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 ...
ever since ‘the ppalm pilot’, there has been an el electronic conversion from the printed tome.
now, with all those video channels and websites, who needs to read paper?
*** she had never been required to read a full book at her public high school.***
Brings back memories as I had a hard time learning to read. Read my first complete book in the 6th grade(1957), yet by the 8th grade I was prolific readier. Got an adult library card in the 9th grade and have read hundreds of books since those days.
Reading kept me from going insane in my teen years.
They were taught symbol recognition which was a program designed to teach the retarded how to go about the city.
They rarely have a vocabulary of over 5000 words and most are stuck at around 3000 which is just enough to communicate on a basic level.
“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles
are enough.”
— Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Buck v. Bell
, 274 U.S. 200 (1927
Ask them? No, it should be required of those that are not nitwits.
That is just it. They aren't.
They are great at calling names but ask them to produce an actual argument and they can't.
“There’s a reason education sucks, it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you got.
Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting ....... by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly .....ier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”
- George Carlin
Maybe so, but I doubt those kids would get into ‘prestigious’ schools.
I would guess it’s low attention spans.
Concerted effort to turn America into a turd world illiterate country.
There was that time in high school english where one of the grade metrics was book reports, scored on the number of pages in the book. I was about 20 pages short from an extra-credit score, so I ran to the library during class time and checked out a version of “oliver livington seagull” that was pretty much a 50 page picture book. Couldn’t have been more than 100 words in the whole thing. “Read” the book, gave my oral book report, showed the number of pages, and got my extra credit.
In hindsight, what in the world was that book doing in a high school library?
Many of the adults as well as the children have a hard time reading their birthday cards. These are not "inner city" children. These are solid middle class people who went to well rated schools. They have white collar jobs. They went to college.
One of the best readers in the group is the guy who never went to college and runs his own business as a handyman. I once complemented him on his reading and he said, "I have to read and understand the manuals so I can install things properly."
I understand why Carlin was so bitter. He pretty much nailed it.
I think you meant Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Sadly, you know exactly why.
Don’t be surprised. 70% of urban high school graduates are functionally illiterate. They can’t read with any real comprehension nor can they complete simple calculations.Many are admitted and financed at major universities for a variety of reasons. They are passed through for political reasons.DEI supercedes merit at these institutions.
Behold! The power of the Internet.
Substitute the Politburo for “Wall Street” and it fits much better.
I would agree. When I was much younger, I read lots of books.
Now, however, I don't have the attention span to get into book reading. Too much reading short articles on the internet
Oregon Eliminates Educational Standards
Annually Oregonians need to be reminded students are no longer required to demonstrate skills in reading, writing, and math. Until 2026, an Oregon high school diploma no longer guarantees academic achievement, but only participation in a system with undefined parameters. The legislators, school districts, and the governor supporting Senate Bill 744 saw that this “will benefit Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color”
. The state adopted the position held by many 19th century abolitionists. When I read Fredrick Douglass’ autobiographies, one passage always stays with me. After speaking to an abolitionist audience, Douglass considered the evening a great success, because he concluded his talk believing these people were convinced, he was equally human with them.
He mentioned this as a significant event, because many supporters of black freedom questioned whether these people were fully human. If educators would treat minorities as individuals, programs would allow opportunities for achievement commensurate with those they see for white students.
I remember Dr. Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…..little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
To me these men’s understanding of brotherhood and individual value proves more meaningful than perceptions of racial or ethnic inferiority.
Oregon just dropped all graduation standards, failing all of its students in the name of ‘equity’
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4288044-oregon-just-dropped-all-graduation-standards-failing-all-of-its-students-in-the-name-of-equity/
And these are the students who can actually read
A lot of public school grads these days are barely literate
Guess we need to spend more on teacher salaries
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