Our troubled educational systems... 

A columnist I read often, had an interesting conversation with us (readers) yesterday. He told of an article in the Atlantic magazine, which I will acknowledge as a fairly erudite publication. The article discussed an amazing though not necessarily startling fact. Today’s young college students are incapable of reading a novel to the end.

You read that correctly. Young people have lost the ability, the drive, the perseverance to completely read a book like Crime & Punishment or any Thomas Hardy novel. It is not that they are illiterate, it’s not that they can’t parse a sentence or complete a paragraph. They don’t have the training nor the aptitude to do the heavy lifting we all learned to do when we were struggling with high school English or even reading those pulp fiction novels at the summer cottage. Students today require tasks that keep the reading short and the analysis compact: chapters, articles, wikipedia, etc. They have evolved intro snippet analyzers.

Is this a short term thing or the result of too many school trips to protest rallies? Have teachers themselves become too tired or bored to take the time to lead their proteges through Away From the Madding Crowd or The Old Man and the Sea? I would think that most English grads who migrate into the teaching profession would still find it a delightful challenge to confront students with Catcher in the Rye or even Jane Eyre, so I am reluctant to suggest that is the problem.

Is it too much screen time? Well my kids watched a good deal of Sesame Street and Mister Roger’s Neighbourhood and I think they can still read books; and, most of the current book reviewers grew up in the same time period. So I don’t think it is screen time, per se. It may be too much phone time coupled with texting, emailing, instagramming and the like. Those activities are quick, truncated and require limited memory use. Moreover these are directly interactive and seldom require much pondering or returning to an earlier chapter to better determine the train of thought that is being developed.

Whatever the genesis of this new lack of ability, it is definitely concerning. I will check with at least one of my grandkids currently in college and ask if they still read books. I did start a mini-bookclub with them all a few years ago but then hockey season and/or exams came along and rather quickly, the project died. I didn’t think much about it at the time but maybe that was the tip of the iceberg. I recently gave away to a couple of my grandsons two major tomes – one received Winston Churchill’s six volume treatise on World War II, the other Will Durant’s History of Civilization. Haven’t asked if either has cracked a cover; maybe the books are (like my copy of Mark Carney’s Values) serving as door stops.

No matter, I must admit to a niggling fear that should this inability to read significant novels be generation-wide, it may not be long before Shakespeare and other playwrights will be shunned because their plays are too long and involved. And that would be a serious problem for live theatre – especially my beloved Stratford Festival.

Now though, it’s back to work… I have some questions to forward to my grandkids… I hope they can read them…

g.w.