“Professors are assigning less reading”
High achievers know how to read, writes Horowitch. “But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.” Like Melville’s Bartleby, they “prefer not to.”
Students are reading fewer “long and boring” books in middle and high school, I noted in a recent post. Common Core stressed using short informational texts, writes Horowitch. “Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea — mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.”
