Tyler Jagt at The Chronicle of Higher Education has bad news for the future. My Students Can’t Read: The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about.
My first day of Literature, Philosophy, and History my freshman year in college, (way back in the dark ages) we were assigned approximately the first 150 pages of a book to read by the next class. Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, is technically an essay, an awful work, and a slog to get through.
What does it say about the state of American education that people in college - they graduated from high school - cannot read a 20 page article?
I miss civilization.
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