Posted on 10/04/2024 9:44:17 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
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.
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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Here we go again and “learning” how modern day students and workers are going to hell because we/they don’t read “real” books and cancelled their paper newspapers and so called paper news magazines.
Many will now use their electronic devices to tell us how we are going to hell by not reading books versus the internet.
My wife was a real book person until the event of Covid and needing a hip replacement. Our libraries were closed, and she tried an Amazon electronic book.
Now, she has 2 kindles and seldom reads a paper book.
I read/skim whatever sounds good as a book aka a Kindle via
my Acer Chromebook 15. I do order a real paper book if it provides some good references. I have a plastic box filled with Dave’s dirty dozen real books by my Lazy Boy for quick high lighted references.
So, I am going to hell as an 85+ year old who prefers Kindle electronic books over real books.
“My wife was a real book person until the event of Covid and needing a hip replacement.”
What does surgery and the flu have to do with that? I went through Covid and had two hip replacements — three, if you count revision surgery. Take my paper books? Out of my cold dead hands.
40 years ago, I attended Purdue and was working in the library part time. One of the people I worked with was also attending and she said she couldn’t read very well. This has been around for a while now. Sad, but true.
Possibly, but it's also the case that online articles compete with other websites, so their authors are forced to get to the point. Just skip the extraneous bullspit and get to the point. Readers have grown accustomed to it and appreciate it.
If you were to black out irrelevant sentences from publications, especially publications aimed at students, you'd be surprised at how little is left.
For example, Jason Fenske, on his YouTube channel 'Engineering Explained', can explain engineering subjects in 15 minutes, whereas I've read books from authors who not only couldn't do it well and in a timely manner, they got it absolutely wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/user/EngineeringExplained/videos
Cliffs NotesTM and Wikipedia were ahead of their time. It's not that Johnny can't read; it's that the authors can't write.
Couldn’t find the on/off switch.................
Spot on.
I haven’t seen that movie in a long time. Maybe it’s time for a re-watch.
...and it has fallen into the hands of the wrong people, almost exclusively.
We weren’t asked by the schools to read books and write reports on them.
We were told to. 😏
The clueless keep wondering why our country is going down the crapper.
These are the deadbeats who want the taxpayers to buy them diplomas.
...bet dey do tuuulerance real gud doe.
Many schools just pass kids for the state money not to teach them?.
Read one word after the other, for 1000 pages.
Devolution, de-evolution, or backward evolution (not to be confused with dysgenics) is the notion that species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time. The concept relates to the idea that evolution has a divine purpose (teleology) and is thus progressive (orthogenesis), for example that feet might be better than hooves, or lungs than gills. However, evolutionary biology makes no such assumptions, and natural selection shapes adaptations with no foreknowledge or foresights of any kind regarding the outcome. It is possible for small changes (such as in the frequency of a single gene) to be reversed by chance or selection, but this is no different from the normal course of evolution and as such de-evolution is not compatible with a proper understanding of evolution due to natural selection.
This is what constitutes voters in our country now and exactly why the country is in such bad shape.
Last night, I downloaded the entire Wikipedia from THIS LINK
It's 109.9 gigabytes, but 128 gigabyte USB flash drives are typically around $10 from Amazon or Walmart.
My wife was a real book person until the event of Covid and needing a hip replacement. Our libraries were closed, and she tried an Amazon electronic book.
Now, she has 2 kindles and seldom reads a paper book.
I am the author of four books, including a 500+ page novel.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kim-Kipling/author/B09SFHWKVZ
You would be amazed how many people simply won’t bother to read a book, any book, these days. Ignorance is blossoming at an exponential rate.
Nearly 50 years ago, I was in a senior philosophy course at Gonzaga. Our weekly assignment was a two page typed repot on the book assigned by the professor. On Thursday, each of us read our papers in class and discuss them. Of the 14 students, 12 were philosophy or theology majors. I was one of two business majors.
I worked my tail off, and earned a B. What I learned from that is that I can more than hold my own in weighty discussions. The professor also ripped the veneer of “philosophy”: it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it…philosophy is nothing but a bunch of bullshit.
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