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]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]

I read Crime & Punishment for AP Lit in high school. We had great discussions about it. Took a Dostoevsky class in college, too. Still think about the things he wrote and the discussions we had. Because that's the thing with the liberal arts, they exist to grow you as a person and inform your outlook on life. Our society would quite possibly be a better place if the programmers and Silicon Valley cowboy coders had to study philosophy and literature.

But I utterly failed at 2 attempts on War & Peace. Oh my goodness, the excessive discussions of the Russian prince from the dying guy. Sorry to the War & Peace lovers on the thread.[/quote]

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