I am part of the problem. Well, I’m part of many problems, but not asking my students to read books is one of them.
OK, not exactly. Even when I retired from teaching high school English in 2020, I did require a number of books read throughout the year, but far fewer than when I started in 1980, including dropping the more difficult texts from the curriculum like a slow leak.
When I arrived, junior year’s American literature curriculum focused on “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Scarlet Letter,” just to name a couple of the maybe 12 to 15 texts.
Admittedly, I eventually caved to the constant whining that Steinbeck was “boring” and Hawthorne was not only boring but “too hard.” Oh, and the one Shakespeare play the whole school read in English classes (when a traveling troupe of actors performed a shortened version at school) was written, students complained, in “Old English” (it’s not; it’s written in modern English).
I’m not saying ALL students read ALL the books cover to cover back in the good ol’ days. I’m sure many at night consulted the twins Cliff and Monarch (last name, Notes). But students were pushed and tested, then wrote papers on some of the great books in Western literature.
Today, not so much.
In an Atlantic article, Rose Horowitch reveals, “Many students no longer arrive at college – even at highly selective, elite colleges – prepared to read books.” One freshman student confessed to her professor 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.”
That professor, Columbia University’s Nicholas Dames, was dumbfounded.
“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how,” Dames said. “Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.’”
Dames said, “Twenty years ago, [his] classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ one week and ‘Crime and Punishment’ the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. They struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.”
Not that Shakespeare or John Donne is easy reading, but the chair of Georgetown’s English department, Daniel Shore, said “his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.”
For those of you who slept through the week dedicated to poetry in high school, a sonnet is a spare 14 lines – not long enough to reach the right-hand margin of the page.
Professor Jonathan Malesic writes in the New York Times that in 2011, “I assigned [my students] nine books [and] the students did great. Most of them aced their reading quizzes on … ‘Walden’ and … ’The Republic.’ After 13 years that included a pandemic and the advent of generative A.I., that reading list seems not just ambitious but absurd.” (nytimes.com 10/25/2024).
Here’s at once the depressing part and perhaps the answer to students not wanting – or being able to – read.
Malesic continues, “The jobs they most ardently desire are in what they proudly call the ‘sellout’ fields of finance, consulting and tech. ... Success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read?”
But, hey, apparently Gen Z DOES read – snippets scrolled on the internet and texts. Will that bring them the nuanced moral insights of “The Sound and the Fury” or the profound rhetorical intellectual perceptions of a James Baldwin?
Only TikTok knows for sure.
• Rick Holinger taught English and creative writing on the college and secondary school levels. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his writing appears in Hobart, Chautauqua, Boulevard, Witness and elsewhere. His book of poetry, “North of Crivitz,” and collection of essays, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available at local bookstores, Amazon, or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.