The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
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Why would you study anything with literature if you had never read a book before? This sound like a colossal waste of time and money. My theory is that if you were good at anything or had an interest in a particular topic, you would study something else like engineering, medicine, or law (I exclude the case that you may be genuinely interested in literature). Thus, many of those who study literature have no idea what they should study else and probably think that they can always get through a course which is about book. Why? Probably rich family pressured them into studying instead of posting stuff on Instagram or TikTok.
The article is about a course that's required for all freshmen, not just lit majors. Here's the first sentence of the article:
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998.
I can corroborate that it gets crazy even in courses expecting high literacy. I had the painful experience of teaching a 3rd year course in communication studies that was part of the media production stream. It required writing preproduction documentation and a script. There were a lot of questionable attempts but there's always a range of interest and skill, right? One student, and let me remind you this is third year at a university, I called into office hours. I'm a fan of poetry, so I just had to be sure that she wasn't cleverly lampooning Gertrude Stein in some ironic way. Sadly, no, she just had no fucking clue how to write ANYTHING coherent. Amazing.
It still applies. If you cannot X, but X is required, don't do it.
If you cannot read books, higher education is probably not your thing.
I didn't say their point wasn't valid, I just thought their reading comprehension was ironic.
Apparently in many highschools and middle schools, literature classes will only make students study an excerpt or article on the subject, not the entire book. When they get to college and their professors drop a book on them, it's unexpected, because they thought it would be more articles and excerpts.