Teaching to Read Whole Books
Schools and the sad state of reading
The other week, I read with dismay an article from the Atlantic on "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books". They give a simple but unsettling reason for why: They've never been asked in school to read a whole book. Pitt News goes even further, with 41% of University of Pittsburgh students surveyed saying that even when they are assigned a whole book, they almost never read the whole thing.
A New York Times opinion piece adds there's a simple reason why: reading books doesn't seem relevant to students' career paths.
Studying books in school is a difficult task. It's difficult to teach students to read them well, and difficult to check they're actually reading them. What's more, I agree with the Times: reading books isn't, strictly speaking, immediately relevant to most career paths in the modern world.
But, it's still important for schools to be assigning books.
To start with, having students read whole books - assuming, unlike the University of Pittsburgh students, they're actually reading them - takes time. Personally (to pick the Atlantic's example) I could finish Pride and Prejudice in a day, write a short review of it the next day, and then read another book after that. It might feel like a firehose, but I could.
But I know I'm unusual. It took long practice to learn to read that fast - I remember that when I was younger, I'd frequently skim and miss a lot. And also, when I actually read Pride and Prejudice, I did take longer. Of course, I was reading a few other books at the same time, but college students will have other classes at the same time too.
Plus, the practice matters in other ways too. When I was several years out of college, I was spending too much time online (mostly reading short pieces like forum posts) and not reading many books. After a while, I realized - to my consternation - my attention span had dropped, and I was finding it harder to keep reading books. When I saw (from the Atlantic) that Professor Dames' students report their reading load feels impossible and that they can't remember details, it felt like what I remembered.
Several months of regularly heading outside with a book and without my phone cured me. But, that cure takes time and dedication - I think more dedication than most college students would be willing to put in, and more than I would've been willing to put in if I didn't love books.
But even if teenagers get assigned books and read them, most teenagers aren't going to understand most good books right away. I read several of Plato's dialogs as a teenager, and didn't understand most of them. I read 2001: A Space Odyssey before I was a teenager, and missed most of it. When I reread as an adult the books I last read as a teenager, I typically realize how much I missed - and some of it is definitely imperfect memory, but I don't think that's most of it.
I'm not blaming myself. Like most teenagers, I didn't have the background knowledge or life perspective or interest yet to understand much of the books, and sometimes not even the skill at piecing together allusions and metaphors and hints to notice. 2001's themes about secrecy went way over my head; I skimmed most of Plato's theoretical analysis of justice to rush to the worldbuilding around his ideal republic; I half-grasped The Scarlet Letter's themes around secrecy and self-identity but largely shrugged at them since I couldn't connect.
Part of studying these books in class, obviously, should be to teach the students this. Roman schools taught students a lot by explaining all the allusions and metaphors in epic poetry. Modern schools explain - or at least used to explain - topics like symbolism and contrasting character arcs from books like The Scarlet Letter. All this is very good. But unless you're planning to spend several whole days (not just class periods) or more on each work like Roman schools did, you can't unpack everything in them. And a lot of what you do unpack, students aren't going to be interested in.
What's more, it's hard to check in a group (such as a class) whether someone really understands books they've read. 41% of University of Pittsburgh students hardly ever even read all of an assigned book, but presumably a lot of them are still passing the classes. I remember my own classes, and I'm not surprised. Even in smaller discussion sections, it's hard to talk to any one student long enough to be sure they've read every part of the book. Checking whether they really understand it is even harder - anyone can skim an article on themes in The Scarlet Letter or 2001 and parrot it back. A good conversation can probably reveal the difference, but an uninterested student might not be up for one even in the unlikely case the professor or TA has time.
With all these problems, I'm not surprised many teachers have given up trying - even when they want to try.
That said, if high school and college students aren't reading whole books, they're missing out on a lot.
They're missing out not just on reading well-developed lengthy arguments or lengthy detailed pictures of characters in the books; they're not just missing out on lots of fun. They're missing out on the experience of seeing and learning to see those well-developed lengthy arguments and pictures.
That wouldn't just teach them to read later books in a deeper way. Reading more detailed arguments in books and analyzing how they fit together has helped me with my blog posts, with debating people online or in person, and even at work with debating design decisions with my coworkers.1 Reading detailed pictures of people in books has also helped me empathize with and understand people unlike myself, which has helped me understand the world better (both the present and history) and connect with real-life people.
I've had classes without books: the history portion of my high school American history-and-literature combined course was taught from lectures and primary source excerpts, and my college economics course was taught from lecture notes and handouts. But I could feel how that was necessarily limited in detail. In economics, that was pardonable due to the topic. In American history - if it hadn't been for the literature portion of the class, it would've been very impoverished and given us little more than a list of facts rather than a real picture of the time period.
True, as the New York Times piece says, this isn't immediately relevant for most jobs. But it helps develop skills that are. And for real understanding, reading whole books is invaluable.
So what should be done?
This problem isn't just a school problem - the British National Literacy Trust recently found only 35% of kids enjoy reading, the fewest ever seen in their surveys. I'd recommend to any parents that they read to their kids and encourage them to read; that's what my parents did and I'm sure that's what worked for me.
But for schools, the solution is more difficult. I'm convinced, though, they should try. One of the functions of schools is to introduce students to areas they might not encounter otherwise; literature - both fiction and nonfiction - is definitely one of them. It might not teach them specific transferable skills, but it'll teach them a deeper understanding of life.
There're good things about the traditional literature curriculum. Plato and Shakespeare taught me not to be scared of old books; The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby gave me a picture of American history as well as literary motifs.2 And, I do think it's important to read and try to parse through some deep books - like Plato's dialogs - that you don't understand at first. That said - when most students are hardly reading at all, I'm willing to give most of that up to pique their interest. It's more important to introduce kids to books they'll like.
So, schools should assign fewer books, and more interesting books. They can teach symbolism and noticing pictures painted from those fewer, more interesting books. Ideally, they can spend more time digging deeper, not just in lectures but in small-group discussion sections. If done well, it can also fill in any missing background information and walk them through the process of noticing themes.
Ideally, students could even pick the books that look more interesting to them. That would take a lot of coordination on the school's part, of course. I'm convinced pushing students to actually read books would be well worth it. But - even without that, I'm sure there're many other books that would appeal to more teenagers than the current canon. The current canon is well worth reading - I've sung Shakespeare's praises myself - but reading itself is even more valuable.
Of course, I'm talking about an ideal setup here. The Atlantic describes time pressure around standardized tests; I can't speak to that. I'm sure a lot of school boards would be skeptical about replacing Shakespeare and Hawthorne (who are, indeed, good authors!) with more immediately-attractive authors.
But something should be done. To make more general the Atlantic's conclusion, "To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read."
Admittedly, another big thing that helped was high school debate club (another experience I'd recommend to any interested teenager). But without the raw material from books, I would barely have known what to do in debate club.
Though, The Scarlet Letter tells at least as much about Hawthorne's own age as the age he set it in!
I wonder if you have read David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous. In it he argues that in a world where knowledge was recorded on paper we came to think of knowledge itself as being shaped like a book. With the coming of the Internet, he argues, we discovered that knowledge is shaped more like a web, and that part of that discovery is the realization that knowledge is a much more fluid and uncertain thing than we once supposed.
The irony, of course, is that he made this argument in a book. Perhaps what we can take from this is that reading whole books may become a smaller part of the typical student's education in a webbed world, but that there are perhaps still subjects and/or forms of argument for which a book is the appropriate medium. So, yes, while modern education may be shaped more like a web than like a book, books still have their place as nodes on that web, and students do still need to be able to deal with them.
Ohh! This (below) reminded me of something:
> "That said - when most students are hardly reading at all, I'm willing to give most of that up to pique their interest."
Marshwiggle read an article about how someone... who had an English class* full of about-to-fail-to-graduate-because-of-this-class High School seniors, he set the following (iirc) terms for his class:
"We will read Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Come to class, participate in class discussion, and you will pass." And the dude ended up successfully TEACHING them all a ton! (There's a lot in those stories, literarily-speaking - they're brilliant - and they're short! And also, they "read" as having unmistakable evidence of understanding of the human condition--even to the inner-city high-schoolers who were on the receiving end, in that situation!)
* "English class" as in the literature kind, not ESL!