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 was thinking of online, and games.
As for comics,
I learned a lot from the old ones.
Superman! Batman! Wonder Woman!
Before wokeism, and not Wonder Woman.
Wokeism 101:
As proclaimed in the manifesto of a feminist wordcrafter ("Brianna Thompson") in wokeducation, warring against what God ordained, and who is employed from a college founded in 1824 by Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase,
"...intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights and LGBTQ social movements,...animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise... representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity...Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies...
Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity... As a class collective, our aim is to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced."
This counts toward the methods requirement for the major. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104. Open only to first-year and sophomore students.
Author is Brianna Thompson, who teaches courses in American women’s literature, queer theory and utopias/Afrofuturism at Kenyon college (founded by Episcopal Bishop in 1824). Course is Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214, https://www.kenyon.edu/academics/departments-and-majors/english/academic-program-requirements/courses-in-english/
I think we can agree on the idiocy of woke education.
Just as religion has its place in religious schools, where people can positively choose to have it as part of their curriculum, and can negatively choose not have it in public institutions where the subject can be avoided.
Though I don’t mind seeing religion - all religions, that is - discussed as part of a curriculum of history/culture/social studies, etc. I would object to the woke professors putting a biased spin on its history. But then, today, I don’t know how to encourage any child to go to any college where free thinking has been censored to a single, approved belief structure. I’m relying on Trump getting to the issue of biased education sooner rather than later.
Yes, finding a book with appropriate content can be tricky today. Parents can’t just let kids look at books freely in the library now.
And yet, here in the engineering school, our senior design report is hitting 100+ sources, all of which needed at least a skimming, if not a full reading..
Without a doubt, the study of literature, mythology, etc., provides a well-rounded education. No argument there. Studying those subjects is worthwhile.
But, for better or worse, colleges are the trade schools of today.
In the old days, fewer students finished high school, and even fewer went to college. So, back then, a high school diploma meant something, and a college degree was considered an impressive achievement.
As time went on, with each passing decade, more and more students finished high school and earned college degrees.
Now, a high school diploma means nothing, and a bachelor’s degree at minimum is required for even the low-level jobs.
So, today, most kids go to college because they have (or, at least, they believe they have) no other choice if they want a good job.
They are more interested in a career than they are in a well-rounded education, and they are paying a fortune. This is why I think literature should be an elective for STEM majors.
Also, I assume, when you say literature is important, you are talking about classical literature.
When I was in school, we were assigned books that were controversial for their time - for example, ‘Catcher in the Rye.’
Now, some of the books assigned in college literature courses are... weird. Even in high school, some of the books are downright disturbing with explicit content.
You are right about our dumbed down education and the majority in college as trade schools at best (though probably as often as four to six year parties paid by others).
But the low level of literacy of most of those students is shocking. It is not just humanities courses that have been grievously watered down. Because of their pathetically low levels of reading, studying and comprehension, students learn very little across the board.
Many are functioning around what you might have been familiar with at the 5th or 6th-grade level—and college courses have been modified to accommodate that.
I took several English and literature courses. NONE included a study of literature. Other than grammer(sp?), the “theme” taught, was socialism and opposition to limited government.
I learned something about literature:
- when I stumbled onto a book by the wife of a famous author
- when I was befriended by the sister of another famous author.
Trump may somewhat suppress but "Wokeducation" and promotion is too embedded in culture, in every major institution, from government, to media, to education, to industry, to the military, and lastly, religion, but within which those who greatly esteem the Bible as the sure, supreme, accurate word of God have long testified to being the most conservative group, thank God. .
Without another "Great Awakening" such as saved America in the past, then the US is headed toward more perversion, and destruction. No nation has every suffered demise while obeying the fundamental universal laws of God.
The redeemed are those who have been spiritually born of the Spirit (Jn. 3:2-7) by effectual, penitent, heart-purifying, regenerating faith in the Divine Son of God sent be the Father to be the Savior of the world, (1 Jn. 4:14) who saves sinners by His sinless shed blood, (Romans 3:25; Eph. 1:7) on His account. (1 Corinthians 6:11)
And which faith is imputed for righteousness, (Romans 4:5) and which is shown in baptism and following the Lord, (Acts 2:38-47; Jn. 10:27, 28) whom they shall go to be with or His return (Phil 1:23; 2Cor. 5:8 [“we”]; Heb. 12:22,23; 1Cor. 15:51ff'; 1Thess. 4:17)
In contrast to those who were never born of the Spirit or who terminally fall away. (Gal. 5:1-4; Heb. 3:12; Heb. 10:25-39) Glory and thanks be to God.
I had no problem with you “picking on” NY - it has gone into the dumpster - I was just pointing out that it happened after Carter established the Department of “mis-Education”.
Have a nice day.
Because they don’t emphasize the “3 R’s” only political puke and trash.
Even worse and more cynically, they teach basic math and reading in a way that confuses and sets back average students.
I want all to have a nice forever. And we are on an officially pro-God of the Bible, "pro-life, pro-family, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights,"... opposing "all forms of liberalism, socialism, fascism, pacifism, totalitarianism, anarchism, government enforced atheism, abortionism, feminism, homosexualism, racism, wacko environmentalism, judicial activism, etc." forum. Thank God.
They make simple math complicated intentionally. Converting fractions, and like, used to be a pretty simple process. I think this started with the idea of “new math”. They want you dumb, stupid, and compliant these days.
And even “new math” is far superior to their new common core teachings. They try to make elementary school students show 5 ways to “estimate” and answer, without getting them solid on one way to get to the actual answer.
And it’s not accidental, but IMO criminal.
They now refer to the algebra that students used to learn in middle school as “college algebra”.
“But, for better or worse, colleges are the trade schools of today.“
You lost me here
Read the headline and the article. That’s the topic
Look at the election we just had. The so called president e just had.
Wool
At our culture
Look at the most popular movie right now
The state of our education system
What kids are getting taught
Look at the price of college. A trade school for $30 k per year?
What trades are they getting taught
They can’t read a book
For educated kids today, books are obsolete relics providing information that is not relevant to the immediate tasks at hand. The required information to permit living and acting is provided in endless sources immediately on hand with their lap tops or ubiquitous handheld computers called phones.
“ For educated kids today, books are obsolete relics providing information that is not relevant to the immediate tasks at hand. The required information to permit living and acting is provided in endless sources immediately on hand with their lap tops or ubiquitous handheld computers called phones.”
Oh geeze. They’re talking about how they’re not able to focus on a book. An e book
I’m a teacher an English teacher. And I have kids in college. And I talk to my friends and their kids
“And it’s not accidental, but IMO criminal.”
You’re exactly right.
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