Losing my marbles over this article
aparently something they're just glossing over as a cause (and brushed off in favor of smartphones because of course the blame is shifted onto the youth for adult's mistakes) is how the No Child Left Behind act has led to teachers simply not instructing highschoolers and middleschoolers how 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."
Not a single book! If someone is reading YA novels they're going above and beyond because they're not even requiring a single book in some of these classes.
"It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet."
"But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. 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. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But 'in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.'"
"Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels."
"'There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ' he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.
In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven."
look what captialism took from us smdh. Trying to make schools "streamlined" by forcing them to do arbitrary testing to get funding, and ruining the ONE thing that schools are supposed to always be good at: basic literacy.
It's not even about what kind of books they prefer (to me at least), it's about having never even getting the opportunity to read books in the literary canon at all. They can like where the sidewalk ends even- but they can't form an opinion on Jane Eyre if they've never even read the damn thing. (I haven't, but I've read the works of Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, etc that were popular with teachers when I was growing up. It's not the specific texts per se as it is depth of time period and subject matter.) For many of them, they won't even know some of these books exist without explicitly being given them, much less understand the historical contexts without guidance.
Like. Reading is a skill. No one enters the world knowing how to read a book. It is a skill that must be taught, and is often best taught in schools where they can go chapter by chapter with analysis and reflection using essays that can be graded for accuracy in a group with peers. And the result of this no longer being taught in gradeschool is that college educated adults will have the skills equivalent of highschoolers from a decade ago. It's no longer the case that college will just not net you a job- it will not even provide you an education on par with older college graduates. Kids are just too far behind.
