Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University\u2019s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they\u2019re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames\u2019s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college\u2014even at highly selective, elite colleges\u2014prepared to read books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy jaw dropped,\u201d Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It\u2019s not that they don\u2019t want to do the reading. It\u2019s that they don\u2019t know how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read it all<\/a> (registration or subscription).<\/p><\/p> Appalling.
The Elite College Students Who Can\u2019t Read Books – The Atlantic https:\/\/t.co\/xK0Aru2Enm<\/a><\/p>— Carlton Larson (@carltonfwlarson) October 1, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>