherwise unfit for conversation, positions in running organizations, knowing how to behave. They do not have to know how to read books and do all of the normal things that adults do in society but if they don’t they will be losers."
They need to know how to read and write well. And studying literature in high school is worthwhile.
But, the article is talking about college, and I was referring to college majors when I wrote: "I don’t think ‘literature’ should be a required course for all majors."
All STEM majors should be required to take courses in technical writing, for example. But, why should they be required to read and analyze literature in college?
Oh, my goodness, your library is beautiful, and so is the rest of your home. Wow.
Your average male college student spends hours a day playing video games—and has a horrible lack of academic commitment, focus, or general knowledge.
Yet young men will try to defend the educational value of video games in the same way that young women think they learn from Tik-Tok.
Fortunately, I was able to hold onto my old, aged books, which are my favorites. I loved them too much to give them away.
It took 2 years and 2 crews to finish the library. I sanded and prepared every board until 3 or 4 in the morning before they arrived, and invented many of the techniques for handling soft lumber. Then the crew would put them on the walls. When I had a particularly great board, they’d slice them down the vertical and we’d glue garbage onto them to make them 3/4”. Then I could do facing pieces. The closet doors had to be made since they were 10’ high and I couldn’t buy them easily. Those we laid out with a map. I still have a lumber room in the basement with boards I bought all over southern MA.
I was raised on the books of George Barr McCutcheon and I’ve tracked down every one of them in multiple copies so I’ll never worry about a dog eating one.
We’ve got a massive crisis in reading among our white students as well.
You did a wonderful job. It looks like a dream home.
“All STEM majors should be required to take courses in technical writing, for example. But, why should they be required to read and analyze literature in college?”
Good question.
To be educated. Part of our job or role as citizens is to educate the young. That means at least in our own way supporting parents in their endeavor. The IRS does a lot of that for us
Still and especially then we have a say
Our country will thrive in the future with educated kids
In college, as the article points out, kids are saying they can’t read. That’s the topic. They learn to read a lot sooner than that. The job of grammar school teachers is teaching them to read
An educated person needs to know literature.
My father and my husband. Naval academy and West Point (our military academies are considered the best educations at the moment by many) knew greek, Greek and Roman mythology, Latin, a foreign language ( speaking, reading, writing, listening). Why do military academies teach this. One was a champion boxer the other a starting football player check the star photos in the lucky bag of a particular year. Both were engineers. Their sports prowesses were stellar but they each earned engineering degrees and theycould recite lines of literature to make a point.
Why?
In high school inthe forties people knew how to write a paper they all knew how to write a cohesive 5 paragraph essay in no time. How to write a research paper. George Eliot, Blake, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Robert Louis, Taming of the Shrew
Why did they know all this? In the same Lucky Bag (USNA yearbook) there are photos of astronauts.Jim Lovell is in there right in my living room. Why would the Apollo 13 Chief need to know literature
Most people don’t realize what they learn from literature. All classic stories have time signatures. So do good/intelligent movies. Maybe the producers don’t know why but they do. My father would ask, who wants to go to the flicks? I want to see Dirty Harry. “Personnel is for A holes”. My father would at, ‘oh, that guy’s gonna do this then watch what happens, that guys going to do that’. Game theory. He used it in running the sales department at a Fortune 500 co at age 45. Senior VP ground floor semiconductors in the early 80s
These people thrived on knowing what people are going to do next. That’s literature. Fiction, classic fiction, is the study of human nature. Most of those characters are either real characters or composites of real people. Caricatures of people and how they behave morally and immorally. And the consequences of their choices
Watch any good 2 h movie. 10 minutes in what happens. 25 minutes in. 50-60 minutes When does it wrap up
Like a symphony
Same as classic literature
Then look at classic characters. If you say we’re gonna need a bigger boat what do you mean.
If you say we’re not in Kansas any more
Look at Tom Sawyer and the way he gets out of painting the fence. Or “it’s alive!” Or even “we seek the Grail”
When my Aunt who put three kids through good schools visited with her niece having a party with swanky New York multi millionaires, of whom she came from, she told me she was dismayed that the men knew nothing about making conversation about anything but their jobs.
That doesn’t build a culture. A society of Americans full of ideas and philosophies about where we’re going, the world we’re putting together for our kids’ futures. It’s about money now for me
Anyone can go to college and get out with a trade. All kids should get out of college with a skill. Intense language studies,Coding, engineering no matter what else they study
But without literature, Greek myth, American lit (and its requisite American history lessons), Brit lit its trade school. Which is fine and necessary. But not a complete education.
There is the rub eh? Even parents show up concerned when folks try to remove "Jimmy lost his Jimmy" from the local school library. Guess which book curious kids then want to read?
I lived in the library and by the time I got to College, I had already read a lot of the stuff thatn was required for the English, History and other courses
This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness by T. R. Fehrenbach (New York: Macmillan, 1963)
Great read!
Did you evef read a tech manual? There’s some of the most badly written stuff on earth
Ebooks sales are not that great.
The problem isn’t books, it’s publishing.
Guess who owns the publishing houses.
As for self-publishing...
Well, God made editors for a reason.
Wow they’re just learning that!
In the year 2000 freshman students in engineering were accepted with little or no algebra at Penn State. In the 70s’s, I had to have the first course of calculus before I walked through the door.
When I went back to college full time in the late 80’s all incoming students were required to take a math competency test. If you got less than 6 right, you were required to take remedial math. An 097 course for most of them, but for those who only got two or three right, it was back to math 094.
And just before that when I was going part time, I took an English writing course. The writing ability of the students even then was mostly appalling.
I’m jealous! Always dreamed of something similar, but life kind of got in the way.
Ooohh, thanks for sharing. It looks like a perfect space
to line the walls with plenty of reading room in between.
And even a ladder. Got to have the ladder.
Some of those look quite old. I continue to save many of
the older books, both fiction and non-fiction. You learn so
much about the past that you don’t really get from today’s
writings.
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