Thomas Bertonneau: Students no longer are reading serious works
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series (to be published on Fridays). By analyzing the responses of his Survey of Literature students on their exams, Thomas F. Bertonneau, who teaches at SUNY-Oswego, offers insight into where education is failing today. The first essay sets the stage.
Since the mid-1980s, I have taught a standard survey of literature course to undergraduates in California, Michigan, and most recently upstate New York. This course introduces canonical texts, from Homer’s Odyssey to early medieval texts such as Beowulf or the Icelandic sagas, and sometimes later works. Over the years, my experience has chronicled what I believe to be a broad retreat from genuine literacy into a new, orally based “post-literacy” of emotion-drive mentality, egocentrism, “presentism,” and logical obtuseness. This retreat will have serious consequences for our society.
This three-part essay will describe my observations, based on the written responses of my students on exams. My course is a general education requirement that most students must take, usually in their freshman or sophomore year. Frequently, it serves as a prerequisite for other courses in English or the humanities, and where I currently teach, it is required for most education majors. In sum, this course offers a useful occasion for the general observation of undergraduates.
The Way They Used to Be
Even in the mid-1980s, student interest in literature was low. I was a teaching assistant and teaching fellow at U.C.L.A.—a first-tier branch of a world-class state university. Except for a few English majors, however, most students saw the course as an obstacle to be hurdled or, better yet, circumvented. Poetry-averse engineering majors and haughty pre-law types volubly asserted the unfairness and inconvenience of having to study Shakespeare or Cervantes. Many read the assigned books desultorily and quite a few disdained to read any of them at all. Obsessively clever, they figured out ways to cheat on the quizzes that I imposed to keep them to the reading schedule. When it came to writing a discursive examination, the consequences of “blowing off the course” tended to manifest themselves dramatically. Instead of specific allusions and meaningful argument, one collected blue book after blue book of vapid generality, half-remembered lecture phrases, and boilerplate rhetorical devices learned (or half-learned) in high school.
In the main, however, students used competent language. They completed their sentences in grammar not too defective, and they deployed vocabulary more or less at an adult level. And in those days one still saw students actually reading books, even if they were not the books assigned in their classes. I recall a moment when it seemed that every frat-boy on campus was lugging around the paperback of The World According to Garp. (I don't know why.)
As inexplicable as the Garp enthusiasm was, it stands out in contrast with the situation today. Reading is no longer a casual activity for students, and there appears to be a correlation between the dominant student attitude to reading and the level of student competence in writing.
Adults know what propels the descent: proliferating electronic media, video games, an ideologically inspired de-emphasis of rigorous learning at all levels of education, and a pervasive attitude of entitlement that students now absorb into their deficient souls the way babies drink nourishment from a mother’s breast. Flashing lights and three-minute “rap” songs stultify cognitive development. MTV, that bastion of the youth audience, nowadays specializes less in the music video than in the “reality show,” with its endless, formless palaver among “twenty-somethings” confined in a house.
These models of comportment are definitely oral rather than literate. A number of publications over the last decade, such as Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, have remarked on the phenomenon of a noticeable restriction of cognitive range in college undergraduates. What Bauerlein sees, I see: young people cut off from any elevated sense of who they are, frozen in the “cool” indifference of pop-culture, largely confined to the restrictions of the present moment, and hostile to maturity.
Until about five years ago, in a sustained spasm of unjustifiable hope, I regularly asked students in all my classes to write down the titles of the last five or ten books that they had read voluntarily or, if not voluntarily, then under compulsion in high school or college. In the very first years of my career, in California, a few students wrote down half a dozen titles, often including Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye or maybe a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. The occasional ferocious Ayn Rand follower turned up who had memorized long passages from Atlas Shrugged.
For ten years, the list has been non-existent. The only books that most students have read are the politically correct parables that nowadays figure in the high school curriculum in place of what used quaintly to go by the name of the “classics.” If, at seventeen, I had taken Maya Angelou’s Why the Caged Bird Sings to represent “literature,” I might have developed no interest in books, either. Thus student reading ability remains extraordinarily low even when, in college, the instructor figures out, as I have, how to cajole them into doing it. Students typically cannot make reliable or secure statements about characters or describe events in the story or, much less, frame an interpretation of this or that legend or saga. (I say “typically” to allow for the exceptions.) But by and large, even when today’s representative undergraduate has painfully “read” Beowulf, he has less to say about it than his faking counterpart of 1987, and what he says he says in a version of written English that hardly ascends above a level of sub-literacy....
Read entire article at http://popecenter.org
Since the mid-1980s, I have taught a standard survey of literature course to undergraduates in California, Michigan, and most recently upstate New York. This course introduces canonical texts, from Homer’s Odyssey to early medieval texts such as Beowulf or the Icelandic sagas, and sometimes later works. Over the years, my experience has chronicled what I believe to be a broad retreat from genuine literacy into a new, orally based “post-literacy” of emotion-drive mentality, egocentrism, “presentism,” and logical obtuseness. This retreat will have serious consequences for our society.
This three-part essay will describe my observations, based on the written responses of my students on exams. My course is a general education requirement that most students must take, usually in their freshman or sophomore year. Frequently, it serves as a prerequisite for other courses in English or the humanities, and where I currently teach, it is required for most education majors. In sum, this course offers a useful occasion for the general observation of undergraduates.
The Way They Used to Be
Even in the mid-1980s, student interest in literature was low. I was a teaching assistant and teaching fellow at U.C.L.A.—a first-tier branch of a world-class state university. Except for a few English majors, however, most students saw the course as an obstacle to be hurdled or, better yet, circumvented. Poetry-averse engineering majors and haughty pre-law types volubly asserted the unfairness and inconvenience of having to study Shakespeare or Cervantes. Many read the assigned books desultorily and quite a few disdained to read any of them at all. Obsessively clever, they figured out ways to cheat on the quizzes that I imposed to keep them to the reading schedule. When it came to writing a discursive examination, the consequences of “blowing off the course” tended to manifest themselves dramatically. Instead of specific allusions and meaningful argument, one collected blue book after blue book of vapid generality, half-remembered lecture phrases, and boilerplate rhetorical devices learned (or half-learned) in high school.
In the main, however, students used competent language. They completed their sentences in grammar not too defective, and they deployed vocabulary more or less at an adult level. And in those days one still saw students actually reading books, even if they were not the books assigned in their classes. I recall a moment when it seemed that every frat-boy on campus was lugging around the paperback of The World According to Garp. (I don't know why.)
As inexplicable as the Garp enthusiasm was, it stands out in contrast with the situation today. Reading is no longer a casual activity for students, and there appears to be a correlation between the dominant student attitude to reading and the level of student competence in writing.
Adults know what propels the descent: proliferating electronic media, video games, an ideologically inspired de-emphasis of rigorous learning at all levels of education, and a pervasive attitude of entitlement that students now absorb into their deficient souls the way babies drink nourishment from a mother’s breast. Flashing lights and three-minute “rap” songs stultify cognitive development. MTV, that bastion of the youth audience, nowadays specializes less in the music video than in the “reality show,” with its endless, formless palaver among “twenty-somethings” confined in a house.
These models of comportment are definitely oral rather than literate. A number of publications over the last decade, such as Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, have remarked on the phenomenon of a noticeable restriction of cognitive range in college undergraduates. What Bauerlein sees, I see: young people cut off from any elevated sense of who they are, frozen in the “cool” indifference of pop-culture, largely confined to the restrictions of the present moment, and hostile to maturity.
Until about five years ago, in a sustained spasm of unjustifiable hope, I regularly asked students in all my classes to write down the titles of the last five or ten books that they had read voluntarily or, if not voluntarily, then under compulsion in high school or college. In the very first years of my career, in California, a few students wrote down half a dozen titles, often including Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye or maybe a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. The occasional ferocious Ayn Rand follower turned up who had memorized long passages from Atlas Shrugged.
For ten years, the list has been non-existent. The only books that most students have read are the politically correct parables that nowadays figure in the high school curriculum in place of what used quaintly to go by the name of the “classics.” If, at seventeen, I had taken Maya Angelou’s Why the Caged Bird Sings to represent “literature,” I might have developed no interest in books, either. Thus student reading ability remains extraordinarily low even when, in college, the instructor figures out, as I have, how to cajole them into doing it. Students typically cannot make reliable or secure statements about characters or describe events in the story or, much less, frame an interpretation of this or that legend or saga. (I say “typically” to allow for the exceptions.) But by and large, even when today’s representative undergraduate has painfully “read” Beowulf, he has less to say about it than his faking counterpart of 1987, and what he says he says in a version of written English that hardly ascends above a level of sub-literacy....