Anyone who has children knows: with the current educational system, you can obtain a university entrance qualification without ever having read a complete book. That same thesis is now included in the American magazine The Atlantic in a report that has many people arguing and which is titled ‘Elite college students who can’t read’signed by journalist Rose Horowitch. It is not only a question of that country, but something common in the best universities on the planet. The story begins with a Literature and Humanities teacher named Nicholas Dames confronted by a student who is overwhelmed because it is difficult for him to read the book he has prescribed for the students. It cannot handle classic texts, sometimes long and dense, which is normal not to be able to assimilate if in high school you were only required to work with excerpts from current novels, poems and newspaper articles. Dames consulted with his colleagues and they all admitted to having similar problems each time they assigned their students to read.
It’s not that students are dumber or lazier than previous generations, but simply that no one has ever asked them to read complete books. The author of the report consulted 33 professors from elite universities and they all agreed in recognizing the problem. “Of course, there are still students who are great readers but now they are the exception, not the rule“explains Anthony Grafton, professor of History at Columbia. The factors that lead to the collapse of attention are many. Of course, the constant temptation of smartphones. Also the impact of the pandemic, which made everything work online, where texts are shorter than in print. In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third- through eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach full texts.
Private centers are still more demanding than public ones, but in some ways reading has become an extravagance. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at the University of California at Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages a week, but now she assigns less than half. “I don’t do all the Iliad. I assign books Iliad. I hope some of them read the whole work,” Kahn said. “It’s not like I can tell them, ‘Well, in the next three weeks I hope you read the Iliad ‘, because they are not going to do it,” he resigns.
Cultural habits
The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall group of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. “A couple of teachers told me that their students see reading books as something similar to listening to vinyl records, a small subculture that can still be enjoyed, but that it is mostly a relic of an earlier era,” the journalist admits. According to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, So-called deep reading (sustained immersion in a text) stimulates a series of valuable mental habitssuch as critical thinking and self-reflection, in a way that superficial reading or short bursts do not achieve.
Those most skeptical of the thesis point out that it is not a question of concentration, but of interest
The discussion has reached the Spanish networks, where it is not difficult to find teachers who recognize the problem. Some point out that students who read two or three books per subject now sweat to complete the first one. Other teachers blame teachers for agreeing to lower expectations to avoid conflicts with students. Almost everyone curses a contemporary culture dominated by TikTok and movies watched at double speedothers have the honesty to admit that they also read much less, despite having been educated in the old paradigm.
Those most skeptical of the thesis point out that it is not a question of concentration, but of interest: students are capable of reading hundreds of pages of the so-called fan fiction (narratives based on popular characters from cinema or bestsellers) but they have a hard time reading Don Quixoteperhaps because it is a text that is too dry when there is a lack of minimal notions about daily life in the 16th century.. Whatever position we have, it seems clear that all this is only the beginning of a long debate that will be central to education in the coming years.
