Three philosophers walk into a bar.
The first says, “Most of our students are functionally illiterate.” The second one says, “That’s a pretty severe judgment; how do you know?” The third says, “Duh. It is not simply that the students can’t read; it’s that the students live in a post-literate world.”
A fourth philosopher, already at a table in the bar, says, “are you sure you should be talking about your students in public like that?” The first one replies, “It’s not as if any of them are going to read this!”
The first philosopher is Steven Hales (Bloomsburg University), whose post about today’s “average students at Average State U” was added to the Heap of Links last week. Here’s an excerpt:
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided…
Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books, which they probably do not own and definitely did not read.
The second philosopher is Martin Lenz (FernUniversität Hagen) in a post at his blog, Handling Ideas. Here’s a bit from there:
Hales’ section on reading starts by pointing out that “most of our students are functionally illiterate.” This is a drastic remark. Did he do tests? We are not told, but we get something like a definition detailing that this status amounts to being “unable to read and comprehend adult novels”. How the heck does Hales know? If he has any ways of learning about his students’ reading habits, he keeps them to himself…
I’m not saying there are no ways of knowing or at least making educated guesses at what people read and comprehend. We do that all the time. So I’m not saying you need rigorous testing or anything like it to get an idea of whether someone read something and whether their reading aligns with yours. But given the drastic type of judgment, I’d expect a modicum of information about such ways. What this lack of information leaves me with is the assumption that the conversations informing Hales’ inferences about adult novels might have been quite superficial.
The third is Justin Smith-Ruiu (Université Paris Cité). At The Hinternet, he writes:
[T]he tendencies he’s describing are all perfectly real, so real in fact, so obviously real, that we should be well past the point of describing them by now, or of debating whether they in fact exist, not to mention past the point of blaming the students for their existence. We should by now have moved on to the much harder task of accounting for the economic, political, and technological causes behind them, so that we can figure out, soberly, what to do next.
It is not simply that the students “can’t read”; it’s that the students live in a post-literate world. They are using their anatomically modern human brains to execute different cognitive tasks than had been valued for some generations prior, though by no means since the dawn of humanity, and it behooves us now, very urgently, to pay attention to what these new cognitive tasks are, and to learn how to shoehorn the entire humanistic tradition into the vast set of objects they are focused on. It’s not going to be easy, but it has a much better chance of succeeding than simply scolding the lazy kids for not doing the reading. We have no more hope of getting literacy back, at least not as we had long understood it, than an early modern polymath had of convincing his disciples to become masters of the medieval ars memoriae. It’s over.
Discussion—both about what’s happening and what, if anything, should be done about it—is welcome.
Related:
Why Students Aren’t Reading
Reading Philosophy: Observations & Advice
How Do You Teach Students to Read?
Are Your Students Doing the Reading?
New: The Philosophy Teaching Library
From a 2022 article in The Atlantic:
“The shares of American 9- and 13-year-olds who say they read for fun on an almost daily basis have dropped from nearly a decade ago and are at the lowest levels since at least the mid-1980s, according to a survey conducted in late 2019 and early 2020 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Among both age groups, the percentages who said in the 2019-20 school year that they “read for fun on [their] own time almost every day” were at their lowest points since the question was first asked in 1984, according to the survey, which was public and private school students before the fielded among U.S. COVID-19 outbreak. It is unclear whether the pandemic may have changed these patterns.”
That’s surprising to me that 9 year olds have always been more likely to say they read for fun on a daily basis than 13 or 17 year olds!
The same applies to “doing arts and crafts” and possibly also to “naturally curious about the world…”
High school students generally have far more homework and extra-curricular activities, and so they have far less time to read for pleasure—or inclination to read for pleasure with the free time they have.
Why would the students do the reading if Prof Hales oozes this much contempt in his actions or writings and students are aware of this? Of course, I haven’t sat in on any courses by Hales, but having read other pieces, they strike a similar tone. Perhaps more importantly, even if most students don’t read pieces like this, some will find out about it—and word will likely eventually get back to others who take his courses, and they will (reasonably) think their professor has decided that they are illiterate idiots who like buffalo wings. Not a good look.
Finally, I’d register that among my colleagues at similar career stages (I’m an assistant professor at a reasonably good department) it’s entirely standard practice to share slides with students. I wonder if the norms on that have simply changed from when Hales was a student?
I understand your main claim to be that Hales’s snobby or condescending attitude makes a greater causal contribution to his students’ not reading than the factors he cites.
This claim was wrong when people made it on Hales’s substack, and it’s wrong here too.
Obviously, students don’t do the readings because they’re difficult and long, and because they have many easy, fun, and enticing alternatives, and because of mundane facts about executive functions. Short term goods engage motivation far more effectively than the abstract goods which philosophy confers on students, like ‘being well-rounded’ or the capacity to be a good citizen of a democracy.
The condescension hypothesis is wrong on the facts because you grossly mischaracterize what professors are like in the classroom. I am just as fed up as Hale is, but you won’t see a hint of condescension in my classroom. Like most professors, I behave in the gently encouraging way I think ultimately gets the most students to see the value in philosophy, and to give it a fair shot. I don’t go on rants about kids these days or shake my fist at the sky (I’m under 30, btw).
So your hypothesis that professorial bitterness discourages the students from reading is obviously mistaken, both about professorial behavior and about the causality. The claim that professorial bitterness significantly discourages from reading is as plausible as the claim that racial minorities intentionally avoid employment en masse to strengthen the democrats’ case for welfare services. Needless to say, anyone who thinks that that is happening is delusional. There is absolutely no evidence for that.
The analogous claim here is that students are avoiding reading in order to stick it to the man–to give the professor who looks down on them a hard time. Your suggestion doesn’t even explain 1% of the phenomenon of non-reading, let alone a significant share of it.
This is a comically uncharitable interpretation of my main argument, and your additional comments about fallacious reasoning about racial minorities is even more comically uncharitable. My main argument was not the causal claim that students don’t do the reading BC of Hales’ condescending attitude. My claim was the normative one that he shouldn’t write snobby condescending pieces about how his students are illiterate.
This is in part due to a causal claim: writing such a piece could very well make the students LESS motivated, a less safe classroom environment, etc.
I said nothing uncharitable. In your first post you claimed–and in your reply you continue to claim–exactly what I attributed to you. You claim that the students aren’t just lurking on the blogs of professional philosophers, but they are also reading those posts instead of the assigned reading, and that this causes them to avoid the reading. Every step of that argument is implausible, and every premise false.
Here’s the argument I’m making:
P1. If an action has sufficiently high risk of contributing to an unproductive or unsafe classroom environment, professors have a (prima facie) obligation not to do it.
P2. The act of publishing an op-ed complaining about one’s illiterate, entitled, iPhone addicted, buffalo wings loving students has a sufficiently high risk of contributing to an unproductive or unsafe classroom environment.
(Supporting reason: the op-ed will likely get back to students and they will—appropriately/fittingly—feel as though their professor thinks poorly of them.)
C. So, professors have a (prima facie) obligation to not publish such op-eds.
I’m confident there’s some straw man that you’ll prop up and skewer in response to this post, so this will be my last reply. It’s not a good use of my time to continue to engage with uncharitable interlocutors.
In general, does anything that is likely to make students “feel as though their professor thinks poorly of them” sufficiently risk an unproductive or unsafe classroom environment? If so, aren’t bad grades or rebukes for rampant plagiarism much more likely to produce this feeling than a blogpost? If not, then what sort of generalization justifies the move from your “supporting reason” to P2? I don’t know how big a problem illiteracy is. But if it is a problem, keeping quiet about it does not seem like a real service to students, regardless of their feelings. Am I also being too uncharitable for engagement?
You began with comments like:
“Why would the students do the reading if Prof Hales oozes this much contempt in his actions or writings and students are aware of this?”
“[S]ome [students] will find out about it—and word will likely eventually get back to others who take his courses, and they will (reasonably) think their professor has decided that they are illiterate idiots who like buffalo wings.”
These comments really do suggest some kind of causal claim, but I can see other (e.g., normative) readings, too. However, after Pageturner said that the causal claim was your “main” point, you clarified with comments like:
“My main argument was not the causal claim that students don’t do the reading BC of Hales’ condescending attitude.”
“[He shouldn’t write snobby pieces] in part due to a causal claim: writing such a piece could very well make the students LESS motivated, a less safe classroom environment, etc.”
“P2. The act of publishing an op-ed complaining about one’s illiterate, entitled, iPhone addicted, buffalo wings loving students has a sufficiently high risk of contributing to an unproductive or unsafe classroom environment.”
These remarks suggest that Pageturner was *right* to assert that you were making a causal claim, but *wrong* to describe that claim as your “main” one. That’s certainly a difference. But, from my less involved vantage point, it doesn’t seem “comically uncharitable.” The causal claim remains a key premise.
“P1. If an action has sufficiently high risk of contributing to an unproductive or unsafe classroom environment, professors have a (prima facie) obligation not to do it.”
We should certainly strive to make sure that our classroom environments are productive. And what should they help produce? They should help produce good philosophical habits and conversations that rationally illuminate the issues under discussion.
If a professor observes such a deplorable state of unpreparedness in his students that even a very skilled and dedicated teacher would find it very difficult to bring those students to an appropriate level of philosophical achievement, then it seems to me that sounding the alarm about this could be an entirely reasonable and productive response. It can bring attention to the issue and others can be brought into a discussion to help prevent and resolve the problem.
But you would have us believe that your understanding of his students’ habits and abilities is so much better than his that you can see that the true cause is more likely to be his bad attitude, and also that — despite what he says about his students tending to avoid even assigned readings — they will somehow end up reading this editorial and be so unhappy (despite the fact that he at no point identifies the bad students in any way) that they are apt to do even worse at university.
This seems highly implausible.
Also, what are we to make by the ‘or unsafe’ bit? Is his article apt to cause broken glass to be scattered on the classroom floor, or to create a fire hazard? Is it going to lead to fistfights? Will students feel that they are about to be exposed, by name, if they do start improving, so that they will end up doing worse? As always, claims that something is creating an ‘unsafe’ environment need to be spelled out clearly. Please give us a plausible story in which the article may lead to some needless harm or risk that outweighs any harms or risks that would otherwise be present.
Just a note on providing slides: I am a fairly young professor and, by and large, I do not provide slides in my courses. I used to, but stopped because of pedagogy training I received that suggested students are unlikely to take notes when they know they’ll get the slides after class. The act of writing notes has a lot of important benefits to retention (even if they don’t review them). Since changing my practice to not providing slides, I’ve had a noticeable increase in student note-taking and question-asking, which in turn has allowed me to start profitably using activities where I ask them to turn to their notes from previous classes. (No laptops allowed.) I only provide slides a week before exams in case they have holes in their notes as they study. For what it’s worth, the high quality of our classroom environment is something students have specifically highlighted in course evaluations.
Even when I uploaded my slides throughout the semester, however, I never included my lecture notes with them. This can be done easily by converting your slide decks to a PDF before uploading them.
Is there research that backs this up? Would love to cite this should I eventually be called to explain my teaching choices.
Probably should have did some of my own research. So my bad for asking. Found this paper which seems to be a fine starting point:
Worthington, D. L., & Levasseur, D. G. (2015). To provide or not to provide course PowerPoint slides? The impact of instructor-provided slides upon student attendance and performance. Computers & Education, 85, 14-22.
“The present study found no such academic benefits from IP slides. When student exam scores on the EVT and on the IV units were compared, students taking the class in the spring (no slides) did just as well as their fall semester counterparts (partial slides).“
“when IP slides become a part of the notetaking process, students may simply become, as some researchers have suggested (e.g. O’Quigley, 2011, Quible, 2002), more passive in the learning process. “
While we’re not required to use slides at all, I suspect that providing them only as PDFs would be frowned upon for disability-related reasons.
Not a problem (at least according to my university services), because PDFs can be made accessible with just a few clicks. I only provide my slides in PDF.
The 2008 financial crisis had myriad causes, but the critical necessary cause that enabled the rest was the ratings given by the rating agencies. That could have been the bottleneck where the crisis was prevented, but it failed. With student literacy, the critical necessary cause is lowered standards, i.e., grade inflation. If students are functionally illiterate, it’s because they haven’t had to be otherwise to get into college in the first place, let alone be well on their way to a diploma.
At the college level, the incentives for individual instructors and departments favor grade inflation; reinstituting meaningful grading would require higher-level collective action and general sacrifice (e.g., the significant work required for meaningful teaching evaluation, instead of deferring to student evaluations).
I think this is really interesting and definitely should be a part of the conversation. That said, I’m not totally sure it’s a plausible causal story. Take, for example, declines in daily leisure reading among 9-year-olds that Justin cited above. How does the view you’ve offered here applied to that? I can kind of squint and see a just-so story like the following: “Because of cratering standards at the college level, high-school educators are no longer incentivized to evaluate their own students rigorously, since those students can go to college even if they are functionally illiterate, and this has effects all the way ‘down the chain’ of primary education.” But that doesn’t seem so plausible to me.
Now that I’m writing this, though, I’m not sure I know what the explananda are supposed to be in your comment, though. Were you pitching your view as a (partial) explanation of why Johnny-the-9th-grader can’t read, so to speak, or only as a (partial) explanation of why Johnny-the-college-sophomore can’t read, according to which Johnny could have and should have been filtered out by the college admissions process before that point, but wasn’t, while saying nothing about why it is that Johnny found himself in that sorry state to begin with (i.e. about why the primary education system failed him)?
Next up: “Students launch emotional literacy campaign for professors on TikTok. They decided to use the short form video format to address the lack of attention span professors exhibit towards the idea that they are dealing with adults, not children.”
In the mid 2000s, I satisfied a gen ed science requirement as an undergrad by taking an intro to astronomy class with ~300 other students in it. It was a spring semester course in New Jersey. Spring had not yet sprung, so I often found myself nodding to sleep in the 50th stadium-seating row, dozens of feet off the ground but only a few from the ceiling, blanketed by the centrally controlled heat. Then one class, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed, just a few rows down, another student watching the original Predator movie on a full-on portable DVD player that they had brought to class. The next week, I watched that same student watch the sequel, and the week after, I watched them watch Soldier, then Universal Soldier the following week – it was ~12 or so weeks of dystopic 80s American action sci fi. Solve for my degree of literacy.
Well, at least you acquired a nodding acquaintance with some reasonably good SF/action movies. So, time not wasted.
I do not have a general solution to offer here, beyond acknowledging the challenge, but did not want to miss this opportunity to boast that my 13yo daughter is currently reading Silas Marner, voluntarily and her own idea… I am rather pleased about this and have already bored my family, friends and colleagues on the subject so welcome this further opportunity for smugness 😉
I do think that developing and nurturing attention spans in children is super important. We have already lost something in this regard (I don’t think anyone nowadays is as effortlessly erudite as, e.g.,TS Eliot, because a nerdy young Eliot now would be doing something involving a screen not reading Dante) but in kids now this is reaching dangerous proportions. Youtube in particular is like a machine designed to remove the ability to concentrate, and I don’t think any child should be allowed to use it. Once people get to university it is pretty late to correct habits trained in for nearly 2 decades at that point.
This is complete and utter rubbish. I’m honestly embarrassed that philosophers are making arguments that would earn a student in my critical thinking class an F. I’m not sure about Hales but as a philosopher of science (and a top rate one back when he wanted to be) I expect much better of Smith-Ruiu. Not only does their positive case that students are so abysmally stupid, lazy and dishonest rest entirely on anecdotes, but students’ ability to read and understand texts is an empirical question and one that, compared to some others, ain’t all that hard to test. And guess what, people have in fact tested it. Those tests aren’t a cause a for celebration but they aren’t abysmal either. According to the actual data today’s students are reading and doing math a bit better than we did back when we are in high school. Yes, the pandemic was a huge setback but the actual gains were large enough that they’re still past where we were. (Check this out for said data).
I’ll add that this sort of thing infuriates me on multiple levels. For one thing, it feeds right into the false narrative that public schools have failed that the right wing pushes as a justification to gut public education. When you write stuff like this you are helping to destroy American public schools. It’s as simple as that. Those of us who have children and aren’t rich enough to afford private schools need to call out this [nonsense] whether it’s Linda McMahon or Hales and Smith-Ruiu spreading it. It is also both deeply morally wrong in and itself and stupid to treat our students with such contempt. Yes, it does ooze a nasty classism and snobbishness, but more importantly, the right loves to seize on professors insulting their students like this when they try to demonize higher education. Don’t do their work for them! And if you hate your students that much please have the decency to retire and make way for someone who will give them the education they are paying so much for.
The grounds of your objection are confusing. It is one thing to talk about the phenomenon itself and another thing to deal with political narrative building around that. I appreciate that you mention some data, but let’s hold on and do more assessment before going into the politics of all that which almost always derail the discussions.
I share your commitment to public education and not hating students. But you are mistaken about the current generation of students’ abilities to read and understand texts. Your link to that interview for data is largely an education-reporter restating the NEAP summary that, over the years, students’ reading and math *assessment* scores “starting in the 1970’s up through 1988, … saw a huge improvement in reading in math for all groups of kids, but especially African American and Latino students” and “The average student is reading and doing math better than the average student of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation.”
That is true, all well and good. But that report on assessments doesn’t undermine at all the observation that for some of us, it is the case that our students are not reading, struggle to read long-form in particular, and often give up the struggle easily. I am not saying this out of anything but concern for my struggling students so please don’t assume I’m merely a snob. (Possibly I am. I don’t think I am.)
Everything in the NEAP statements and the interview with the reporter that you link to is consistent with the widespread reports of postsecondary students’ struggles to read, to focus, to manage length, depth, quantity as well as quality, as described here:
The College Kids Are Not All Right – by Natalie Wexler
So I rather more agree with the author of this Vox article that there’s something like a literacy crisis – It just isn’t what most think it is, i.e. it’s not the schools, it’s the absence of reading whole-texts for leisure in people’s lives:
Are kids really going through a literacy crisis? | Vox
I am gobsmacked at the suggestion that I am condescending to my students, or that I am chiefly interested in blaming them. Also, I never called them “lazy.” I literally say in my piece that it is a societal problem and my main emotion is sadness. I can only assume that if I pointed out a forest fire that Martin Lenz would be skeptical until I produced peer-reviewed studies. At least Justin Smith-Ruiu gets it: I am describing a phenomenon that an overwhelming number of professors at school similar to mine have confirmed. If people prefer personal attacks on me to opening their eyes to what’s going on, well, I guess I find that disappointing but predictable.
“I can only assume that if I pointed out a forest fire that Martin Lenz would be skeptical until I produced peer-reviewed studies.” – Now that strikes me as diligent reading indeed.
To quote Hank Hill “I’m confused. You seem to be saying that like it’s a bad thing.” Anyway, I’m not going to speak for Mr. Lenz but I’d at least like to produce one study of any sort rather than you know your own personal vibes.
Thanks, Mr Matassa! It doesn’t even have to be a study. A mere indication of what precisely the conclusions are drawn from would suffice. Otherwise we’re going to use “literacy” supposing we agree about what it is by just pointing at the supposed phenomenon. But pointing only helps if you have already characterised the phenomenon.
Compare: “There is a forest fire.” Yes, fine, but it matters whether you’ve seen it ‘on the news’ or ‘smell fire’ from the direction of the woods or ‘see it’. It would perhaps also give us a clue about the kind and size of the fire which, in turn, would help us how to go about it. By not pointing out the grounds of your inferences, you give no clues as to how to assess and address things.
You are right that it is important to have some kind of evidence. I remembered this report, when I read Hales’ piece, and thought this is what he has in mind: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
Note that this is about an elite college and Hales emphasizes that he teaches at an “average institution”. I cannot speak to historical trends in North America but I recognize too that too many of my students have a hard time reading longer texts and watching scenes from arthouse movies. The problem is simply paying attention and understanding content. The missing knowledge is concerning too. When I referred to Antigone in a 3rd-year class, only a handful of students knew what I was talking about. Sometimes, I must explain what the French Revolution was about, since a majority of students have not heard of it (or forgot about it). Unfortunately, they also do not know much about the history of their communities or the indigenous peoples they share the land with. This is only a diagnosis and I would be interested in discussing the causes.
To speak directly to your points, the Atlantic article is the fire on the news and I smell the fire in my classes. So, I share the diagnosis with Hales but I am not sure about the decline. This is such a widespread motif in cultural criticism that I would need more evidence for it. Reading adult novels was considered cultural decline too once upon a time…
“I smell the fire in my classes.”
How can you say this when we haven’t even solved the hard problem of consciousness yet?!?!?!
I agree. I observe there are always well-intended people under posts like this who conflate a deeply sad reaction to a general phenomenon (and may I say, real) among today’s young people with a condescending attitude towards any specific students and start criticizing the attitude. Even if the two coexist in some people, there is a need to discuss the general phenomenon, though sadly I believe nothing can be done about that by us professors.
More seriously though this is in bad faith in a couple of ways. First, a lot of the internet’s worst people will tack on “Obviously, I’m not blaming them. It’s just genes/biology” after they say something godawful about African Americans or women. And no one honestly thinks that shows they’re not racist or sexist. As for the second let me tell you a story about my dear granny Matassa. After she diagnosed herself with skin cancer from random spot on her arm my mom, who was a nurse, said “I don’t think that’s what it is. It doesn’t look like it to me. But really lets let Doc Jones look at it and if he thinks it’s suspicious they can run some tests. That’s the only way to know.” Granny’s response was “You’d say I needed a doctor to know if I was bleeding if I cut my arm off!” This is a much better analogy to what you’re doing than the forest fire. Of course Granny Matassa dropped out of school in the eighth grade so we cut her some slack. I can’t extend the same charity for people who have PhDs.
As a small anecdote, at least in my intro to philosophy classes, I stopped assigning primary texts because I realized I was doing it more for me than for students–because I was trained in the HOP and read the primary texts, I assumed they should too.
But I am the exception, not the rule–the avergage student isn’t gonna care if they read primary texts like I did
I have since switched to Stich and Donaldson’s anthology and I do think students are doing the reading and understanding it better.
I do post my own lecture notes for students but powerpoint slides I will never use of rely on in a philosophy class.
As a lethargic student myself, I would be inclined to agree with Dr. Hale. There appears to be a palpable malaise sweeping our nations youth, a certain hebetude instilling itself within the malleable. I do not know the cause, but I can assure you that we (students) find itself with a dearth of motivation. Perhaps it is a societal grievance, perhaps the strings of puppetry have become too loose. Yesterday, in existentialism ironically enough, one of my peers typed the following phrase into chatgpt, “provide an insightful comment on Beauvoir’s ‘A Very Easy Death.’” After reciting the insipid automaton’s answer, he started playing Clash of Clans. Now, I am not postulating that he is the average student, nor that his behavior is ubiquitous, but I am going as far as to say these sorts of instruments of distraction are common. Covid was a dagger in the heart of the youth, and each succeeding event pushes the blade further into the withering heart.
It would be prudent of me to correct Dr. Hale to “Hales” as not to prove the point of student literacy….
This comment is riddled with errors! Apologies esteemed academics…
“Writing still exists today, underneath the video clips we watch online.” From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdrbF-PhWRM
Many of my students are unwilling or unable to read basic instructions (in the end, they amount to the same thing).
For a great many of my students, English is their third or fourth language. They are not stupid, but there’s no question their English literacy is not up to snuff. A few years ago I tried having us all read aloud a sentence each of Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. It was an unmitigated disaster far beyond what you might expect (given that reading aloud in public is hard). Most of my class was simply not actually capable of doing it, period.
I don’t know what to do about it, except: not that. I don’t think anyone came out of that feeling good.
Third or fourth language? I would think that if you can speak two let alone three languages you’re probably going to do quite well in English as well, but I suppose those students exist. However it’s likely that for many students it is their *second* language and that’s where the rubber hits the road (if your native language is the only one you master).
Second for many, but for as many, third or fourth behind Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc. These are international students studying in English for the first time. Overwhelmingly, their oral skills are fine. But for a great many, their reading is just not, even when the motivation is there.
I don’t have enough domestic students to have a clear idea of their reading skills. My impression is that, by and large, they’re okay but not great. For them, I suspect motivation is a bigger bar to success
That’s interesting. May I ask where you teach? I’m asking because you and Hales might be comparing apples and oranges. The students he considers ‘functionally illiterate’ are, by and large, native speakers (or at least he probably assumes they are supposed to be fluent). I may be wrong about that.
This is just an anecdote, but I teach at a good UK university, and last year, as we were talking about narratives in one of my classes, I asked them whatever their favourite novel was (or at least something they liked). About half of my students said that they have never read one — that in fact, they have never read a book from cover to cover. I didn’t quite know what to say to that.
I don’t think it is altogether doom & gloom, since they seem to have other forms of literacy. But still.
I’m out of touch with what happens in schools these days, but I find it extra sad if they never even did that in school, even if they never did it voluntarily.
Isn’t the answer to this question:
just the following: “Because we are literally employed (in part) to assess how well students have comprehended what they’ve read and whether they can string together grammatical sentences”?
Well, had Hales said that his criterion was their performance in dealing with philosophical texts, I would happily go along with this line of reasoning (even if there might different clues for lack of comprehension)
But what we got instead was “unable to read and comprehend adult novels”. And assessing the understanding of novels is quite different from assessing performance in philosophical reading.
The point, I take it, is that if they lack the skills to read and follow a novel suitable for adults, then they won’t be able to read most works of philosophy.
I genrally share your assumption. That actually got me wondering about the clues on which Hales’ assessment is based, though. Why?
Here come my anecadata:
At least some people who study philosophy quit reading novels. So engaging them in talk about literature might not be the best way of judging their literacy.At least some people who are well versed in technical approaches to philosophy seem reluctant to talk about literature.Some people have difficulty talking about what they read, even though they understand the material quite well (which you find out if you give them time and a bit of a break).So the inference from one genre to the other might not hold. Nor does the inference from poor performance to poor understanding always hold. – Why does that matter? Well, if you still find that student performance in philosophy is bad, this might not be owing to a lack of literacy but owing to other reasons (simply not doing the reading, which Hales actually suggests, or a plain lack of interest, whatever). Why does this matter given that the result (the poor performance) is the same. Well, means of addressing student performance will have to be in line with the underlying reasons.
That’s why I think it would be helpful to look more closely at how we draw such conclusions. So my point is not that I doubt Hales’ overall description of the situation, but that we need to spend more energy on analysing from what clues we get to our assessments.
Yes, that sounds straightforward. But, on second thoughts, why would such an inference from (mastering and performing in talking about) one genre to another hold? Compare: A devoted jazz player / listener might have little clue about classical music and might not appreciate the culture around the latter (and vice versa).
That does not follow at all. Especially as we don’t really know what an ‘Adult’ novel is supposed to entail. Presumably they can and do read ‘non-adult’ novels, so we should really ask what do these terms mean and whether the problem is the type of works of philosophy we produce.
I by adult we mean the sort of over-wrought, boring, but seen as intellectually difficult texts, that in all honesty no one reads fully; while, non-adult mean fun, interesting, engaging… then maybe we should ask philosophers to try communicating in a less adult style?
I am shocked that no one has made a joke about the misspelling of “severe,” even after quoting it directly!
Oy. Just fixed that.
My own anec-data…
I’ve just marked a bunch of 1st year work, which was focusing on the arguments of (one part of) a single article.
Most students showed at least some basic grasp of the article, but very few read beyond that. And even then a good number mangled the article, such as taking bits from other parts of it or projecting ideas onto the author that don’t seem to be in the article at all.
I don’t have evidence that they CANNOT read (in the sense of not being capable of it), but I lack evidence that they can. Regardless, most DO NOT do the reading, in the manner required to understand it.
It’s really not that hard to look up the empirical literature comparing college literacy, writing, reasoning, and vocabulary levels over time. Hint: They have all been declining since at least the early 90s.
I am having a hard time finding the data you refer to. Can you help point me in the right direction?
I also can’t seem to be able to find anything
I don’t think Hale’s essay was condescending at all. It’s mostly just factual.
There’s plenty of empirical evidence (as others here have indicated) that students do less reading for their classes, and very often little or no reading at all. I’ll agree with Smith-Ruiu that students (and our whole culture) is becoming post-literate, or, at least, much less literate.
I liked making videos for my classes, and students seemed to watch them. I was also surprised in recent years about how often students would learn some topic by watching videos. So perhaps shifting to a different medium would help.
But Hales mentions other, stranger features of classroom life that I can verify from my own experience: the students struggle to concentrate or focus, and have difficulty sitting still through fifty minutes. I don’t know what the causes are here.
I won’t complain about the kids being worse, but they sure are different. I do worry that we are not doing enough to reach them where they are culturally.
I’m fine with all the calls for more research to back up what Hales is saying, as far as they go, but I am dissatisfied with this conversation in a big respect. My experience as a teacher basically coincides with Hales’, and I say that as someone who loves students, treats them like adults, has no big, overt problems with teaching young people. I work at a SLAC in the rural Midwest: the demographic I teach is almost uniformly white, evangelical, and lower middle class. So, I respect that my experience might not be what other people’s experience is. But it *is* my experience. What happens if I can’t provide peer-reviewed research showing that this is the case? As a teacher, I don’t really care. I am desperate for some kind of solution to the problem that I and apparently at least some other people have. I don’t like the conversation that is unfolding in the comments because I simply am not interested in people picking apart whether Hales is correct. Frankly, I don’t really care whether he is right in the details even as far as my own experience is concerned. But the big picture he is painting resonates deeply with my own experience, and I am curious whether anyone wants to have a constructive conversation about how to move forward. I signed up to work at a SLAC because I desperately wanted to teach students about important philosophical texts, and it is frustrating to see conversations that professional philosophers have about these sorts of topics deteriorate into so much snark.
Thank you! I am sad that your comment is buried so deep in the thread. WHAT DO WE DO?
I do the following (and I want to hear what others do):
1. No laptops in class (unless you have documentation from Disability Services).
2. Requiring paper books, not e-books.
3. Class is a slow walk through the reading. We spend a huge amount of class just reading selected passages out loud, and then talking about them. Passages read out loud in class are then later used as prompts for essay exams.
4. Some regular form of quizzing. I struggle with this, as I hate writing and grading quizzes, and students hate taking them. But it is the simplest form of reading accountability, which is absolutely necessary if I want them to read.
I am not claiming that all of these work, or that they do what I think they are doing. But these are all hills I would die on. What are y’all doing?
Thanks. 🙂 I just replied to another commenter (grant waters) with a reply to this comment as well. FYI: I also do the no-laptop thing and it works great. I also give extra credit to students who put their phone in a bucket at the front of the class, and it’s generated basically tech-free classrooms.
Thank you for saying this.
I have been hesitant to assign “untraditional” texts and assignments, such as podcasts as reading and creative work as writing. My thought is pretty straightforward: if students’ reading skills decline, shouldn’t we focus more on the development of those skills rather than finding alternative texts? Same for writing.
But I guess I am now at the point of rethinking about this and almost ready to change my mind. Maybe the trend is too strong, and assigning multimedia philosophical works could nevertheless make students think and learn something (rather than nothing)? I am ready more than ever, but still a bit hesitant. I am curious about others’ thoughts.
This is a reply both to grant waters and Jaybird.
I really like everything both of you are saying. Here’s an idea I did this semester in my class on Confucianism and Taoism: I got them to do in-class passage analyses. They struggled with them at the start of the semester in a big way, but I was able to tailor my feedback to them in constructive ways that helped them improve. So, over the course of the semester (which is now wrapping up), I watched them develop the critical-reading skills that I had been noticing were on the decline. It was really gratifying as a teacher.
As for the “untraditional” media: when I see a student struggle with actually sitting down to doing the reading but able to, in principle, understand what a text says, I have encouraged them to use a text-to-voice program. Sometimes, I recommend Speechify, though I confess I’ve never used it myself and can’t really help a student learn to use it. I’ve never actually assigned a podcast or a video or something, because (honestly) I am a bit too snobbish and teach the history of philosophy and would much rather have students learn to read the primary texts. My mission is to figure out a really good way to do that, but it’s tough. In theory, I could see myself recommending some podcasts as supplementary content in the near future, but I don’t know whether students would actually engage with supplementary content at all.
This sub-thread is giving me life! Thank you for kicking it off – so many good suggestions here. I love the idea of doing passage analysis. Also, the phone bucket!!
Late for the appreciation sub-sub-thread 🙂 Like Jaybird, I appreciate the input.
I wonder if you have any tricks to make students enjoy the textual analysis. You mentioned the analects and Daodejing, which are fun. But many other texts are kind of dry (for most undergraduate students at my institution which is a public R2). Usually only 5%(?) of the students are into doing real philosophy and like the textual analysis process. I worry that most students would quickly lose interest, especially in the context that we need enrollments to survive, and in the context that some of my colleagues are doing “untraditional” assignments ranging from creative work to just taking walks. I have the (maybe false) impression that students are happier there though not in the way that I wish them to be.
I really appreciate this subthread. I teach at a pretty unselective SLAC in the US, have students across a real range of backgrounds, and have noticed declining reading skills for the last 20 years. In the US at least, I would say that whole-language instruction plays some role. Whole-language instruction encourages students to figure out words through context and cueing strategies, and less on how to literally read/decode letters into words. (The podcast “Sold a Story” describes this more fully.) That can work pretty well in K-5 texts with simpler words, pictures, etc., but when you’re reading abstract philosophy readers simply do not have context. (If you do not know five words in a sentence that also contains two independent clauses and three dependent ones, you have no way to orient yourself.) And indeed, when we’d discuss chewy sentences in class and I’d ask students what words meant and they didn’t know, they would make guesses, and say their guesses were based on context. I think the strategies other folks are citing are good, but I will also say I have changed how I teach philosophy. We spend more time in the first two weeks literally doing “how to read philosophy” exercises (Melissa Jacquart has a really great pdf that gives explicit strategies that are relevant for philosophy), we outline arguments of shorter readings on the board as a group, and I endlessly reiterate these sorts of strategies. It pays off; not all students, but many students will now tell me accurate definitions of complicated words when we read aloud in class, and we are able to finish the semester reading one harder book most of the way through.
WOW – I had not thought about how whole language instruction might play into this problem!! Thank you for the Jacquart – what a great resource.
I can’t speak for America, and I don’t even have good anecdotal data let alone a proper study or whatever, but many of my students here are extremely well read. A lot of them have read some of the classic novels I haven’t gotten around to, and I was a voracious classic novel reader up through college (with a not terrible but not amazing amount of classic and contemporary novel reading since then). The example that is most salient in my mind because it came up in a class recently is Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, which I haven’t read but which some students have.
Some of this is likely due to my students being the “cream of the crop,” so to speak. So I wonder what things are like at top American universities (and top universities around the world).
Some of this is likely also due to my students being liberal arts students who actively sought out that kind of education rather than a professional degree. So I wonder what things are like for American students who self-consciously have chosen the liberal arts as opposed to students who see (e.g.) philosophy classes as useless gen ed wastes of time.
It is not the fault of the youth of 21st century are experiencing this deep, scary and widening gap between their generation and others before them. They have been fed the message that the liberal arts (and what they stand for.. reading, writing, hypothesizing, inferring, etc.) won’t make anyone rich. To be able to appreciate Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Maupassant, Frost, Marquez, Carpentier, and others means that across the generations there is a common thread that can serve as the springboard for small talk or serious conversation. That is gone. It is not the fault of this generation alone. All of us who at different times ,(perhaps with good reason) bashed the tedium of what we learned have a hand in what the current technology has only accelerated, exposed, and rendered archaic.
In case you’re interested, Irmtraud Hnilica, a colleague of mine, has written another response to Steven Hales’ piece.
Don’t believe him? Google American literally level
Ok ok, but anyone can Google right. Did you know literacy is measured by an extremely, I’d say too broad, definition? Financial literacy is included, so considering all the “% of Americans can’t read highschool/college level material” is really being nice because probably much less could read meaningful prose
I can’t imagine someone would argue against the first claim except to be a contrarian. The truth is in the pudding, and pudding is in all of our faces 24/7
There’s some irony here that we’re all in an internet comment section discussing this, is there not?
Now I’m a non-traditional philosophy undergrad, a dad in his 30s going back to finish his bachelor’s. I’m mostly in online classes so my experience might be just as anecdotal but you may not realize what years of education-as-commodity looks like from a student perspective.
Professors who don’t update slides or videos – some from as far back as the pandemic! Syllabi with proofreading errors, half-assed lectures because there’s a million more to do. I understand why it happens but also we must see how disengaged and overwhelmed education systems disengage and overwhelm students.
We basically educate kids because mom and dad have to work and kids need to go somewhere, and we educate people in college because we’re out of ideas and have devalued other jobs.
On another point: Adults, for the last 15 years or so, have spent the majority of their lives online denigrating younger generations whole feeding them algorithmically perfected stimuli. We don’t have to wonder at the problem – we know it!
We have no vision for education and no will to put a lid on what online companies can do to our brains. This doesn’t stop until those two things get solved.
I realise this is now an old-ish post, but I just came across a recent study (focusing on English majors in Kansas, trying to read Dickens) which may be of relevance:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346