“Ignorance is a delicate bloom. One touch and it’s gone.”*

[supergee]

Many of our colleges deflower book virgins.
*Oscar Wilde

Comments

[weofodthignen]

I'm suspicious of that article not just because of the tenor of the offerings below it and in the sidebar, but because at one point the author equates not having read a whole adult book with not having read a page of the textbook in a class. However, this is a real thing. At a college that shall remain nameless, I taught the accelerated version of the course that the English Dept. head told me had as its real purpose to get the students to read one whole book. (My version was wildly successful. It was a science fiction course with oral presentations instead of papers, and multiple-choice quizzes, and those students who were not inspired cheaters read three whole books. All the books were on reserve in the library. The librarian and the local bookstore were both shell-shocked, but at least one student subscribed to Omni, and I think I improved several lives.)

Part of the problem is that what students do in high school to graduate and to get into college has nothing to do with reading actual books unless they are interested in majoring in literature when they get to college. And that is not unconnected to the fact that "college" in the US is a grab bag for everything from auto mechanics, hairdressing, phys ed., and cooking through teacher training, caring for toddlers and geriatrics, dance, political debate, and speaking on TV to law, brain surgery, astrophysics, and linguistics theory. Most of the students don't want a "real" college education, resent the time, the cost, and the unbelievable bureaucracy, and are right. They should be at dedicated institutions or serving an apprenticeship, but "college" is a shibboleth in the US and increasingly elsewhere. As such, the recommended pre-college reading list is an anachronism and an insult. It was possibly defensible at my alma mater, where the quarters are only 8 weeks long, and given my major, but those books were expensive and hard to get and in retrospect I shouldn't have bothered. What students should be doing the summer before they enter college is traveling, if possible, and taking the last chance to explore their own preferences at a minimum. And that includes the ones who have to work that summer, which is the vast majority in the US. Otherwise college is inevitably just like high school in the US: instructors shovel stuff at you just because they are instructors, and your choices about classes are inevitably both ill-informed and poorly thought out.

If US colleges want only students who have read books, they should select their students accordingly. If they recognize they are far broader-based than that, they should drop the pretense; or provide a course like the one I taught to make up for the suckitude of the high schools. Whatever they label it. (I think it was Writing 103.)

M