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 ...
“Now, she has 2 kindles and seldom reads a paper book.”
Yeah; you already said that
Me, I haven't bought a physical book in ages. However, I do read long detailed books on-line, mostly World/History issues. That keeps my synapses working at full speed. Plus, talking with you folks here and other web sites sometimes makes my neurons work overtime. I'm 74.
This is why admissions to colleges should be based on an entire student portfolio instead of a standardized test (that most students get coached to take or pay a company to coach them on to better scores for college admission purposes).
I tutor and have taught high school classes in private classrooms seheduled to meet weekly. The majority of the students came from a homeschool or private school setting. A few had recently been removed from public schools. The students who performed at the highest levels and were genuinely enthused were the home educated students. They offered wonderful and thoughtful discussions. The contrast was stark. Almost every public school student I encountered would not do required assignments and would not participate in class discussions. There is simply no desire for deeper thought or a desire to want to know more.
My friend gave art classes to many of these same students. She had the exact same experience. The students who had recently been removed from public education had no interest and did not do the projects that had been assigned.
I have a family member in another state with step children. This family member said they make great grades in school and absolutely cannot do any mental math. They are in high school and supposedly in a “good” school.
A the holder of a philosophy degree, I concur. Made a career for myself in the sciences.
Here is the problem with electronic for the youngers and by that I mean the ten and under crowd. You can not touch it.
If you sit a young child down in a room of real books they are attracted by the bright colors and shapes and will explore. They will pull them off the shelves and open them, looking for pictures and colors. They will bang them on the floor, might tear them a bit and probably chew on a couple.
They will be able to do none of this with electronic books. For all the talk of IPad Kids they do not read books on them and it is nearly impossible to read a book with them on a IPad. You need physical books to learn to read properly. A screen is not the same thing.
You need to have learned phonics in order to learn to read properly.
You may scoff but it is indubitable true that a child that does not grow up in a house with real physical books does not read as much or as well as a child who does.
So have physical books in your home when you have children just as you have physical toys in your home when you have children.
As for older people they will do as they like.
I don’t understand this at all. I and everybody kid I knew, well, us boys anyway, were pouring through A.C. Clark and Isaac Asimov and trading dog eared paperbacks the moment we got past See Jane Run, around 2nd grade.
Did you take your Adderall today?
BS article.
They aren’t shocked.
Dumber than Dirt but some of the proudest morons you will ever meet...
Thanks, my mother was a reading instructor, and we were basically born readers.
Our children are now in their 50’s, and they and their cousins were book read to as babies and down the road taught their children how to read from paper books.
Those children, our grandkids and nephews/nieces learned how to read books and how to use computers basically all of their lives.
Me, I haven't bought a physical book in ages. However, I do read long detailed books on-line, mostly World/History issues. That keeps my synapses working at full speed. Plus, talking with you folks here and other web sites sometimes makes my neurons work overtime. I'm 74.
I’m 69 and I still prefer paper books (we have over 7000 of them), but I use a Kindle fairly often for two reasons:
1. I can read in bed at night without having to turn on a lamp.
2. I can carry about a pickup load of books in my pocket.
1. You posted, “I can read in bed at night without having to turn on a lamp.”
I have sleep apnea and often the best hour of sleep in a night comes at 6 am, for me.
My wife reads her Kindle until I wake up at 7 am.
By 1977 it had already fallen into the wrong hands. I was TV editor for a medium-sized newspaper in the early 1960s. I saw the handwriting on the wall then, with the advent of taxpayer-funded so-called ‘educational’ TV that has morphed into the monstrous government propaganda machine called PBS. Pandora’s Box was opened for the kind of mass brainwashing George Orwell foresaw in his prescient novel “1984.” As Walt Kelley foretold through Pogo” “I have seen the enemy and he is us.”
In high school I read several books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Today’s young people have never even heard of the Gulag and have no idea about the Soviet Union and the horrors of communism. I wish that the short book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was required reading in every America high school
I even read "Walter Chrysler: Boy Machinist," and maybe "Glenn L. Martin: Boy Conqueror of the Air." It was incredible how many famous Americans they were able to find. I think the books went out of print and were eventually replaced by woke versions from Simon & Schuster.
I am gross and perverted
I’m obsessed ‘n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I’m the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can’t look away
I make you think I’m delicious
With the stuff that I say
I’m the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I’m the slime oozin’ out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don’t need you
Don’t go for help . . . no one will heed you
—I’m the Slime, Frank Zappa, 1973
I am old guy. If you put a book in front of me that I like, I will literally carry it with me everywhere. I will read it in the parking lot instead of going into a store with my wife.
But when I was in college they made me read crap that was not interesting (to me). It was drudgery. Honestly, it lead to a boom in cliff notes purchases.
How do you manage to get accepted to an “elite” school if you can barely read? Sounds like these places need to tighten up their acceptance standards!
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