My daughter went to Dartmouth and I can confirm that her friends did not read much, they watch films and videos to relax. I remember reading one of her papers and chastising her for some poor writing and she told me, Mom, the other students write much worse. Then she shared with me a paper by another student and indeed it was not even worthy of a mediocre 10th grade student.
I think some of the blame needs to go to the absurd school system and its overstuffed but fatuous curriculum. Kids heads are stuffed with curriculum which they will need to pass AP tests. But engaging with reading actual books, and taking the time to think about an discuss ideas, is not done in any deep way.
The QUANTITY of what high schoolers on an elite track are expected to cover, destroys any QUALITY. Kids aiming for elite colleges will have 4 hours of homework a night, as well as extra curriculars and a full day of classes. This leaves no time to actually read for pleasure, whether assigned reading or not. It leads to a superficial type of intellect.
I'm a teacher. Far removed from the likes of preparing kids for Ivies (I currently teach at a Title I middle school, but I have in the past taught high school where 99% went to four-year colleges, including a good fraction to Ivies), I have come to question the efficacy of homework at all. Anything assigned for the evening is suspect. This was true even before the advent of AI, but now it is wasted effort assigning it and grading it. I now assign homework to my math students, with the understanding that it is for practice and will have no more impact on their grade than baseball practice on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will have on the score of Saturday's game. My students' entire grade is based purely on their performance on tests, and those tests are on paper.
Pre-modernity, books were the way for the masses to connect and share knowledge. Now, it’s done directly, swiftly, and at scale.
Technology has rendered obsolete the need to read a single person’s point of view. Just as map reading and cartography are niche thanks to Google Maps (and candle making obsolete thanks to Edison).
What does this replacement of the single author’s thoughts with the din of noise in the digital realm mean for thoughts, brains, and priorities of those consuming them?
"What does this replacement of the single author’s thoughts with the din of noise in the digital realm mean for thoughts, brains, and priorities of those consuming them?"
It means that from here on out, It's Bologna, All the Way Down.
Shakespeares languages is far enough from our own that I think that he is a real challenge to read but sorry, that girl lacks taste. She doesn’t know good lit if it gave her a swift kick in the butt 😆
The problem is not the language as Shakespeare wrote in early modern English, not that different from what we speak today. The problem at least for the plays, which a student at a prestigious university should have been exposed to in high school, is that the reader must make an effort to imagine what would be happening on stage.
They should take an excuse for a field trip to watch it then!
My wife and I went to a delightful Midsummer Night's Dream performance last year where the director had rewritten it so that Titania caught the plot and had Puck turn it on Oberon! My wife had neither seen the play nor read it, so she couldn't understand why I was laughing so hard at the trick.
True. When I read Merchant of Venice I wondered how the characters could change sex so easily. It was pretty easy because women were not allowed to act on the public stage in Shakespearean England
I'm not sure where you get the idea that past generations did not actually read. Back in the early '70's we idolized authors like Vonnegut, Pynchon, Barth, Heller, Salinger, Bradbury, Rand, Robbins, Roth, and Asimov. And those were just the contemporary writers; no book was more widely read than Siddhartha. I'm not sure what generations since then have been up to, but if they haven't been reading they have a world of pleasure ahead of them if they make the effort. I'd give my right arm to encounter these folks again for the first time.
Thanks young man for some honest observation. I'm a boomer, and I can confirm your observation that we have fallen, but not from a very great height.
I wonder if a deeper analysis would reveal any distinction in reading fiction and non-fiction. I'm not even sure how significant knowing that would be, but it might prove interesting if there is a difference in their respective trends over the past two or three generations.
The reason that this occurs to me is because, about 50 years ago I pretty much quit reading fiction. I'd like to say that this meant that I increased my uptake in non-fiction, but to the extent that I read more non-fiction, it was not books, but magazines like The Economist and later, online content like Persuasion and TFP. Now, in a wan attempt to stave off senescence, I have again turned to reading novels, primarily works of canon that all "educated" people claim to have read, but more likely have read a synopsis of. All of this is made possible by my purchase of a Kindle for the express purpose of "catching up" on a lifetime's reading. It turns out to have been a good investment, and I'm happy to report that many of the classics are actually quite enjoyable reads.
Whoever selected the picture for this article apparently didn’t do much library research. The picture is of Webster Hall formerly a relatively unused auditorium space but presently housing the Rauner Special Collections. Yes, it is part of the Dartmouth libraries but the main library, Baker-Berry, which should have been pictured is a beautiful structure modeled in it’s original part on Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
I'm going to do two things here that I never do....... sorta. Comment on something I haven't read (but I will) and boldly play the age card. I've done the latter, but subtly, and it's tough to resist being more vocal so I'm doing that now, probably embarrassing myself in the process.
But..... I started college in 1959 and in the early 60s, a bit out of the loop living in Arizona and going to ASU, I heard and saw most of the phenomena aka things I read complaints about. I won't even name them except the topic here: reading. Students were routinely excoriated and savaged for either not reading or, worse, reading paperbacks. I worked in bookstores and no end of customers would insist on the hardback based on an assumption that the paperback was abridged, thus confirming the fecklessness of kids reading "softcover" books. The spoken language was assailed for being full of "slang" and writing was by definition atrocious. I could go on and may once I've actually read this piece. Please argue with me if you will but only if you are at least 80 and grew up in the U.S. I have two friends whose lives track mine to a degree and I can check with them on their opinions.
I think the young man who wrote this anticipated your excellent observation, as he notes (speaking about how much reading we do) that over the years, there has been "a fall yes, but a fall from a low height."
This goes to my pet peeve, a pet that needs to be neutered and spayed, about people ignoring context. In fact, I'm in the process (about 5 years long now) of writing up a guide to not leaving out context. What was the socio-economic context of me? Working-class, expecting to get a job in a gas station when I graduated high school. My wife? Get to college to avoid the trap of so many Black women then of early marriage and jobs limited to house cleaning for 'White folk.' My ambition came from finding myself in a high school bordering a wealthy area so many of my friends were going to college, WHICH COST $56 DOLLARS A SEMESTER THEN. We both paid for tuition and books via minimum wage jobs. And there's more..............
Ironic to talk so much about how no one gives specifics and leave off a section to recommend us some goodies!
I'll start by saying I find books on communication a guilty pleasure, like _Getting To Yes_ or _Never Split the Difference_, but my all-time nonfiction pick is probably Mark Kurlansky's _Salt_. It sounds a little silly to do a history of Western Civilization by tracing salt, but it's fascinating and the book is really evocative in its descriptions of how salt was used to make foods and the circumstances by which it was attained.
On fiction, I just picked up _Midnight's Children_ at a previous Persuasion piece's recommendedation, and will dig into it once I'm no longer spending my fiction time budget on the hilariously long webfic murder mystery _The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere_. TFtbN is probably unrecommendedable unless you like very long fiction, but I'm finding it really makes good use of each word. It's set in a fantasy-like world with a really interesting background in a culture in which people regularly live to 500, and it grapples with the social issues and outlooks that might arise. Before the bodies start cropping up, that is.
I'll join in hoping, but I'm curious why you bother to hope for any specific success. Everything I hear says that everyone's so bad at this that I'm happy to see improvements from anywhere at all.
I have been a philosophy professor for over 40 years. I too found postmodernism exciting and interesting but never thought of it a framework for education. I have seen first hand the move from loving literature for its beauty and timeless insight to social activism and, well, hating that very same literature. I saw Sociology depts become departments for Social Change and History become Howard Zinn's story of Western badness. Dartmouth in particular was the one place a college student could once study real Classics, study the Koine with pride, without the now obligatory snarky presumption that old is white and white is colonialism and the West is white and rotten. Beauty for the new non-reading non-writing Dartmouth student is worthless biased nostalgic sentimentalism. (Tell that to Xenophanes or Ovid or Apuleius or even Sappho!) Classical conservatives, on the other hand, love the things they hope to conserve-- the Beautiful for one; but the new ill-educated angry contemporary Dartmouth liberal now only hates things. Think of what has become of poetry in no more than 40 years. Contemporary poetry is all pretty much the same wretched politically hackneyed pablum. So of course students neither read nor write -- literature is a scam for them and that is a shame αἰδώς!
I haven't seen any new conservative art that I think is really good (this is meant as an indictment of recency, not conservativism). Because of how bad political universities suck, I'm kind of afraid that UATX, which seems fairly political, is going to make awful art and flop. Do you think there's a good chance they teach beauty better and we "win" and get some actual art appreciation? I'd be really excited if so
We visited the school and I somewhat tormented the faculty and students with questions precisely around this concern. It is not an art school, but they are very concerned with understanding universal truths hidden in ancient texts; one classics professor in particular struck me as quite wonderful. Their very focus is exactly to rectify what this article criticizes: Students at UATX are required to do a tremendous amount of deep thoughtful difficult reading of paper books and then learn to speak and argue reasonably and coherently. Their intent is to conserve and discover what is beautiful and what is virtuous; the Greek concept of Arete genuinely guides the UATX curriculum. The danger they face is ideological capture by their donors. We will see if the faculty and the administration and the advisors can stay their course and not lose their way because of the funding they so dearly need from their very wealthy donors. It is a worthy experiment, and I am very optimistic. But it is an adventure, a real adventure for bright young people entering an academic world where real intellectual adventure is very rare. But then, "All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
The modest idea--even Emerson's--was that college was the place where you were taught and expected to read a lot, not where you were supposed to be converted to the religion of books. Sure, Americans have always been modest readers at best. Young Ezra or F. Scott would absorb the culture of the ages. Less curious minds would get enough, it was hoped, to go on to have a reasonably sophisticated and moral adult life, turning when necessary to the wisdom of the classics while fighting the good fight on Wall Street or in the trenches. That is, reading a lot in college was not expected to make you a voracious reader, a life long bookworm. But it would help you see outside your own little bubble and your own tiny historical moment. And, of course, the more long books you read, the easier it becomes, so you were gaining a skill. We are now obsessive navel gazers, caught in the present. Shakespeare is not Taylor Swift. This is not because he's better or worse, but because he's different--old, challenging--and will make you see something you can't see or hear in Taylor. When students fail to grasp this gift, they, and we, are all poorer.
My daughter went to Dartmouth and I can confirm that her friends did not read much, they watch films and videos to relax. I remember reading one of her papers and chastising her for some poor writing and she told me, Mom, the other students write much worse. Then she shared with me a paper by another student and indeed it was not even worthy of a mediocre 10th grade student.
I think some of the blame needs to go to the absurd school system and its overstuffed but fatuous curriculum. Kids heads are stuffed with curriculum which they will need to pass AP tests. But engaging with reading actual books, and taking the time to think about an discuss ideas, is not done in any deep way.
The QUANTITY of what high schoolers on an elite track are expected to cover, destroys any QUALITY. Kids aiming for elite colleges will have 4 hours of homework a night, as well as extra curriculars and a full day of classes. This leaves no time to actually read for pleasure, whether assigned reading or not. It leads to a superficial type of intellect.
I'm a teacher. Far removed from the likes of preparing kids for Ivies (I currently teach at a Title I middle school, but I have in the past taught high school where 99% went to four-year colleges, including a good fraction to Ivies), I have come to question the efficacy of homework at all. Anything assigned for the evening is suspect. This was true even before the advent of AI, but now it is wasted effort assigning it and grading it. I now assign homework to my math students, with the understanding that it is for practice and will have no more impact on their grade than baseball practice on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday will have on the score of Saturday's game. My students' entire grade is based purely on their performance on tests, and those tests are on paper.
This is a major problem with high school education, especially for people trying to go to a top schools like the Ivies!
Hmmm. Interesting piece. Thanks for the insight.
Another way to think of this:
Pre-modernity, books were the way for the masses to connect and share knowledge. Now, it’s done directly, swiftly, and at scale.
Technology has rendered obsolete the need to read a single person’s point of view. Just as map reading and cartography are niche thanks to Google Maps (and candle making obsolete thanks to Edison).
What does this replacement of the single author’s thoughts with the din of noise in the digital realm mean for thoughts, brains, and priorities of those consuming them?
"What does this replacement of the single author’s thoughts with the din of noise in the digital realm mean for thoughts, brains, and priorities of those consuming them?"
It means that from here on out, It's Bologna, All the Way Down.
Shakespeares languages is far enough from our own that I think that he is a real challenge to read but sorry, that girl lacks taste. She doesn’t know good lit if it gave her a swift kick in the butt 😆
The problem is not the language as Shakespeare wrote in early modern English, not that different from what we speak today. The problem at least for the plays, which a student at a prestigious university should have been exposed to in high school, is that the reader must make an effort to imagine what would be happening on stage.
They should take an excuse for a field trip to watch it then!
My wife and I went to a delightful Midsummer Night's Dream performance last year where the director had rewritten it so that Titania caught the plot and had Puck turn it on Oberon! My wife had neither seen the play nor read it, so she couldn't understand why I was laughing so hard at the trick.
True. When I read Merchant of Venice I wondered how the characters could change sex so easily. It was pretty easy because women were not allowed to act on the public stage in Shakespearean England
I'm not sure where you get the idea that past generations did not actually read. Back in the early '70's we idolized authors like Vonnegut, Pynchon, Barth, Heller, Salinger, Bradbury, Rand, Robbins, Roth, and Asimov. And those were just the contemporary writers; no book was more widely read than Siddhartha. I'm not sure what generations since then have been up to, but if they haven't been reading they have a world of pleasure ahead of them if they make the effort. I'd give my right arm to encounter these folks again for the first time.
Dumb question. Why aren't we flunking the students who blow off the readings?
Thanks young man for some honest observation. I'm a boomer, and I can confirm your observation that we have fallen, but not from a very great height.
I wonder if a deeper analysis would reveal any distinction in reading fiction and non-fiction. I'm not even sure how significant knowing that would be, but it might prove interesting if there is a difference in their respective trends over the past two or three generations.
The reason that this occurs to me is because, about 50 years ago I pretty much quit reading fiction. I'd like to say that this meant that I increased my uptake in non-fiction, but to the extent that I read more non-fiction, it was not books, but magazines like The Economist and later, online content like Persuasion and TFP. Now, in a wan attempt to stave off senescence, I have again turned to reading novels, primarily works of canon that all "educated" people claim to have read, but more likely have read a synopsis of. All of this is made possible by my purchase of a Kindle for the express purpose of "catching up" on a lifetime's reading. It turns out to have been a good investment, and I'm happy to report that many of the classics are actually quite enjoyable reads.
Whoever selected the picture for this article apparently didn’t do much library research. The picture is of Webster Hall formerly a relatively unused auditorium space but presently housing the Rauner Special Collections. Yes, it is part of the Dartmouth libraries but the main library, Baker-Berry, which should have been pictured is a beautiful structure modeled in it’s original part on Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
I'm going to do two things here that I never do....... sorta. Comment on something I haven't read (but I will) and boldly play the age card. I've done the latter, but subtly, and it's tough to resist being more vocal so I'm doing that now, probably embarrassing myself in the process.
But..... I started college in 1959 and in the early 60s, a bit out of the loop living in Arizona and going to ASU, I heard and saw most of the phenomena aka things I read complaints about. I won't even name them except the topic here: reading. Students were routinely excoriated and savaged for either not reading or, worse, reading paperbacks. I worked in bookstores and no end of customers would insist on the hardback based on an assumption that the paperback was abridged, thus confirming the fecklessness of kids reading "softcover" books. The spoken language was assailed for being full of "slang" and writing was by definition atrocious. I could go on and may once I've actually read this piece. Please argue with me if you will but only if you are at least 80 and grew up in the U.S. I have two friends whose lives track mine to a degree and I can check with them on their opinions.
I think the young man who wrote this anticipated your excellent observation, as he notes (speaking about how much reading we do) that over the years, there has been "a fall yes, but a fall from a low height."
This goes to my pet peeve, a pet that needs to be neutered and spayed, about people ignoring context. In fact, I'm in the process (about 5 years long now) of writing up a guide to not leaving out context. What was the socio-economic context of me? Working-class, expecting to get a job in a gas station when I graduated high school. My wife? Get to college to avoid the trap of so many Black women then of early marriage and jobs limited to house cleaning for 'White folk.' My ambition came from finding myself in a high school bordering a wealthy area so many of my friends were going to college, WHICH COST $56 DOLLARS A SEMESTER THEN. We both paid for tuition and books via minimum wage jobs. And there's more..............
Ironic to talk so much about how no one gives specifics and leave off a section to recommend us some goodies!
I'll start by saying I find books on communication a guilty pleasure, like _Getting To Yes_ or _Never Split the Difference_, but my all-time nonfiction pick is probably Mark Kurlansky's _Salt_. It sounds a little silly to do a history of Western Civilization by tracing salt, but it's fascinating and the book is really evocative in its descriptions of how salt was used to make foods and the circumstances by which it was attained.
On fiction, I just picked up _Midnight's Children_ at a previous Persuasion piece's recommendedation, and will dig into it once I'm no longer spending my fiction time budget on the hilariously long webfic murder mystery _The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere_. TFtbN is probably unrecommendedable unless you like very long fiction, but I'm finding it really makes good use of each word. It's set in a fantasy-like world with a really interesting background in a culture in which people regularly live to 500, and it grapples with the social issues and outlooks that might arise. Before the bodies start cropping up, that is.
(Please, commentors, name some books!)
Herzog is a great one—as referenced in the piece. Humboldt’s Gift also by Bellow is worth many reads
I love single subject histories like Salt. A genre that deserves more respect.
Off the topic, I will join you in asking Persuasion to acquire a commenting system that responds to cues for italics and boldface fonts.
Well we are hoping UATX lives up to its promise to improve on this.
I'll join in hoping, but I'm curious why you bother to hope for any specific success. Everything I hear says that everyone's so bad at this that I'm happy to see improvements from anywhere at all.
I have been a philosophy professor for over 40 years. I too found postmodernism exciting and interesting but never thought of it a framework for education. I have seen first hand the move from loving literature for its beauty and timeless insight to social activism and, well, hating that very same literature. I saw Sociology depts become departments for Social Change and History become Howard Zinn's story of Western badness. Dartmouth in particular was the one place a college student could once study real Classics, study the Koine with pride, without the now obligatory snarky presumption that old is white and white is colonialism and the West is white and rotten. Beauty for the new non-reading non-writing Dartmouth student is worthless biased nostalgic sentimentalism. (Tell that to Xenophanes or Ovid or Apuleius or even Sappho!) Classical conservatives, on the other hand, love the things they hope to conserve-- the Beautiful for one; but the new ill-educated angry contemporary Dartmouth liberal now only hates things. Think of what has become of poetry in no more than 40 years. Contemporary poetry is all pretty much the same wretched politically hackneyed pablum. So of course students neither read nor write -- literature is a scam for them and that is a shame αἰδώς!
I haven't seen any new conservative art that I think is really good (this is meant as an indictment of recency, not conservativism). Because of how bad political universities suck, I'm kind of afraid that UATX, which seems fairly political, is going to make awful art and flop. Do you think there's a good chance they teach beauty better and we "win" and get some actual art appreciation? I'd be really excited if so
We visited the school and I somewhat tormented the faculty and students with questions precisely around this concern. It is not an art school, but they are very concerned with understanding universal truths hidden in ancient texts; one classics professor in particular struck me as quite wonderful. Their very focus is exactly to rectify what this article criticizes: Students at UATX are required to do a tremendous amount of deep thoughtful difficult reading of paper books and then learn to speak and argue reasonably and coherently. Their intent is to conserve and discover what is beautiful and what is virtuous; the Greek concept of Arete genuinely guides the UATX curriculum. The danger they face is ideological capture by their donors. We will see if the faculty and the administration and the advisors can stay their course and not lose their way because of the funding they so dearly need from their very wealthy donors. It is a worthy experiment, and I am very optimistic. But it is an adventure, a real adventure for bright young people entering an academic world where real intellectual adventure is very rare. But then, "All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
Good luck with that reactionary fantasy.
Pretty snarky
Elan's history is a bit fuzzy.
The modest idea--even Emerson's--was that college was the place where you were taught and expected to read a lot, not where you were supposed to be converted to the religion of books. Sure, Americans have always been modest readers at best. Young Ezra or F. Scott would absorb the culture of the ages. Less curious minds would get enough, it was hoped, to go on to have a reasonably sophisticated and moral adult life, turning when necessary to the wisdom of the classics while fighting the good fight on Wall Street or in the trenches. That is, reading a lot in college was not expected to make you a voracious reader, a life long bookworm. But it would help you see outside your own little bubble and your own tiny historical moment. And, of course, the more long books you read, the easier it becomes, so you were gaining a skill. We are now obsessive navel gazers, caught in the present. Shakespeare is not Taylor Swift. This is not because he's better or worse, but because he's different--old, challenging--and will make you see something you can't see or hear in Taylor. When students fail to grasp this gift, they, and we, are all poorer.
Great post! So good to deflate generational handwringing in this way.