Media Matters: The Reading Problem – Part I

Over the last a couple of decades – coinciding with the rise of social media and YouTube – many high school and college teachers have decreased the amount of reading assigned to their students.

In a recent article, “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class,” the New York Times reported on its informal survey, finding that many college professors “are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.”I remember the feeling of accomplishment reading my first “real” book (other than pre-teen biographies of Babe Ruth and Jim Thorpe) in Sister Ignatius’ 8th grade English class at St. Helen’s in Dayton. The book – Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A year later in Mr. Hemmert’s 9th grade English class at Carroll High School, we had to read Sir Walter Scott’s 500-page “Ivanhoe” and R.D. Blakemore’s 800-page “Lorna Doone” (which I did not finish). 

Inspired by English teachers, I went on to become one, teaching 9th grade English at West Division High School in Milwaukee for five years in the 1970s. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Raisin in the Sun,” “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” were part of the curriculum. We did a lot of in-class reading and acting out scenes in my five sections – 35 students per class,  reading levels ranging from 3rd to 12th grade. We also diagrammed sentences.

Last September, the National Assessment of Education Progress’ annual report card revealed the declines in science and math scores since Covid. The report also showed that the “three-point drops for math and reading proficiency in American 12th graders” reached their lowest since 1992. 

I interviewed Tim Melley, currently on leave as Director of Miami’s Humanities Center and professor of English. “The best students in my classes read and write as well as students I taught decades ago,” Melley said. “But many more students struggle to read and are open about their experience. Some say they haven’t done much reading, either in school or on their own. Some are not used to being held accountable for reading. Others say they have trouble focusing. 

“That said, reading complex texts has always been, and always will be, difficult. I found it difficult when I was in high school and college, and I believed for a long time that I wasn’t very good at it. I always share that experience with students, because someone has usually given them the idea that reading is just a basic skill they should have mastered long ago. That’s wrong.  Reading well – in the sense of becoming a skilled interpreter of patterns – takes lots of practice. That’s why it’s important for students to take courses with a lot of reading – no matter what profession they plan to enter. I have always seen my job as essentially the teaching of reading and writing and always believed it is invaluable for students to take courses with lots of reading.”  

In a nod to the power of the humanities, Melley reminds us, “In a culture of soundbites and channel-surfing, students should have some experiences where they have to wrestle with influential works of literature, history, and philosophy.”

In an email interview, Lizzie Hutton (teaching in Florence, Italy over winter term), director of Miami’s Howe Writing Center and associate professor of English, also sympathized with challenges teachers and students face. She offered historical perspective: “I was trained in literacy studies and my own research has been about the history of reading instruction in college English departments, and this history teaches us that there have been moral panics about one ‘literacy crisis’ or another every few decades for at least the last hundred years.”

“I don’t want to be an apologist,” Hutton wrote. “Because there’s a lot to be worried about with students using AI as a way to merely ‘outsource’ their reading of original texts and replacing that with reading quick (and potentially off base or watered down) summaries. I also think that high school teaching does seem to trend toward teaching fewer ‘whole books,’ so more often teaching excerpts. This may be a result of testing culture (which focuses on students’ ability to closely read what are actually often incredibly challenging excerpts, often from nonfiction) or a kind of reaction to the fact that teachers don’t feel students can be trusted to complete lengthy reading assignments, or both.” 

Hutton continued: “I think it’s really important to resist hand wringing which often puts a kind of outraged/disbelieving blame on readers (‘students can’t do x’ or ‘students don’t do y’) rather than engaging in more circumspect investigations of the complicated cultures in which readers live and operate (and which they often can’t control). This hand wringing also trades in a kind of nostalgia that I object to. The reality is that readers and reading cultures are always in flux, and that there were always devoted readers and indifferent readers. Technologies, educational values, assessment mechanisms, degrees of educational access change how we read and that’s always been true.”

“For myself, “ Hutton wrote, “it’s important to read ‘whole books,’ but I also acknowledge that this is a huge ask for high school and college students who are under enormous pressure given a move towards a more professionalized attitude towards higher ed as shaped by uncertain job markets. Plus, so many students are putting themselves through college, often working as well as taking classes, and they’re involved in extracurricular activities as well.  So for me the question becomes: how can instructors persuade students of the value of this kind of sustained reading? And how can we help them engage in this kind of reading in a way that feels meaningful and not merely perfunctory? Finally: how can we help them become more mindful about the many kinds of reading they already do every day, so they can build on the skills they already have to develop and sharpen up the new skills we want them to have?”

In Part II, I’ll focus on solutions and the Humanities Center’s “The Reading Project,” a year-long faculty collaboration on the challenges of reading in a digital age.

Richard Campbell (campber@miamioh.edu) is a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University. He is the board secretary for the Oxford Free Press.