{"id":1746,"date":"2025-08-21T08:36:31","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T15:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/?p=1746"},"modified":"2026-01-08T10:24:02","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T18:24:02","slug":"these-students-nowadays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/?p=1746","title":{"rendered":"“These students nowadays…”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The November 2024 issue of The Atlantic<\/em> contains an article (\u201cThe Elite College Students who Can\u2019t Read Books\u201d) that has been raising eyebrows and ire since. In it, Rose Horowitch notes that academics at some prestigious universities have concluded that few incoming freshmen are ready for extended reading, many admitting that they have never been required to read a full-length adult novel. The article has produced a firestorm of responses ranging from the shocked (\u201cHow terrible!\u201d) to the cynical (\u201cSo what were you expecting?\u201d); others scorn her claims, including one who denounces Horowitch for her lack of statistical support, using this single data point to justify a blanket assertion that The Atlantic<\/em> is the worst magazine in the country. Irony deficiency isn\u2019t officially recognized by the AMA, but maybe it should be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find myself caught in a dilemma. I have some perspectives won from my time in the trenches, but I have no statistical foundation here either. Still, I can cautiously echo Horowitch\u2019s intuitions. In my three decades of teaching some unconventionally \u201celite\u201d college prep students online, I have noticed a significant cultural and behavioral drift. My uneasy sense is that students don\u2019t come into our classes as well-prepared as they were when I started doing this in 1995. They know more about a lot of things, but they seem less aware of their relative importance or hierarchical relationships; they tend to know no one<\/em> thing in real depth. Reading is perhaps only a surface manifestation of a deeper issue. For whatever reason, few seem as ready to probe and challenge core suppositions as once they were. Some of this may have to do with the attention-grabbing nature of the Internet (should we blame Steve Jobs for inventing the smart phone?) or perhaps it is more a symptom of childhoods that are so managed by parents that kids have less and less opportunity to do their own thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dichotomy between readers and non-readers that Horowitch presupposes is arguably oversimplified. The phenomenon, if true, is surely important, but it is easy to misdiagnose complex chains of causality that run the length and breadth of a culture. In her defense, Horowitch admits<\/em> that her observations are rooted in relatively shallow anecdotal soil. That limits the extent to which one can claim their universality or objectivity, but it doesn\u2019t make them wrong. There are no broad statistical studies addressing her question, at least not yet; it\u2019s not clear how one could<\/em> put such a study together without setting so many parameters to arbitrary values that the whole would be useless. Demanding quantitative metrics for everything is one of the besetting intellectual failings of our culture: while numbers are very important, a valid perception can be advanced without statistical support \u2014 and in fact almost always is. Ideas don\u2019t get quantified until<\/em> they have been articulated clearly enough to submit to more methodical investigation. To decry Horowitch\u2019s lack of statistical method is to reject any intuition \u2014 which is where most ideas come from, even if they ultimately accumulate statistics beneath them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general<\/em> the students I have taught lately seem<\/em> less ready to think for themselves or to push for answers that make real sense to them<\/em>, and to assume that the answers in and of themselves really matter, and that bringing oneself into alignment with enduring truth is a task worth doing. More seem eager to get The Right Answer \u2014 something that can be defended against charges of being wrong, rather than championing important or enduring truths on their own terms. The so-called culture wars have defined a bleak new kind of casualty \u2014 an atrophied intellectual commitment, in which one\u2019s ideas are valued more because of whose side<\/em> they seem to support than for their intrinsic validity and rigor. Thinking for yourself is broadly suspect, and perhaps subversive, especially if it leaves one confused about what Our Side thinks vs. what Their Side thinks. Under such partisan rubrics, preserving the boundary is paramount. Many people (not just students) claim or repudiate ideas more to signal tribal loyalty than because they have identified an intrinsically valuable truth. If holding an idea \u2014 true or not \u2014 is the sole passport to being accepted by the people you want to be like, it is merely a ticket to the inner circle. I don\u2019t see this as being a particular blind spot of the left or the right: both sides are so preoccupied in trying to win the game that they haven\u2019t given any thought to the fact that most of it is pointless. The meaning becomes just a pathway to an unexamined goal. How you came by the idea, or what its actual weight is in your life, is unimportant, because statistical norms don\u2019t really measure<\/em> personal histories or the extent of one\u2019s commitment, and what is really important (it is thought) is whose side you are on. If this is so, we should not rush to judgment about what has brought it about. It may partly be blamed on current pedagogical methods, I suppose, but a good deal more may reflect changed standards of meaning in a culture that is hopelessly at sea, lacking an anchor for its values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some may be a pragmatic response to\u00a0paying<\/em>\u00a0for education today: every dollar spent needs to promise practical material advantage if one is to survive. But where the perceived value of an idea lies in what it will garner in the marketplace, the quest for new understanding of anything is doomed to failure. What previous generations considered critical truths \u2014 true because they were valuable in themselves, to be held at the cost of life, fortune, and sacred honor \u2014 have become little more than a kind of coin, slowly crumbling under Gresham\u2019s law (\u201cBad money drives out good\u201d). If we really are, as political talking heads on both sides of the aisle seem eager to tell us, in a \u201cpost-truth\u201d society, framed by the convenience of the moment to assume \u201calternative facts\u201d, our culture offers little reason to care\u00a0what<\/em> truth is, provided only that it prove profitable in the short run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time and life are in short supply. People are willing to invest themselves \u2014 that is, their real identities, their personal stock of time, their material resources, and their love \u2014 in what seems to them to be genuinely important. They will pay lip service to almost anything else (at least to a point) as a means to an end, but they will give the least effort they can for any task that doesn\u2019t provide real personal reward. People are, in one way or another, rather practical. We learn early and pragmatically that we have only a certain amount of time available to us. However we use it, it will involve an opportunity cost. Usually only in retrospect do we sort out what was worth spending the time on, and what was nothing more than accumulating rotations of the ratrace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A student\u2019s implicit challenge to the educator, then, is effectively, \u201cIf you don\u2019t show me something to help me get what I want, why should I spend any more time than necessary on it?\u201d On these terms, there are only losers. What takes learning beyond that point is not quantifiable: it\u2019s love \u2014 a love that invites a self-emptying commitment to the object. When learning is infused (from both sides) with genuine commitment, we find that connection and engagement follow \u2014 and a willingness to spend life in the pursuit of the truth \u2014 a truth that transcends the world\u2019s shallow and transient values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horowitch\u2019s enthusiasm for reading the whole of the Iliad<\/em> is not misbegotten. Her claim, however, that \u201cto understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind\u2019s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad<\/em> \u2014 all of it,\u201d is. I have read the Iliad<\/em> in English and in Greek, and it\u2019s grand. But it will not deliver that unattainable goal. The most thorough student cannot appreciate more than a tiny fraction of humankind\u2019s greatest achievements. To command them all, one would have to have experienced all the generations of mankind in every place. The best we can hope to do is to sample as deeply and widely as we can, and to realize that the newest thing is not necessarily the best or the only one. If we bring to the task a seemly humility and generosity of spirit, perhaps when we do encounter the Iliad<\/em>, we will have the wit to see why people have thought it important for 2500 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Scholars Online, in my Western Literature to Dante course \u2014 pitched at ninth-grade students, note \u2014 we do<\/em> read the Iliad<\/em> \u2014 and in three weeks. In the next two, we read the Odyssey<\/em>. Do the students get everything out of it? Of course not. That\u2019s the point of classics \u2014 or of any good work that one is willing to treat with like respect, whether it\u2019s part of a formal canon or not. We can never exhaust the great ones. Therein lies a certain disappointment, perhaps \u2014 but freighted with the long-term prospect of ever-increasing discovery and delight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The November 2024 issue of The Atlantic contains an article (\u201cThe Elite College Students who Can\u2019t Read Books\u201d) that has been raising eyebrows and ire since. In it, Rose Horowitch notes that academics at some prestigious universities have concluded that few incoming freshmen are ready for extended reading, many admitting that they have never been required to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,7,60,30,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character-formation","category-edu","category-study-methods","category-technology","category-writ"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1746"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1756,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions\/1756"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scholarsonline.org\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}