Like many educators, I’ve been thinking about Rose Horowitch’s recent essay in The Atlantic titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” This provocative piece has been making the rounds on social media and blogs dedicated to higher education. Horowitch interviews faculty members in several prestigious institutions about their students’ reading habits. The results are grim: collegians are struggling to read well.
The article suggests two possible reasons for the ongoing decline in student reading skills. Not surprisingly, smartphones and other screens are a likely culprit. Observers such as Nicholas Carr, Jean Twenge, and Jonathan Haidt have been arguing for years that significant use of electronic devices negatively impacts attention spans, especially among children and teenagers. Professors are seeing the fruit of habitual screen usage when even exceptionally bright students struggle to read (and write) in college-level classes.
The culture of standardized testing is another likely factor in diminished reading skills among collegians. Standardized testing has come to dominate public education over the past two decades. Horowitch notes that,
No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.
Perhaps one reason that students who graduated from private schools seem to fair better than graduates of public schools is that the former have been less driven by standardized tests and the pedagogies they encourage. But all students, regardless of their academic background, seem to be struggling more than was the case even a decade ago.
Whatever the causes—and there are almost certainly more than two—many professors have decided they must pivot how they assign readings in their courses. Fewer are requiring entire books, even in literature courses. Others are opting for simpler texts that they hope accomplish the same student learning outcomes. Yet as faculty make these shifts, they also worry that these revised approaches might not promote a love of reading or provoke critical thinking among their students.
I serve as professor of faith and culture at North Greenville University. Our institution is not elite, nor do we seek to be. As a Christ-centered university, our vision of academic excellence rejects the elitism of higher education in favor of faithfulness to Truth and its implications. Because of our identity, our students are mostly drawn from our region. They attended area public high schools, private Christian K-12 schools, or were homeschooled. Many of them are first-generation college students. Some students excel academically and could succeed in the sorts of elite institutions Horowitch highlighted in her article. Others struggle to succeed in college. Most are somewhere in between these two ends of the spectrum.
Every discipline is different when it comes to reading expectations, so there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for pushing back against the decline in student reading skills. But surely professors across the disciplines can think creatively about how to raise the bar among their particular students in their particular courses. This should especially be true in Christian colleges and universities.
A distinctive vocation of Christian institutions should be encouraging students to become better readers. Believers are, after all, a people who are shaped profoundly by words. We trust that the Holy Spirit worked through human authors so that the Scriptures are the inspired, authoritative, and trustworthy written words of God. We further believe the teachings of those Scriptures are represented, restated, and reinforced in the best of the Christian intellectual tradition—a tradition that is itself mostly a collection of influential texts.
Those of us who teach in Christian schools have an obligation to help students to read well, even when this goes against the grain of higher education. This entails at least three core commitments.
First, we should encourage our students to read entire books and complete shorter writings such as essays. Sometimes, this means we must focus more on quality than quantity, especially in foundational courses. It is better to read less, but more deeply, if doing so instills in students a hunger to continue reading widely and deeply long after graduation.
Second, we should teach students to read reflectively, critically, and creatively. For both professors and students, this will require considerable patience in an age of distraction. But this patience will pay off as we help form students to be thoughtful readers in a world dominated increasingly by unreflective instincts and malformed affections.
Finally, we should teach students to read in community rather than as merely autonomous agents. Of course, each student should take responsibility for his or her own learning. But that learning should take place in Christ-centered academic communities where ideas are discussed, debated, and refined. Faithful communal reading includes conversation with the author(s), other readers, the Scriptures, and the best of the Christian tradition.
