The not-reading part is seriously starting to sound like lamenting the death of the epos. Yeah, there is a real loss of an art form there but also most books are padded to death and should have been articles at most, maybe even tweets.
The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.
One of the reasons why we read less long-form, according to a bunch of cognitive science studies and to my own anecdotal experience, is because our attention is shot.
A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it.
The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like The Data Warehouse Toolkit can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online.
Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history.
>Many of [students] do very well—but a striking share perform abysmally (see chart 1). Across rich countries some 8% of students in tertiary education notch up a score in literacy no better than one might expect from a ten-year-old child. The share is about the same for numeracy. Worse, the share at or below this bar has risen since the tests were last run, a little over a decade ago. The share of very poor performers in literacy has more than doubled.
Is this your idea of an intelligent contribution to the conversation?
There is plenty of evidence in the article from real professors at real universities (ex: Princeton), saying that they’ve had to dramatically cut reading workloads from humanities courses. I’ve heard similar things from European universities.
Other hard evidence is in plummeting reading comprehension scores in many countries that participate in PISA.
In the States, there is plenty of other stats that point that students are below their expected reading grade - the worse in generations.
And all you have to contribute is that this is “idiotic”? The irony. Inform yourself.
Above all, NONE of that excuses the claim that "that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore". That one is simply, factually not true. There is such a thing as not being able to read. Students at
elite universities, who btw are not kids, dont fit there.
Second, yes, and mostly because I did actually read those stats and
details of how they are made. All the nuance from the actual
scientific article gets exaggerated into completely different claims
just to create outrage and perpetuate it again and again. Usually by
people who do not know what PISA or reading grades measure.
Reading comprehension as measured by PISA have zero to do with long
form reading of books including classics. It is not trained by reading
those nor measure reading those. The short for articles full of
graphs, scientific claims and such the Atlantic complains about is how
you train people for PISA. I am not criticizing PISA here btw. It is
ok to measure that.
> In the States, there is plenty of other stats that point that students are below their expected reading grade - the worse in generations.
Interestingly, those who made this claim usually do not know how
reading grades are measured or even how high they go. "The worse in
generations" claim is especially dubious and tend to based on
comparison between "guess performance of imaginary past elite student
in undefined historical period" with low performing student today. Low
performing students 3-4 generations ago disappear, because we imagine
them to not exist.
There is outrage every time a school replaces one book by another. Or
when a course that has no reason to assign full Odyssey assigns range
of materials with one chapter from it. There is outrage when student
names a contemporary book as the favorite one instead of a classic.
There is more to literacy than being able to literally say the words that are represented by the letters on the page.
Your argument here, funnily enough, is an example of the exact kind of literacy decline as stated in the OP article.
> Allusions are gone; metaphor is treated literally, often provoking dim-witted outrage.
No, professors are not claiming that college students are literally incapable of sounding out words.
They are saying that students are not able to keep attention on large bodies of text, to follow arguments, understand authorial intent, describe themes, identify rhetorical techniques, or intuit metaphors (such as this very use of reading as synecdoche/metaphor for this whole class of literacy skills which is so obvious that it feels absurd to even have to explain it)
An 8-year-old may be able to read as proven by their ability to answer basic plot questions about a Magic Treehouse book, that doesn't mean they are able to read for the purposes of a university course of any type.
And no, we do not need to guess at literacy performance of people of the past, we have the curricula, we have the books, we have the essays and exams. There is no "guessing at the performance of imaginary elites from the past", we can use the same texts and the same tests. That's one of the neat things about reading, you don't have to guess what happened in the past, you can just read it.
> The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us
All would be well with the World if this was actually true…
The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.