For the first tutorial for one of my classes, the TA made a peculiar statement. He proclaimed to the class, “None of you know how to read.” He did not literally mean that we were all illiterate and would struggle to get through the most basic prose, but instead, he suggested that we lacked the fundamental skills required to get to grips with course readings. This could be deemed a generalisation by this TA or even a cynical outlook on his new class. But worrying is that this seems to be a widely held notion. Greg Wrenn, associate professor at James Madison University, noted that many students would admit “they’ve never read a book cover to cover in their lives.“ Nicholas Dames teaches literature humanities at Columbia and found that students are no longer “prepared to read books” and struggle to even read through sonnets. Such a development seems troubling. Universities are supposed to be a bastion of high learning and enlightened thinking; the fact that many people turn up to these respected institutions without the ability to meet lofty challenges suggests something is very wrong with the state of education.

An unsupportive system: 

Rather than the entire blame being attributed to student laziness, standardised testing is culpable in this worrying development. Modern exams are dominated by multiple-choice and short answer question styles, whether that be at the college or high school level. This is all good and well for science students, but it’s a natural barrier to genuinely understanding texts and readings for humanities students. A multiple-choice question cannot allow one to explore deeper analysis for a text beyond fundamental notions of ‘x happened…’ or ‘X tells us Y,’ ignoring the subtlety of readings that a more extended essay can explore and discern.  

Of course, not all humanities assessments are multiple-choice, but the other evaluation forms hardly inspire a love for reading. Essay assessments are often restricted by a word count far below what is necessary for a complete analysis. How can someone analyse a 30-page reading properly when they only have 800 words to do so? Even book reviews that are occasionally employed across the humanities often focus on very broad, base-level questions of what the book is about rather than asking why the book is the way it is.  

Omnipotent technology: 

With all of this, that doesn’t mean students are totally off the hook. Even if a student has no classes that involve a strong number of readings, they still have plenty of time outside of class to cultivate reading. It costs them nothing to go to a library, pick up a book and spend the day engrossed in a book. And yet, this seemingly is not happening. Instead, there is a focus on the short-term dopamine hit that social media and the internet give our minds over the long-term joy of reading a book. A study conducted over 20 years found that our attention spans, on average, can only focus on one thing for 45 seconds, which is down from over two minutes. In 2016, only 16% of teenagers said that they read every day, while daily social media averages were at six hours. Therefore, it is unsurprising that when faced with the challenge of reading, many students fold instantly because it does not offer that quick feeling of satisfaction and easy entertainment; it requires thought, concentration and patience, three things social media actively prevents us from having. Being an elite institution, U of T professors expect students to live up to the university name and be prepared to study at an elite level. Students can see this is an unrealistic expectation and that it is too hard, but this kind of thinking won’t cultivate a stronger love for reading or solve the problem. But that is not to say that universities can’t meet students halfway.  

A way forward?:

Simply adding more books to curriculums won’t help make people love reading if they already struggle to read a lot. Instead, a change needs to come in the admissions process. Most universities focus on developing ‘your story’ when you apply, wanting to know about a moment of struggle or leadership. This may tell an admissions department about yourself, but to be rather cold, it says very little about your intelligence or ability to handle class material, which, in very simplistic, binary terms, are the central tenants of university education. That is not to say personal stories don’t have their place, but so do academic work. What admissions processes should involve is each student applying should be required to write a book analysis on a book of their choice, with a title of their choice. That way, students are given the opportunity to become engrossed in a book of their choice before arriving at a world that requires such engrossment, allowing them to develop the necessary skills needed to tackle class readings. Furthermore, more classes should do away with set readings and instead require students to go off and find their own readings to discuss in class. This makes it harder for students to get away with not doing the readings because the professor just summarises them and is instead forced to read widely and more extensively while also developing independent learning, things they would’ve struggled to develop through set readings they could just ignore.