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An alarming phenomenon has sprung up over the past few years: Many students are arriving at college unprepared to read entire books. That’s a broad statement to make, but I spoke with 33 professors at some of the country’s top universities, and over and over, they told me the same story. As I noted in my recent article on the topic, a Columbia professor said his students are overwhelmed at the thought of reading multiple books a semester; a professor at the University of Virginia told me that his students shut down when they’re confronted with ideas they don’t understand. Criticizing young people’s literacy is a pastime that stretches back centuries, but in the past decade, something seems to have noticeably shifted. Most of the professors I spoke with said they’ve seen a generational change in how their students engage with literature.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
Why is this happening? The allure of smartphones and social media came up, and it appears that many middle and high schools are teaching fewer full books. (One student arrived at Columbia having read only poems, excerpts, and news articles in school.) But one possible cause that I nodded to in my article is a change in values, not ability. The problem does not appear to be that “kids these days” are incurious or uninterested in reading. Instead, young people might be responding to a cultural message: Books just aren’t that important.
The professors I spoke with didn’t think their students were lazy. If anything, they were shocked at how overscheduled and anxious college kids are today—and they saw that their students’ schedules are crowded with activities that are less about personal development and more relevant to future employment. “There are too many demands on their time and focus to immerse themselves easily or fully in works of literature that might take 20 hours to consume,” James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, told me in an email. In 1971, 37 percent of students said that a central objective of their college years was to become well-off financially. Seventy-three percent said it was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2015, those numbers had almost reversed. Eighty-two percent of students said that it was essential for them to use college to become well-off financially, while 47 percent said they wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Pundits and parents alike have emphasized preprofessional courses and downplayed the importance of humanistic study, Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, told me. In this environment, spending hours reading a novel may seem unproductive.
In some ways, this is a hopeful conclusion: If we’ve shifted what we hold in esteem, then it stands to reason that we could, as a society, shift back. The responsibility doesn’t lie only with Gen Z. Everyone who’s upset about the change has a role to play in reversing it.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
By Rose Horowitch
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
What to Read
Good Talk, by Mira Jacob
Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”
From our list: What to read if you’re angry about the election
Out Next Week
📚 The Shutouts, by Gabrielle Korn
📚 When We Sold God’s Eye, by Alex Cuadros
Your Weekend Read
Thanksgiving Should Be in October
By Ellen Cushing
There’s a better way to do things, and in fact another country already does it. That country is Canada, and it celebrates Thanksgiving in October. We should too.
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