College English Majors Can't Read

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The key terms are “regional Kansas universities.”

There are a lot of kids at regional universities, in Kansas or elsewhere. And these are definitely not the worst group of students moving through higher ed -- 74th percentile or thereabouts is nothing to sneeze at.

The paper also pairs nicely with stories from Harvard et al about students unable or unwilling to read. Would be interesting to replicate, and see to what extent the more selective schools have also been selecting on the basis of ability to process complex text.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I don't understand is how my DC (not a college English major, but a college grad) who can read very well is unable to find a job when these people are the competition.

I know, right? Because the recruiters can't read either.

This is on point.

About 15 years ago, I was re-recruited to a F500 company I'd worked for, for a decade. At the time they had outsourced recruiting to a company that preferred to hire recruiters with 2-3 years of retail management experience. The person who recruited me had been an assistant manager at a Best Buy and been a cashier at a parking lot. They were hiring entry level to mid-career technical staff.

[Anonymous]

If the English majors can’t read, imagine how poorly the STEM majors read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I was a college English major and I’ve read and loved all types of literature. I think we need to separate different kinds of “hard,” because one matters and the other is a distraction. One reason Dickens is hard is the antique language. When Bleak House was written it was the beach read of the times - it wasn’t considered difficult. Because it was written in the vernacular. I see no real urgency in making sure people can read Shakespeare or Chaucer. Should English majors? Yes, even if they don’t love it, they should read some of where our language and literature came from.

All kids should be taught how to read, analyze, and understand meaningful text, though. Plot, metaphor, argument, character development, voice…those are all important. I’m not particularly fussed, though, about what sort of books kids read in order to understand those things, though. Pride and Prejudice is chick lit, but “hard” to read because of language. Harry Potter is easy to read because of its simple language written for children, but it can serve just fine to train kids to identify the important elements in literature and enjoy them.

I wonder if this study had used modern literature - say, The Kite Runner, Life of Pi, etc - whether they would have had different results. Archaic language doesn’t making literature better, it just makes it old.

No, it makes it difficult. That is the point. Only a handful of English majors averaging in the 74th percentile are able to read the popular literature of a hundred and fifty years ago, because, in part, they have not been taught. These people, the vast majority of future teachers, will similarly not be able to instruct the next generation, and a whole world of English literature will be lost. But lol, who needs Shakespeare - anything more complex than Subject Verb Object using an approved vocabulary of 500 words is unnecessary. But maybe we should have PhD students read at the Harry Potter level, to understand some of where our language and literature came from.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree with 9:19.

The opening of Bleak House is a particularly challenging passage, far more challenging than the rest of that novel. I would argue it was written specifically to grab the reader by making the familiar strange. The passage includes a number of referents that would have been familiar to 19th century English readers (Michaelmas Term, Lord Chancellor, Lincoln’s Inn Hall, Holborn Hill, and what London used to be like in November back when everyone burned coal for heating and cooking and the streets were not yet paved). But no one in 21st century Kansas is or should be casually familiar with these things. So for them this passage makes the strange, stranger. Of course they struggled. The use of this passage for this particular research purpose leads me to believe that the researchers themselves don’t really understand the material or that they are operating in bad faith.

Totally agree with this. It’s almost as though the researchers were looking for a way to ridicule the reading level of college English majors…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:English major here: I think this is a combination of phones and screens, which have killed reading for pleasure in many kids, and the fact that teaching of literature has become “politics by other means” and now almost entirely centers concern about inclusion and contemporary obsession with questions of identity at the expense of teaching challenging works. When you swap out The Scarlet Letter for some sort of Y.A.-level story about the challenges facing Identity Group X, it will have pedagogical impacts.

The Scarlet Letter is an overwrought and depressing story that relies on a visceral caring about social norms that have less power now. I agree that the current curriculum default is to assign identity politics literature. However, replacing long dreadful works with shorter dreadful works isn't going to fix things. Vanity Fair or Pride and Prejudice would be better choices.

My personal wish is to add more autobiography (including from diverse authors). I think real people do a better job of conveying their perspectives and struggles than fiction. It helps so much with the authenticity question. The difficulty of comprehending the writing would naturally vary based on the vintage of the material.

I also think getting kids interested in reading the type of writing found in the New Yorker would be useful. My own kid picked up a lot about voice and style from reading it during high school. The articles in the New Yorker are at a level that's reasonable for college grads who don't go into academia.

I've read a lot of the most acclaimed classic novels and liked very few of them. I'm not fond of depressing subject matter. A lot of them are dramatically tragic. I don't mind that they are long. They just aren't enjoyable enough.

I obviously can't defend my reading skills very well over the internet, but I had a 780V, am a PBK, and took a writing-intensive senior English seminar as a junior in college. I'm sure I would have at least made it into the top bracket of that Kansas reading study.

The way back from today's low baseline is to find content that stretches kids' reading capabilities while also being interesting to them. That just might involve permanently deprioritizing James Fenimore Cooper and others of that ilk. Most of the faces on a set of "Authors" playing cards. Times change.

Some things I would keep:

Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare
Anne Bradstreet
Colonial political writing
Vanity Fair
Moby Dick
Walden
Things Fall Apart
1984
A work by Jane Austen
A Chekhov play
Writing by Frederick Douglass
My Indian Boyhood by Luther Standing Bear
Textual analysis of fairytales

Of Dickens, I'd do Great Expectations if I had to. Certainly not Bleak House. I read most of Dickens' famous works voluntarily in high school (received a giant volume from a best friend as a birthday present in 1985). Bleak House was assigned in college honors freshman composition. I remember thinking there were good reasons it was less frequently assigned.

You speak very confidently for someone who didn’t major in English. Sorry, but your intensive writing class doesn’t qualify you to offer your absurd opinions on literature. And this statement absolutely disqualifies you, “I've read a lot of the most acclaimed classic novels and liked very few of them. I'm not fond of depressing subject matter. A lot of them are dramatically tragic. I don't mind that they are long. They just aren't enjoyable enough.


You just told us you have literally no understanding of the books you read or why they are important.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:English major here: I think this is a combination of phones and screens, which have killed reading for pleasure in many kids, and the fact that teaching of literature has become “politics by other means” and now almost entirely centers concern about inclusion and contemporary obsession with questions of identity at the expense of teaching challenging works. When you swap out The Scarlet Letter for some sort of Y.A.-level story about the challenges facing Identity Group X, it will have pedagogical impacts.

No, they don’t teach spelling or vocabulary and kids at best read a few books a year in school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If the English majors can’t read, imagine how poorly the STEM majors read.

Oddly, these days the freshman engineering students often have higher verbal/reading scores on ACT/SAT than freshman humanities students. Certainly that was true at my top-5 public university.

[Anonymous]

I always find it funny that the anti-"multicultural" people are fetishists for foreign cultures, like antiquated Britain and ancient Rome.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If the English majors can’t read, imagine how poorly the STEM majors read.

Oddly, these days the freshman engineering students often have higher verbal/reading scores on ACT/SAT than freshman humanities students. Certainly that was true at my top-5 public university.

Smart people are smart in both reading and math, and engineering is more lucrative.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was a college English major and I’ve read and loved all types of literature. I think we need to separate different kinds of “hard,” because one matters and the other is a distraction. One reason Dickens is hard is the antique language. When Bleak House was written it was the beach read of the times - it wasn’t considered difficult. Because it was written in the vernacular. I see no real urgency in making sure people can read Shakespeare or Chaucer. Should English majors? Yes, even if they don’t love it, they should read some of where our language and literature came from.

All kids should be taught how to read, analyze, and understand meaningful text, though. Plot, metaphor, argument, character development, voice…those are all important. I’m not particularly fussed, though, about what sort of books kids read in order to understand those things, though. Pride and Prejudice is chick lit, but “hard” to read because of language. Harry Potter is easy to read because of its simple language written for children, but it can serve just fine to train kids to identify the important elements in literature and enjoy them.

I wonder if this study had used modern literature - say, The Kite Runner, Life of Pi, etc - whether they would have had different results. Archaic language doesn’t making literature better, it just makes it old.

No, it makes it difficult. That is the point. Only a handful of English majors averaging in the 74th percentile are able to read the popular literature of a hundred and fifty years ago, because, in part, they have not been taught. These people, the vast majority of future teachers, will similarly not be able to instruct the next generation, and a whole world of English literature will be lost. But lol, who needs Shakespeare - anything more complex than Subject Verb Object using an approved vocabulary of 500 words is unnecessary. But maybe we should have PhD students read at the Harry Potter level, to understand some of where our language and literature came from.

Dickens wouldn't understand modern literature. The world moves on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:English major here: I think this is a combination of phones and screens, which have killed reading for pleasure in many kids, and the fact that teaching of literature has become “politics by other means” and now almost entirely centers concern about inclusion and contemporary obsession with questions of identity at the expense of teaching challenging works. When you swap out The Scarlet Letter for some sort of Y.A.-level story about the challenges facing Identity Group X, it will have pedagogical impacts.

I agree with this and would add: this has partly happened in an effort to reach a broader range of students. When schools assigned more challenging and classic literature, a significant percentage of high school students would simply not do the reading or would do it without making much effort to comprehend. Educators adjusted to this in the name of better engagement across the board. What this means is that more high school students might actually be doing their assigned reading and may even be reading at higher rates, but the students who were already engaged and invested are not getting the same high quality of literature that they used to. Thus, the students most likely to pursue English degrees have simply been deprived of opportunities to deeply engage with challenging literature, because they spent high school in a curriculum that was designed to engage students who will resist reading altogether and be put off by Dickens, Homer, Austen, H.G. Wells, Twain, Baldwin, Hurston, or Ellison. Or even YA classics that offer more literary complexity than Harry Potter or the Hunger Games (Diana Wynn Jones, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis).

it is unfortunate, and those students who seek out MFA and PhD programs after undergrad will eventually resent their K-12 education for shortchanging them. But the subjects of this study don't know what they don't know.

I will also note that those responses indicate broader educational failures. The idea that a college student wouldn't understand a reference to a dinosaur and what Dickens is referencing in that passage is not just a failure to understand figurative speech in fiction. Sure, the author is using a term that is out of date now, but the idea that a 19 or 20 year old wouldn't recognize that as a dinosaur reference or understand the mental image of a dinosaur emerging from the much indicates a strange gap both history and science learning.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The key terms are “regional Kansas universities.”

There are a lot of kids at regional universities, in Kansas or elsewhere. And these are definitely not the worst group of students moving through higher ed -- 74th percentile or thereabouts is nothing to sneeze at.

The paper also pairs nicely with stories from Harvard et al about students unable or unwilling to read. Would be interesting to replicate, and see to what extent the more selective schools have also been selecting on the basis of ability to process complex text.

I agree with this, and also with the critique that the study is not well-designed to establish what is claimed. I was taught to read Beowulf (in public school!) but I would not have been able to do that without guidance, and using the opening of “Bleak House” for this exercise is almost as intentionally obscurantist today as using “Beowulf” with no notice would have been 30 years ago.

Still, choosing regional Kansas publics for this constitutes pretty aggressive selection bias relative to the thesis that English majors cannot read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with 9:19.

The opening of Bleak House is a particularly challenging passage, far more challenging than the rest of that novel. I would argue it was written specifically to grab the reader by making the familiar strange. The passage includes a number of referents that would have been familiar to 19th century English readers (Michaelmas Term, Lord Chancellor, Lincoln’s Inn Hall, Holborn Hill, and what London used to be like in November back when everyone burned coal for heating and cooking and the streets were not yet paved). But no one in 21st century Kansas is or should be casually familiar with these things. So for them this passage makes the strange, stranger. Of course they struggled. The use of this passage for this particular research purpose leads me to believe that the researchers themselves don’t really understand the material or that they are operating in bad faith.

Totally agree with this. It’s almost as though the researchers were looking for a way to ridicule the reading level of college English majors…

Alternatively, the researchers are college English professors who have noticed serious problems with their students and are trying to sound alarm bells.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:English major here: I think this is a combination of phones and screens, which have killed reading for pleasure in many kids, and the fact that teaching of literature has become “politics by other means” and now almost entirely centers concern about inclusion and contemporary obsession with questions of identity at the expense of teaching challenging works. When you swap out The Scarlet Letter for some sort of Y.A.-level story about the challenges facing Identity Group X, it will have pedagogical impacts.

I’m an elementary teacher with a master’s in English and the use of lower level texts over the last twenty years is appalling. I don’t see anything like what you describe about content, but teachers are definitely giving students much less complex texts because they say students can’t understand the harder stuff. If students aren’t reading grade level texts when they leave fifth or sixth grade and have access to intensive literacy teaching and interventions, it’s going to be much harder to get on level before they graduate.

I think this starts with parents. If you tell many parents here on DCUM that alongside reading Dog Man and Rainbow Fairies their kids should also be introduced to books from the golden age of children's literature (late 19th century to mid 20th) like Narnia, The Borrowers, Andrew Lang fairy stories, E. Nesbit, and so many others they will tell you those books are "too boring" or "too hard" and you should only ever let kids read whatever as long as they are reading. But parents - and you see this most often with homeschoolers - who read aloud rigorous stories to their kids and require them to read some on their own know that you can absolutely expand a child's reading "palatte" just like you can expand their food palatte. Just like it takes 15 times for a kid to learn to know a certain food, it takes a little while to develop an appreciate for a more complex story. It's easiest if you start by reading, say, a fairy tale illustrated by Paul O. Zelensky and Winnie the Pooh to your preschooler and go from there. Sometimes you may need to have your kids tackle a denser story on audiobook. My kids would never read The Princess and the Goblin because it's really vintage 19th century language, but they devoured the audiobook.

If your kids from preschool on are used to the classic literature that college kids of, say, the 1980s would have also read, then they will already know many of the figures of speech from what they learned young. If they read D'Auliers Greek myths as kids they will have background for Homer. If they read Andrew Lang they will have been steeped in the same stories that readers of Dickens knew.

And yes - some of the thing is that we expect many more people to go to college these days than they did in prior generations. If your parents don't know the value of J. R. R. Tolkein, they aren't putting in the work for you to do so. And that makes teachers jobs much harder.