To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
In The Atlantic, story by Rose Horowitch, published October 1, 2024. Full story here.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia
University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it
has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the
reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course,
but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought
of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same
problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective,
elite colleges—prepared 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.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
