In the Media: The Elite College Students who can't read books
A recent article featured in The Atlantic starts like this: “Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”
Dames understanding asked himself, how can this be? Until a student came to his office in the Fall of 2022 and shared “that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.” (source) This helped Dames understand that “it’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”
What is the value of reading an entire book?
For those students who don’t read entire books in their earlier education experience say that, “the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.” What’s more, “students arrive on campus (in college) with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.”
As on Stanford Professor said, “we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts”.
What’s the Waldorf Education Approach to Reading?
Waldorf Education fosters a lifelong love of reading. This means that our approach is steady and research backed by immersing literature into different curriculum components and building skills over time. Students are supported to feel empowered in reading and the joy of reading kept alive! Our students, starting in 4th grade read anywhere from 3-7 full books a year (for example, 5th graders typically read 3-5 books per year, 7th graders typically read 5-7 books per school year).
Students also experience reading curriculum that challenges them to ask question, think critically and consider characters and plot-lines in totality. This builds focus, attention to detail and follow through for long form texts, preparing them for future challenges!
