A college student reads a Richard Powers novel (AI image via Bing).
As this is a blog by definition for people who like to read, I thought I would share a recent piece that has been getting a lot of attention. "Hilarious Bookbinder" is a pseudonym for a philosophy professor at a state school who describes his students as average, not the elite students an Ivy League school would have; in a recent issue of his Substack newsletter, Scriptorium Philosophia he writes:
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
The whole thing is pretty depressing; it he exaggerating?
There's a sequel, with responses to some of the comments.
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