Reply to the Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't understand this. Aren't admissions more competitive than ever? Aren't these the superhuman students who aced the hardest classes, scored extremely highly on SATs, had very time-consuming ECs....? We are told nobody has a chance at these schools, and yet, those who are actually there, can't read a book? How is this possible.[/quote]

Test prep. Read a short passage find the main idea. Move onto the next skill. Meanwhile, they've never read a whole book about anything. I totally understand why this is happening. Since there's no homework these days, I assign it. My kid is always reading a book for homework, and we're always discussing it. [/quote]

But that just sounds like a run of the mill 4.0 GPA/grade grabber who we are repeatedly told can't get into, e.g. Columbia.

I mean, my 8th grader is not a big reader and she read a non-fiction psychiatry book over just a few days this summer and we discussed it. Pretty sure she would be capable of discussing [b]Pride and prejudice and Crime and punishment[/b] within a couple of weeks. I read these books in HS. They are interesting and not that hard to read.[/quote]

Those books aren't interesting at all.  I mean, Crime & Punishment? Are you now going to tell me War & Peace is interesting too?

Perhaps if we let a kid read a non-fiction psychiatry book instead of Pride and Prejudice or whatever, then things would be better.

But, if you want to read Crime & Punishment, then go for it.[/quote]

DP. Read Crime and Punishment in high school and it still ranks as one of my all time favorites. It’s phenomenal.[/quote]

I read it in high school and hated it.  My friends invented some in-jokes off of it and that was the best part.

Spoiler.  There's a wack job who murders an old lady and that's basically the only interesting scene in 300 pages.  [b]The rest is a bunch of dull policing and OP having recriminations and delirious sweats[/b].

And I liked Moby Dick even though it has tons of filler.  So it's not that I can't handle a bit of tedium with my great literature.

The great Russian novels should be left for college.[/quote]

Not true at all. He didn't murder one lady; there is a lot of romance etc. This is what people who haven't read the book think.[/quote]

I read it all.  Pre-1900s romance is boooooring.  I had to become middle-aged to understand how Pride & Prejudice could be romantic.  C&P is an unhappy, depressing book all the way through.[/quote]

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