By Elena Basati,
In the fall of 2022, a first-year student of Columbia University knocked the door of Nicholas Dames, an English Literature professor, to ask for help. The student was struggling with the material of her great books’ course, as she found it almost impossible to read them entirely. She declared “at my high school we never read full books”. Nicholas Dames was bewildered by her statement, but at the same time he wasn’t really surprised. The professor had been teaching the course since 1998 and he had noticed the past few years a decline in his students’ abilities to handle their assigned readings. He contemplated that in the past they used to analyse great works like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and now they seemed to struggle to understand a single excerpt of the former.
The phenomenon is universal as it has even been recorded in highly prestigious institutions with the number of students being unable to fully comprehend the readings increasing. The root of this issue isn’t universities but schools, since children nowadays are asked to simply decode words and search for their meanings, rather than examining and analyzing complex texts deeply. Rosa Horowitch aims to delve into the issue and unravel the reasons why students have a hard time reading long and complex works.
The past few years, both middle and high schools have moved away from teaching long books and turned to studying short excerpts, news, articles, and acquiring skills to make them good test takers. Teachers prefer using informational texts and assigning exercises that mimic standardized test formats. In practice, this means less Tolstoy and more test preparation. A recent survey showed that only 17% of teachers include in the curriculum full and lengthy books and an additional 49% combine whole texts with anthologies and poetry. However, nearly 25% of the teachers have excluded whole books from their curriculum completely. For example, a public-school teacher at Illinois admits that, in the past, she used to build her course around books but now focuses on teaching good decision-making skills. Many assign snippets of classic texts supplemented by contemporary media, hoping to keep the student engaged with the material. Even Homer’s Iliad is now accompanied by TED Talks, music, and articles. Young people rarely develop the patience and skills to sit down with a novel and read it, let alone analyze it.
A long-standing debate on teaching methods used in class, when it comes to reading texts, has been the one between phonics and whole language techniques, also known as “Reading Wars”. The former is a systemic approach suggesting teaching children how to decode words based on their combination sounds while the latter is in favor of teaching reading through context, encouraging students to use visual aids and the surrounding text to make sense. Although both methods have their own benefits, research leans towards phonics, with many schools nowadays adopting it as their main teaching method. However, a vast majority of schools have excluded phonics entirely from their curriculum and they emphasize primarily on contextual approaches. Without a solid grounding in phonics, students struggle to read fluently, and when faced with longer texts, their comprehension falters. This approach, while well-intentioned, has not equipped many young readers with the skills needed to engage with challenging literature, a gap that only widens as students advance through the education system.
The consequences of these trends are stark in college classrooms. By the time students arrive at elite institutions like Columbia or Georgetown, they are often unable to focus on lengthy, complex works. Professors have noticed that students struggle with both attention and retention, even when reading relatively short texts. For example, students at Georgetown have trouble staying focused on a simple sonnet, and Princeton students often arrive on campus with narrower vocabularies and a weaker understanding of language. At Columbia, Dames reports that many students feel overwhelmed by the amount of reading required for his course, unable to manage multiple books or grasp subtle details across a dense text.
This crisis isn’t solely due to distractions like smartphones, though they certainly exacerbate the problem. The deeper issue lies in the way reading is being taught. As Horowitch’s article suggests, students have been taught to skim or focus on informational texts that do not demand the same depth of engagement. As a result, they have never learned how to immerse themselves in a book and wrestle with its complexity. If we want to ensure that future generations cannot only decode words, but also understand the deeper meanings within them, we must prioritise teaching methods that balance phonics with the deep reading techniques that are critical for academic and personal growth. Only then can we begin to address the crisis of reading at the collegiate level, and cultivate students who are not just literate, but capable of navigating the complex, nuanced world that books can reveal.
References
- The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. The Atlantic. Available here
- What is phonics? National Literacy Trust. Avaiable here
- It’s time to stop debating how to teach kids to read and follow the evidence. Science News. Available here
- How to Build Students’ Reading Stamina. Education Week. Available here
