03

The most active thread yesterday was the vice presidential debate thread that I discussed yesterday and will skip today. After that was a thread titled, "the Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books", and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster linked to an article in "The Atlantic" and provided a brief summary of the article's main points. According to the article, students are showing up at elite colleges such as Columbia University unable to read an entire book. The reason for this is that they were never assigned complete books in their previous schooling. Rather, they have only read excerpts previously. As a result, professors have been forced to water down the curriculum. In response, several posters discuss their children's experience in high school, detailing the number of books that they were required to read. In most cases, the number was quite small, frequently only one or two through their entire high school experience. Posters offer a number of explanations for this situation. One theory is that students who are selected by elite universities such as Columbia are singularly focused on checking boxes needed for college applications. If there is not a box saying "read an entire book", then they don't devote time to doing that. Others blame the spread of technologies such as mobile phones and social media that encourage shorter attention spans and distract students from reading for long stretches. Some posters argue that schools have traditionally assigned books that students find boring and that if more interesting books were chosen, there would be more interest in reading them. A poster who graduated from Columbia pointed out that Columbia's curriculum is particularly heavy in reading and, even when the poster attended decades ago, it involved way more reading than to what she was accustomed. A lot of the traditional forum arguments came up in this thread. Private school parents told of huge numbers of books their kids were expected to read, citing that as an advantage of private over public schools. Some posters blamed test optional admissions, a topic with which some posters are obsessed and blame for almost every problem with colleges today. Of course, grade inflation was also blamed. Several posters argue that this is a parenting issue and that parents should be ensuring that their kids read books. In response, several posters recount struggles they've had trying to get their children to read more. A number of posters suggested that the inability of today's kids to read entire books is due to the easily accessible alternatives they have to fake reading in order to pass an assignment such as Internet summaries. However, others pointed out that while the specifics might be new, the idea is not. Older generations might not have had Internet summaries, but they had Cliff's Notes.