Georgetown students 'have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet'

"Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books," writes Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. Students tell professors they were assigned excerpts, news articles and poetry in high school, but rarely or never full-length novels.

Nicholas Dames teaches Columbia's famed great books class. Twenty years ago, students "had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next," she writes. Now his students say "the reading load feels impossible" and "they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."

Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, says students give up easily when faced with an idea they don't understand. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told Horowitch that "his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet."

Professors are assigning less reading, they told her. Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, has dropped Moby-Dick in favor of Melville stories and novellas, such as Billy Budd, Benito Cereno and Bartleby, the Scrivener.

High achievers know how to read, writes Horowitch. "But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text." Like Melville's Bartleby, they "prefer not to."

Students are reading fewer "long and boring" books in middle and high school, I noted in a recent post. Common Core stressed using short informational texts, writes Horowitch. "Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea — mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests."

They've also been encouraged to let students choose books that match their interests, even if they prefer easy "young-adult" books, rather than teaching mind-stretching books that build "reading stamina."

Educators blame social media and smartphones for eroding students' ability to focus, writes Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week. "With their beeps, badges, and buzzes, smartphones are engineered to maintain users’ attention — and to pull students’ focus away from focusing on print."

In a survey, 83 percent of teachers in grades 3 to 8 said students' reading stamina --the ability to read at length -- had decreased since 2019. Only 17 percent said they primarily teach through whole books and essays.

Doug Lemov, who trains teachers, believes “knowledge-building curriculum” can help, if used well. "Students should be reading together in class for sustained periods of time, working through complex syntax together, then discussing the texts’ meaning, craft, and nuances, he told Sawchuk. Students need to practice "sustained attention."

Forced to choose a "science of reading" curriculum, most New York City schools are picking HMH's Into Reading, which gives teachers lots of choices, writes Sarah Schwartz in Education Week. Some teachers have criticized its heavy reliance on excerpts rather than whole novels.

The other two curricula — Wit & Wisdom and EL Education — include more "full-length books, with more of an emphasis on learning subject area content than on building reading skills and strategies," she reports.