Dear Loyal Readers,
You and me, I’d venture to say, we like to read. This is why I put together this newsletter week after week. And this is why you generously subscribe to it. After all, this is Article Club, right? We’re here to read.
But we also know (though I don’t like to admit it): Reading isn’t for everyone. This month’s article of the month, “Is This the End of Reading?” follows the downward trend of reading, especially among Gen Z college students. In her piece, writer Beth McMurtrie looks at the problem straight on: listening to professors, considering causes, and most importantly, thinking of ways to respond.
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Leading this week’s issue is a conversation I had last week with Ms. McMurtrie. Especially if you’re an educator or a parent, I highly recommend that you listen. In the interview, Ms. McMurtrie shares the feelings of professors dealing with the abrupt shifts they’re witnessing in the classroom. Reading stamina has significantly declined, and so have critical reading skills. Gone are the days when students could read a book or an article on their own. Now, according to one professor, reading has become a “scavenger hunt,” in which students search for discrete answers to discrete questions, dipping in and out of short excerpts, rather than taking in a whole text.
If that interview does not catch your interest, never fear. I urge you to read one of the other three articles in this week’s issue. They are about:
how we shouldn’t blame phones and the pandemic on the decline of reading
how a woman visiting an abortion clinic finds Christianity confusing
how a college in Texas espouses free speech, unless they don’t like it
If you like what we’re doing here at Article Club, and want to support this venture with a paid subscription, I would be very grateful. It’s $5 a month or $36 a year.
An interview with Beth McMurtrie, author of “Is This the End of Reading?”
I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Beth McMurtrie this week. Senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. McMurtrie knows what she’s talking about when it comes to the status of reading among college students. It was a delight to talk to her. I encourage you to listen to our entire conversation. Here’s an excerpt:
If you think of teaching as a vocation, a calling, which a lot of academics do, [the decline of reading] is really an existential crisis because you’re seeing harm come to your students. I didn’t find many professors who were angry at their students; they were sad for their students. They were certainly frustrated and sometimes wanted to beat their head against the walls, but they were sad for their students because they could see the anxiety that the students felt when they couldn’t do the work.
[The professors] would often say to me, These students have no idea how much less I’m asking of them than I asked of students 10 or 15 years ago. It changes what you can do in the classroom and how you can teach. You can’t get through as much material, which means students just simply aren’t as learning as much content. If you can't get through as much content, you may end up having to teach the skills that you thought students had learned in high school. So then your teaching becomes a different kind of teaching.
And if you don't do those things, then you kind of have a dead classroom, or you might have a discussion that goes off the rails because the students are not interpreting kind of what they're learning in a useful way.
2️⃣ The Loss Of Things I Took For Granted
I included this fair, well-written piece last year when it was published, but I’m sharing it again, especially since Ms. McMurtrie highlighted it in our interview. Focusing on the decline of reading among college students, it’s a great companion piece to hers.
Prof. Adam Kotsko writes: “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.”
By Adam Kotsko • Slate • 7 min • Gift Link
3️⃣ Two Days Before Abortion Stopped In Kentucky
Savannah Sipple: “I grew up in a conservative, religious part of eastern Kentucky where fundamental Christianity rules. For most of my upbringing, I recognized the pastors, choir leaders, and Sunday school teachers as the folks who lived the kindness they preached. When someone’s family member died they cooked food, cleaned house, and prayed with the grieving. They regularly took up offerings and gave food to those struggling.
“What I didn’t recognize at the time were the microaggressions. They’d say slight comments about Catholicism, which confused me as a kid because part of my family was Catholic. They’d make jokes about gays. Preachers pronounced lesbians the scourge of the nation because they dared to live without men. I was closeted, but I was both the butt of the joke and then the monster. Still, I was devout. This kind of confusing Christianity where hate is enmeshed with love was the only kind of sacred available to me. Even when my personal beliefs stood in contrast to what I was taught, I remained silent. I heard church folks disparage women who sought abortions. I heard their judgments, the way words like abomination, backslider, and sin always carried a tone of disgust and dismissal. And I stood by.”
By Savannah Sipple • The Arkansas International • 8 min • gift link unavailable
4️⃣ An American Education
Noah Rawlings: “A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country’s southern reaches — in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was a ‘hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.’ Here a new university: the University of Austin, or UATX.
“UATX is a ‘genuinely safe space,’ in the sense that it isolates students from the inconvenient opposition of other peers and professors. It is a monoculture of free-market faith which provides, in the end, a venue for young people seeking success in tech and finance to network and to fortify the rightwing ideas that brought them here in the first place.”
➡️ Big thanks to loyal reader Tim for recommending this article. Want to nominate an article to appear in the newsletter? Click here.
By Noah Rawlings • The New Inquiry • 26 min • Gift Link
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