The Illiterate Elite?

I was working my way through my YouTube Watch Later playlist, which has a bunch of weird, disparate crap in it because 2 months ago I was interested in woodworking, 1 month ago I was learning Japanese, and today, well, today I guess I’m watching a video that talks about elite college students who do not know how to read books.

I guess this is based on an article in The Atlantic, so I set aside a video about creating slipcases for handbound books and roll over to read about why everyone is, apparently, stupid.

For Clarification

The article and video are not about illiterate college students, and that’s probably the biggest sticking point for a lot of people: “How can you get into Yale without knowing how to read!?”

These students can read, if you put a page from Moby Dick in front of them and asked them to read it out loud, they can.

The hubbub is about reading books, as in full-length texts.

Is Reading Full Texts Necessary?

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know, and you don’t know either. But this is the first question we need to answer before we embark on this journey.

I think it’s entirely possible that we may see a future where reading entire books is not necessary. Imagine a Matrix-like future where dudes in trenchcoats are shooting up places at a heretofore unparalleled rate…er, no not that. Don’t imagine that. Imagine a Matrix-like future where you can have a book beamed into your head, as though you read it.

It seems impossible, but if you told someone in 1925 that in 100 years, they’d be able to pull books out of the air, books read aloud to you by another person who wasn’t doing it live, but recorded, and you could start and stop that recording at any point, and this was available free from your library—if you told someone about something like that, which we consider pretty straightforward, they’d probably put you in an insane asylum. A 1925 insane asylum, which was probably a pretty unpleasant place to be and seemed to come with a decent chance of having your brain poked with an ice pick.

But we’ve strayed from the question. The question isn’t whether reading full texts will ALWAYS be necessary, it’s whether it’s necessary today. Given the information we have today, is it a good investment of time and energy to teach students to read full texts?

I say Yes. For one, if you can read an entire book, you can definitely read something shorter. If you can read full books, you do have access to something that is still important today.

But the real hurdle here is that reading full books is only one component of changing the entire American education system.

Testes

According to one teacher, who I do think speaks for many, the reason full texts are not being taught in schools is because the tests students take will not involve full texts, they’ll involve pulling information from very short snippets. So, teachers are strongly encouraged to teach that way, replicating what students will encounter on the tests. And they are discouraged from teaching full texts because that’s valuable time that can be used to improve test scores.

Let’s not get too into the weeds on this, but this is the fundamental problem with testing: Well-designed tests determine whether a student is making a reasonable amount of progress, whether the teaching methods are working, essentially.

When we “teach to the test,” we are sort of gaming the system. Because it’s possible to teach someone HOW to take a test and to cover the sorts of things a student will encounter on the test, and thereby increase test scores without necessarily increasing learning or knowledge.

It turns standardized testing into an episode of Taskmaster: the goals are set up, and something that appears to measure, say, athleticism, may also measure someone’s ability to understand the specific parameters of the task, which then gives them the option to use a literal pair of scissors to cut through the bullshit.

I might suggest that the problem with testing is not necessarily the tests themselves (tests are always being debated in terms of fairness, a good example being an east coast bias in an SAT question that requires someone to know what a regatta is. One could argue that this leans towards coasties…on the other hand, if you’re going to Yale, knowing what the fuck a regatta is may end up being helpful, as would knowing that it’s wise to at least pretend that your dad is rich, maybe by shopping for a new exotic car during class), although tests certainly were created with some pretty shitty goals in mind.

The problem is that people with access to things like tutors and SAT prep were learning how to take the test, which meant learning vocabulary words via flash card as opposed to learning them by reading books and encountering these words “in the wild.”

I think tests should be designed to measure your overall progress, intelligence/knowledge, right? And I recognize that a standardized test with those delicious-to-fill-in bubbles can’t ask students in-depth questions about all the books they’ve read, so someone probably thought, “Hey, people who read a lot encounter a lot of words, so testing them on words is perhaps a reasonable substitute for testing how much reading and writing they’re doing.” Or, “Hey, here’s the vocabulary a student is likely to encounter in college, so the more of this they already know, the more likely they are to succeed in college.”

So we tried to test for a marker of something like reading, but then students were pushed towards studying those markers, not actually reading.

There is some level of this that has to do with No Child Left Behind, which I still blame GWB for, and it’s part of why I still consider him the worst American President in my lifetime. We’ve got a guy making a very good run at the slot, but man am I tired of people posing GWB as this cute old man who’s buddies with the Obamas.

NCLB was a mixed bag, but one of the big issues it presented was that schools that performed poorly on tests faced the possibility of ALL the teachers being replaced. Being fired and replaced with a new staff. Which, clearly, puts teachers, who get paid shit, in the position of saying, “Well, I could teach to the test and keep my job, or I could actually teach and probably get fired.” Not to mention that the value of teaching to the test is debate-able: I don’t think students really learn anything, but it may allow some students to do better on the SAT and get into a better college, which could improve their lives more than reading Catcher in the Rye.

When I was in school, in the era where I guess we left a lot of children behind, we had readathons where, once a year, we spent the entire day in the classroom reading. We had a school library with a legit school librarian. We had visiting authors do storytimes and readalouds.

When I was in junior high, the English teacher had an assignment where you were supposed to commit to reading a certain number of books for the semester. It didn’t matter what they were, and you could choose to commit to a lower number for a lower grade, but the assignment was very focused on reading entire books.

I did not go to special schools. I was in a public school, not an incredibly awesome one, and not in a state that was killing it, education-wise.

My experience was that reading books was very much a part of school, an expectation, and something schools genuinely set aside time and resources for.

On some level, I tire of this sort of thing.

Because seeking out the origin of the problem with readers is not really providing us new insight. “Testing is not being done correctly.” “Social media scrolling is more engaging than Faulkner”

There are not really useful conclusions because we are not acting on them.

This sort of thinking reminds me of something I read in a book called The Courage to be Disliked. The author talks about how we spend too much time thinking about the origin of a problem and not enough time thinking about how to solve it. The analogy is that if you went to a doctor while sick, and the doctor explained how you got sick, but did not help you out with your illness, you probably wouldn’t be too pleased with that, assuming you survived and all.

I think that’s where we’re at with books right now. We keep looking for the cause, the origin, and it kind of doesn’t matter whether we’re right or not because you can hardly even get parents to agree on not letting kids have smartphones in class. College professors KNOW that students using laptops in class are not paying attention, but there’s just not much they can do about it.

In most cases, we’re unwilling or unable to attack this problem at the likely origin, so further defining that origin seems like a waste of time.

The other thing that bugs me about this whole, “It’s the social medias!” and “The tests is bad!” thing is that it presumes that students who enter college without the stamina to read all of The Odyssey are fundamentally broken. In the YouTube summary of the Atlantic article, the YouTuber seems to feel that the problem is that kids were taught to read in an unwieldly, terrible way, and it kind of feels to me that he feels these kids are irreparably harmed by this.

I don’t agree.

Jog It Out

With jogging, you have to work up to it. We say, Okay, today, you’re going to do 2 minutes jogging, 2 minutes walking, and we’re doing that three times this week.

Next week, 2 minutes jogging, 1 minute walking, three times.

The third week, 2 minutes jogging, 30 seconds walking, three times.

Then we can just try a full-on, 20 minute jog. Doesn’t have to be fast, doesn’t have to be pretty, but just try and keep your feet moving for 20 minutes.

Even a very broken trainee can improve their situation. Even a very weak person can probably squat down into a chair with a broomstick on their back and work from there. Even someone with some orthopedic issues can probably modify their movements in such a way that they’re able to come a long ways.

I don’t think these kids are broken beyond repair. I think people who don’t read full books probably need some help, some guidance, and maybe some understanding.

So for the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking about a new plan I cooked up this year: +1Book. The idea being that everyone who hasn’t read a book in a while, you can do it, and we’ll work up to it together.

There are several elements that go into this, so hopefully you’ll stick with me.

You know…for a post about how it’s hard to get people to read long things…this is pretty damn long…