Are Students Reading?

Featured

Dec 19

College students today – even students at elite colleges such as the Ivy Leagues – are not equipped to read full books, as Rose Horowitch’s recent Atlantic essay “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” revealed. Horowitch argued that many elite colleges see their students failing in basic comprehension of and attention to literature because of the standards set in today’s high schools and because of our culture’s widespread technologically-induced distraction. Educational standards for high schoolers today rarely ask students to read full texts, and, in turn, college professors have come to expect less of and assign less to their students.

But it is not only the students who have grown less rigorous. Colleges also require less of their students than they used to, at least as relates to reading and comprehension. Many colleges have moved away from requiring a “core” of liberal arts classes, and those that do still uphold general education requirements have allowed a wide range of subjects to fulfill these requirements or have simplified those classes beyond recognition as true liberal arts classes. The average student will likely not only graduate high school without reading any complete work of Homer. He will likely also graduate college – whatever that college’s rank, and unless, perhaps, he is majoring in the humanities – without finishing one of Homer’s epics.

But the humanities themselves have declined significantly in recent years: as Nathan Heller’s 2023 New Yorker article “The End of the English Major” discussed in depth, humanities students have dwindled in many of our nation’s universities. Heller suggested two potential causes for this decline: higher education’s increasing emphasis on pre-professionalism and innovation, as opposed to knowledge, as well as the humanities’ increasing emphasis on critical theories and social criticism.

While the tide of higher education in our nation turns away from the classical liberal arts and toward career preparation, technological training, and critical theory, some schools function against the tide. As I read Horowitch’s and Heller’s essays, I couldn’t help reflecting that the educational maladies they presented were minimal, if not entirely absent, at my alma maters.

From kindergarten to twelfth grade, I attended a classical Christian school. The significance of the classics and the value of the truth and beauty taught in them were central to my K-12 education. Most of our middle school and high school literature curriculum was composed of full texts – rarely did we read excerpts. A classical curriculum and a countercultural environment trained the attention of my classmates and I. We were expected not only to comprehend but also to argue and write eloquently about complex texts and topics, and, because of the personal and intellectual formation that a classical Christian curriculum imparts, we were able to do so.

I then attended a small, Christian liberal arts college where many students come from homeschool or classical school settings. Here, too, are the humanities considered vital: every student is required to take a “humanities core” composed of classes on theology, philosophy, classic literature, western civilization, and western art and music. While many of my peers studied pre-professional and STEM subjects, seats in humanities classes remained full, and many STEM students also took an interest in minoring in or sampling disciplines such as Theology, English, and History. And while my public-school peers certainly struggled to keep up in humanities classes, most of my classmates did not struggle with sonnets or rail against reading full texts to the extent that Horowitch details in her essay. Professors at such colleges, in my experience, do not usually bend their requirements to suit the mental weaknesses and shortened attention spans of modern students but instead uphold rigorous expectations and help their students to meet them.

Our nation needs more institutions like these – high schools at which students are challenged to engage meaningfully with literature and the humanities at large and colleges at which high-school standards set by the Common Core do not sway professors away from challenging their students to read and comprehend the classics. Increasingly, it is the small, conservative, Christian liberal arts schools that accomplish this task of forming students to read and think well, not the Ivies, large liberal state schools, high-ranking research universities, or other “elite” institutions.

The rigor of such countercultural schools – including Hillsdale College, New College Franklin, Grove City College, Patrick Henry College, The University of Dallas, Thomas More College, and others – owes in part to the fact that they still maintain the centrality of truth, goodness, and beauty and hold in honor the role of education in forming the student in such virtues. Such schools can do so because they find their grounding in the transcendent truth, namely the transcendent truth of Christianity. To our broader culture of secularism, truth, goodness, and beauty are meaningless – mere matters of taste and opinion – and education’s only formational quality is its ability to form students as workers for the marketplace and mouthpieces for ideology.

John Henry Newman had a better understanding of educational formation. In his 1852 work The Idea of a University, Newman wrote that liberal arts education is a“process…by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture.”

While discipline of the person through training in truth is not the aim of modern education, many institutions today still follow an older way and, accordingly, produce good fruit. There are, in our educational ecosystem, sub-cultures that do indeed train their students as persons and shape their minds in the pursuit of truth. Those who are appalled at Horowitch’s and Heller’s findings would do well to seek out such sub-cultures and, upon finding them, be encouraged:students are still thinking and reading deeply in our day. But it depends which students you ask.