Adam Kotsko, who teaches humanities at a small liberal arts college, finds that even his best students are unprepared to read and understand 10 to 20 pages of a complex text, he writes on Slate. They can't stay focused. They can't follow arguments. Professors can't lower expectations fast enough to keep up with the decline in literacy. (My post is headlined Why Joe College Can't Read.)
Brian Huskie, who teaches English at a large urban high school, has seen the "same problem -- only worse." His students groan at "as little as a single page of reading."
They're not asked to read challenging books. His school replaced Romeo and Juliet with The Poet X, a "vacuous and uninspired" young-adult book with a Dominican heroine (black and Hispanic!).
Students don't read the whole book, writes Huskie. They're asked to read three to 12 poems, depending on the teacher. As Kotsko writes, "these are the types of passages likely found on standardized tests, so we’re going to train for the tests."
English teachers aren't supposed to teach content any more, he writes. They teach “skills” (e.g. “how does the author’s use of figurative language develop the central idea of the text”). "The rationale is that we don’t need whole books for skill-development, and that more time needs to be spent on 'analysis' than wasted on simple things like understanding the plot of the story.”
As it turns out, writes Huskie, "the strategy of 'not reading' somehow doesn’t produce effective readers, writers, thinkers, or test-takers." In 2022-23, his school ranked in the 5th percentile on the state's English Language Arts exam.