Nicholas Dames has taught Columbia University’s required great-books course, Literature Humanities, since 1998, and 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’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s 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 — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.
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.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
Alan Bloom was right again.
The minds of this new breed are incapable of sustained thought, not by nature, but by habit.
lol
Probably something here about video overtaking the written word.
I also noticed that persons that are excessively social stop thinking by themselves. They look like they are part of an organism and not an individual anymore.
The tyranny of the IQ curve strikes again: too many of our youth are going to college.
It gets worse. Many universities are now creating programs, especially those online, in which they mandate professors are not allowed to use books in their classes. They must only use “open source” documents — and trust me, they do not use journal articles. Students find them far too difficult to read. We are also starting to see newly minted PhDs who grew up never reading, becoming college professors. Naturally, they do not assign books. Academia is morally broke.
Dan Kurt: “The tyranny of the IQ curve strikes again: too many of our youth are going to college.”
Bookreading is in steep decline among all classes, cultures, and brain stratifications. We live in a society.