[Header Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash]

Let’s start with a scavenger hunt.

Find a news article published since the 1940s that shows that students not only read proficiently but eagerly and a lot.

I’ll wait, and don’t worry, this blog will (likely) be here when you return.

Glad you’re back and I suspect you are (virtually) empty handed.

So that little adventure is about this latest nonsense: The Loss of Things I Took for Granted by Adam Kotsko.

I should clarify that I taught high school English throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and then, I have been a college professor (teaching mostly first-year students) since 2002.

I know a great deal about students as readers and writers.

In fact, when I was a student in the 1960s and 1970s, most students did not read assigned writing, and we were almost never asked to write anything of substance (I did lots of grammar book assignments and diagramed a metric-ton of sentences).

My students in the 1980s and 1990s (including my AP Lit students and advanced students) confessed to me that they often did not read assigned writing and my class was almost the only place they had to write (including other English classes).

Now, before I go further, I must note that Kotsko’s take is a tired and lazy one that also does identify a fact about students as readers—a lack of engagement with extended texts—that is in no way unique to the last decade, but a common reality for a century (or more) of formal schooling.

Except for a brief shining moment of possibility in the 1970s and into the 1980s when the National Writing Project promoted writing workshop and a few key literacy advocates introduced reading workshop (both of which offered structure for students choosing to read and writing in authentic and extended ways), traditional schooling and especially the accountability era of schooling since the 1980s have created students who are non-readers and non-writers.

Multiple times Applebee and Langer have shown that students are rarely asked to write in authentic and extended situations, and Gallagher’s Readcide directly confronts how schooling creates nonreaders.

We as a culture in the US have a very long history of handwringing about “kids today” while simultaneously working furiously to insure that those same kids are underperforming because our expectations are nonsense, our shouts of “Crisis!” are nonsense, and our education reform approaches are nonsense.

My own reading and writing lives were created outside of school—a love of science fiction and comic books laying the groundwork for me as a writer and academic.

I was an incredibly good student, reader, and writer in spite of school (although I was also lucky to have a few wonderful and encouraging teachers who worked outside the norms of schooling).

Since I have spent my entire career as a literacy educator and as a writer/scholar, I certainly deeply value reading and writing, but I also recognize that false rhetoric and narratives are equally common for a century and harmful in terms of actually achieving anything like most students being proficient and eager readers and writers.

The “kids today” approach combined with perpetual reading/writing crises is, again, tired and lazy while successfully keeping our blame-gaze on students and their teachers without rightfully pulling back and confronting the systemic forces at play.

The most profound barriers to reading and writing for students are social inequities; recent research once again confirms that a significant majority of measurable student learning is causally linked to out-of-school factors.

Yet, our obsession with reading/writing crises and “kids today” is typically paired with back-to-basics calls (More phonics! More grammar!) and in-school only reform (that looks exactly like the previous reform).

I recently sat in on a book club. Adults decided to have the book club, chose the book, and then sat around drinking wine and simply talking about the book.

And this past weekend, a friend excitedly told me they were posting an informal blog about rewatching a TV series.

People read and write.

By choice.

And it makes their lives richer.

Formal schooling has never looked like that for children as beginning readers and writers.

If we are not happy with “kids today,” we might be better off finding a mirror and taking a long look.

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Update: Paired Texts from Slate

The Loss of Things I Took for Granted by Adam Kotsko (11 February 2024)

If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

Who Cares If Johnny Can’t Read? (17 April 1997)

Among the truisms that make up the eschatology of American cultural decline, one of the most banal is the assumption that Americans don’t read. Once, the story goes–in the 1950s, say–we read much more than we do now, and read the good stuff, the classics. Now, we don’t care about reading anymore, we’re barely literate, and television and computers are rendering books obsolete.

None of this is true. We read much more now than we did in the ‘50s. In 1957, 17 percent of people surveyed in a Gallup poll said they were currently reading a book; in 1990, over twice as many did. In 1953, 40 percent of people polled by Gallup could name the author of Huckleberry Finn; in 1990, 51 percent could. In 1950, 8,600 new titles were published; in 1981, almost five times as many.