Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing new obstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications, from a variety of perspectives. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Hasn’t every generation felt that the younger cohort is going to hell in a handbasket? Haven’t professors always complained that educators at earlier levels are not adequately equipping their students? And haven’t students from time immemorial skipped the readings? And when I talk about it with nonacademics, certain predictable responses inevitably arise, all questioning the reality of the trend I describe.
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Since this development very directly affects my ability to do my job as I understand it, I talk about it a lot. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument-skills I used to be able to take for granted. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation-sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch.
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As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet.