University Professor ‘Terrified’ By The Sharp Decline In Student Performance — ’The Worst I’ve Ever Encountered’
"What's mind-boggling is that students DON'T EVEN TRY."
laflor | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro If you follow the news in the parenting and education sphere, you've surely heard all about how there seems to be a pretty shocking literacy crisis among today's young people.
Teachers have reported being astonished by how poorly prepared their students seem to be for basic reading and writing skills, with blame being placed on everything from technology to parenting.
Until recently, the crisis seemed to mostly be concentrated on Gen Alpha and the youngest among Gen Z, kids currently in middle and high school. But college instructors say that's far from the case, and now even professors at some of the most elite universities in the world are sounding alarms about their students' lack of literacy skills.
A university English professor has noticed a 'terrifying' decline in her students' literacy skills and general performance.
In a Reddit post, the professor shared that she works at "a university on the east coast of the USA," an area of course known for its prestigious universities. And she said she's never seen the crisis this bad in her entire career.
Kzenon | Canva Pro
"What strikes me the most is the decline in student writing and comprehension skills that is among the worst I've ever encountered," she wrote in her post, adding that "these are SHARP declines."
The professor said her students 'don't read,' write terrible essays, and 'don't even try' in her class.
The professor went on to say that when she recently assigned an exam focused on a reading selection, she "had numerous students inquire if it's open book." That is, of course, preposterous — the entire point of a reading exam is to test your comprehension of the reading you were supposed to do!
But that's just it — she said her students simply "don't read." And not in the sense that we all slacked off a bit in school, buying Cliffs Notes (if you're of a certain age) about "Pride & Prejudice" or Googling the plot of "Moby Dick" instead of reading the book.
She said that reading an entire book is basically foreign to her students, a problem many educators online noticed as well.
And when her students get poor grades, they expect multiple second chances. "They expect to be able to submit assignments more than once. They were shocked at essay grades and asked if they could resubmit for higher grades," she wrote. "I told them, also, no. They were very surprised."
The decline she's witnessed has left her shocked. "What's mind-boggling is that students DON'T EVEN TRY," she said. "Students used to be determined and the standard of learning used to be much higher." And it's left her feeling essentially like throwing up her hands.
Even educators at prestigious Ivy League schools say their students simply can't handle reading an entire book.
Without a doubt, this English professor is not alone in her experience. A recent article in The Atlantic has gone viral for painting an even more dire picture of this crisis with a title that says it all: "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books."
In it, journalist Rose Horowitch spoke to professors at some of the most elite institutions in the country, from Stanford to Columbia to the University of Chicago, who all said that even just reading, let alone understanding, full-length books is beyond many of their students' grasp.
In just one of several examples, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco said that he has had to retool his Herman Melville unit, which used to focus on "Moby-Dick" — long an essential novel most American students encounter at one point or another — to instead center on the author's short stories and novellas like "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Billy Budd, Foretopman." He's resigned himself to the change. "One has to adjust to the times,” he told The Atlantic.
Many educators blame Bush and Obama-era education policies like No Child Left Behind and the Common Core standards meant to address them.
So what has changed those "times" that Professor Delbanco mentioned? Many educators lay the blame on George W. Bush's 2000s overhaul of education, known as "No Child Left Behind," and the Common Core standards adopted in the 2010s to address its intense focus on standardized testing. (NCLB was repealed and replaced in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act, but that legislation retained much of NCLB's focus on testing and assessments.)
With regards to English skills, NCLB and Common Core resulted in teachers essentially having no choice but to prioritize shorter, more informational passages, often in nonfiction, in order to "teach to the test" — that is, to ensure their students would test as highly as possible on the litany of standardized tests required by NCLB, which included punitive measures for schools and teachers whose students tested poorly.
However, being able to tackle a short nonfiction passage for a standardized test is an entirely different set of skills than digesting a novel and all its nuances. As teacher Mike Szkolka put it to The Atlantic, "There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?" Hence, many of today's students simply don't know how to do so.
Some of you are surely saying, "So what if a kid can't read Tolstoy?" But reading books is one of the key ways we first encounter the wider world with all its nuances and, perhaps most importantly, contrasts to our own lives and experiences. In short, reading, and the humanities in general, are how we learn empathy. That's why they're called "the humanities" in the first place.
You need look no further than a news headline or any social media post about a hot-button topic to see that our society is suffering from a terrifying dearth of empathy nowadays. That many of our politicians are hell-bent on ensuring empathy stays out of our schools — that's what the right-wing crusade against "social-emotional learning" is all about — and that books have been among their first lines of attack is surely not coincidental.
So, where do we go from here? It's hard to say. There are still plenty of kids who love to get lost in a book, and even the social media blamed for hobbling young people's attention spans is rife with communities of book lovers of all ages. But something's clearly got to give.
Encouraging a love of reading in kids by returning to the old way of doing things — reading books to them from the very beginning of their lives — seems like a good place to start. Our future may, quite frankly, depend on it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.