As the parent of a kid with a PhD in humanities, this is certainly a relevant topic. Academia in general is using adjuncts and non-tenured faculty and the academic job market is going to have to change. Unionization of grad students and part-time faculty along with strikes, is having some impact, but the writing is on the wall for humanities.
In English, the loss of a canon was inevitable. Young people don’t read books any more and I even wonder about attention span. (They reject email over texts!). The skills learned in humanities majors are not valued or concrete, and career outcome, though wide, is not always immediate. With the cost of college/loans, vocational paths are more popular.
I just read of another college (sorry, I forget which one) that shut down its English department and two other humanities, entirely.
I wonder if lack of reading is related to “balanced literacy” instruction. Kids who can benefit from phonics (all of them!) show up as dyslexic or otherwise learning disabled until having a corrective phonics program. Some do have dyslexia while others learned to dislike reading.
That is not how dyslexia works. Kids that have it don’t just “Dislike Reading,” And actually getting diagnosed with dyslexia isn’t easy or cheap. Getting real treatment is also not easy and it certainly isn’t cheap, and rarely is offered in schools. In our experience, it wasn’t related to phonics at all either, but there is more than one type of dyslexia, so that may be true for some. I don’t know.
I think I must have not been clear. Separately from children who in fact have dyslexia, there are children who aren’t taught to read properly and are misdiagnosed with dyslexia. Balanced literacy does everyone a disservice, and most harms those kids who do have dyslexia.
I’m saying that kids who don’t learn to read properly may end up disliking reading. There are kids with dyslexia who end up loving reading. Separate issues.
That’s great @FallGirl. Mine do too. Though they are in their 30’s. I have read that book reading is in decline among young people can try to cite), and you almost never see a young person reading on the subway, even in Cambridge/Boston, or in a cafe for that matter. Though of course reading is happening online all the time.
All of my kids love reading for pleasure and (at very least) read voraciously during school vacations and the summer. At least one of my kids reads for pleasure on the weekends and when she can manage it during the school week.
However, I have certainly noticed that my kids read less than I did at their ages, and this has been true at every stage except possibly when they were in early elementary school.
I think it is a combination of having scheduled activities demanding their time and also the strong pull of various screens, both the activities and their access to screens have increased as they’ve aged. When I was their age, I had a lot of time with nothing much to do and the easiest form of solo entertainment was walking to the closest branch of the public library. Thus most of my free time was spent either reading or with friends (phone, in person) or even reading with friends. This isn’t even a rant against social media or gaming. I am just pointing out that there are so many competing demands and forms of entertainment available in 2023 compared to when I was a child and teen; it is no wonder that reading gets less time. Everything gets less time.
I expect the quote was taken, without full context. For example, some students may not have initially known subject/verb in a non-standard passage from 1800s literature, then caught on quickly as it was explained. This type of sentence structure labels is not tested on the ACT/SAT or any other admission criteria and may not be taught/remembered well across the varied HS backgrounds.
In the most recent Harvard senior survey, the median reported GPA was 3.85 with extremely few having non A/A- averages, so I expect few Harvard students are generally getting C’s in English courses, as was previously implied.
I hadn’t heard of it either, and was recommended the “Sold a Story” podcast. I recommend the podcast for anyone interested in why reading skills have been lower across the country. (This instruction may have impacted one of my kids.)
Maybe people are stopping reading books because the quality of writing is going down. This is happening possibly because of the low quality of new Eng Lit graduates
There is astonishing amount of excellent literature out there. I don’t think there is or will be any shortage of great fiction or non-fiction to read due to a lack of English majors. But there may be fewer people who can fully appreciate it.
English lit majors are not creative writing majors, and there is no rule saying people only read recent literary output. So I don’t think there’s a mechanism for a downward spiral between recent grads and readers…
I said it in jest. But let me tell you what else is happening. In high school, in eng lit class, kids are expected to critique old books in the context of current values, without regards to context. Clearly kids are not going to feel fondly about all the old literature that they just spent several pages criticizing.
…and yet we of the female persuasion manage to feel fondly about books written, oh, pretty much any time up until now, that telegraph inherently sexist values…
