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The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's 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'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.

the future is r-slurred :marseygigaretard: :marseybrainlet: :marseyfoidretard: :marseyspecial: :marseyretard2: :marseydramautist: :marseyshitforbrains: :marseyretard3: :marseystroke: :marseyawardretard:

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I wonder what the books are. If it's some ye-olde shite from hundreds of years ago, yeah, I don't really expect people to be able to parse those out.

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Personal opinion, works till after the 1950s are all alright. Stuff beyond the 1950s gets tiring due to its ancient writing style where it is overly verbose or just plain boring in the way it is written compared to the decades of advancements we have made at improving the quality of writing.

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Weren't most things in the old days written verbosely 'cuz writers were paid by the word? It makes sense haha

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Writers are still paid by the word, the expectation for the quality of words just went up over time.

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Anything old enough that you'd have trouble parsing it like say. Canterbury Tales or Shakespear is going to have modern translations, despite being in English.

They're talking about things like Pride and Prejudice and translations of Crime and Punishment. Which might sound a bit archaic but hardly something you'd have issues with parsing if you're not a completely brainrotted zoomer.

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