by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
Earlier this month, an essay with the provocative title “College English Majors Can’t Read” began making its way around the Internet.
The essay’s starting point is a 2024 study of literacy skills in English majors at two public universities in Kansas. The study’s authors asked students to analyze the first seven chapters of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House – a novel assumed to be challenging but not atypical for a university-level course for English majors.
The results were depressing.
Only four of the 85 students understood the passage entirely. A majority (58%) understood very little. Around four in 10 understood half of the sentences they read.
These weren’t atypical students, either. All the participants took a standardized reading test prior to the study. All but six had scores that marked them as competent high school students.
One of the more striking findings is that participants struggled with metaphor. Here’s a passage from Bleak House:
“On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.”
One student’s analysis:
Describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers?…A cat?
Admittedly, I’ve cherry-picked the funniest example. But the inability to understand figurative language was widespread. The authors found that:
Most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.
It’s probably not surprising that these problematic readers believed that they would have no difficulty reading the rest of the book.
The study also found a wide array – let’s call it intellectual laziness. Students were provided with dictionaries and access to the internet during their test. Few bothered looking up unfamiliar terms. That resulted in students reading the book’s opening sentence:
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
…and concluding that “O.K. Two characters it’s pointed out this Michaelmas and Lord Chancellor described as sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”
Now admittedly, the opening sentence of Bleak House packs in a lot of things that are unfamiliar to modern American readers. Until 1882, the United Kingdom had two different court systems—common law courts, which (roughly) heard criminal law cases, and the Court of Chancery, which (again, roughly) heard civil law cases. Lincoln’s Inn Hall was the home of the Court of Chancery. The Lord Chancellor was the chief judge of the Court of Chancery. And Michaelmas Term is the court’s fall term, running from October through December.
You wouldn’t expect a college undergraduate to know all of this ahead of reading Bleak House. But you would expect that they could use the internet to figure out that Michaelmas Term is a time period, not a person.
Concerns about reading proficiency are nothing new. After all, Why Johnny Can’t Read topped bestseller lists for 37 consecutive weeks, in 1955-6!
But it’s also undeniably true that reading proficiency has declined in recent years, with a noticeable drop right after Covid.
Evidence is also mounting that the ubiquitous presence of smartphones is eroding our ability to concentrate on long, dense texts.
I’ve watched this happen to my own reading skills. Our son, Matt, graduated from NC State earlier this month, with a major in philosophy and a minor in English. I was incredibly flattered when he asked me to read and comment on all of his final papers for his philosophy classes.
I was also shocked at how hard it was.
I wasn’t always familiar with—or in some cases, had just forgotten lots of—the primary texts Matt was using. So, I had to read those before I could even start on Matt’s papers. The result was I spent 12 hours reading and commenting on a 15-page paper. I used to grade 20 similarly sized papers in a week.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to getting these skills back (or to developing them in the first place).
You learn to read challenging texts by reading challenging texts. And you’ll read challenging texts only if you already love to read.
That’s why we’re currently hard at work putting together our annual Summer Reading Program. Our goal is to get kids excited about reading.
Because kids who are excited about reading turn into the kinds of young adults who know that the Lord Chancellor being addressed by “a large advocate with great whiskers” is about a lawyer with a huge beard, not a cat.
