The Weekly Reading List - June 2

A slightly short reading list this week. I spent the weekend celebrating my son’s birthday with friends, and it meant I wasn’t trawling the internet for reads like I usually do. Still, there are gems in here.

As always, I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments. Consider this an open forum for any sort of topic you’ve been pondering.

Kids don’t read anymore

And neither do adults, really.

The problem is first described over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.¹

Academics across the country are talking about the reading problems they are seeing among traditional-age students. Many, they say, don’t see the point in doing much work outside of class. Some struggle with reading endurance and weak vocabulary. A lack of faith in their own academic abilities leads some students to freeze and avoid doing the work altogether.

And a significant number of those who do the work seem unable to analyze complex or lengthy texts. Their limited experience with reading also means they don’t have the context to understand certain arguments or points of view.

These struggles are not limited to a particular type of student or college. This is a cohort, after all, that has had smartphones in their pockets since middle school, survived pandemic high school, and faces a future that appears, to many of them, fractured and hopeless.

College-aged students are increasingly unprepared to read difficult texts. Professors who lighten reading loads aren’t ‘meeting their students where they are’ — they are exacerbating the issue.

Over at

MILLER’S BOOK REVIEW 📚

, Joel J Miller tries to think through some of the causes. One interesting hypothesis: if we spend too much time on literacy-building activities and don’t emphasize factual knowledge, reading comprehension suffers. Most texts presume a background of facts and cultural assumptions. If we do not introduce these facts to children, then they will struggle to read. And if they struggle too much, they will never read for pleasure.

Protesting the Decline of Reading

There is a tendency to fear-monger about this sort of stuff. Every generation encounters new technologies, and previous generations tend to get quite worried about how it is all going to play out. So we do need to think carefully about all of this and make sure we are not giving into our worst instincts.

Yet, there does seem to be a decline in literacy. I believe I witnessed in my 7 years of teaching undergraduates. Every year the reading loads were lessened, but students still struggled.

This is occasioning some more thoughts, which I’ll try to work through this week. Stay tuned.

Living life backwards

Byung-Chul Han is a strange philosopher. He is a Korean-born, Berlin-based philosopher who draws on Heidegger, Marx, a grab bag of Eastern philosophers, and Catholicism to make sense of the world. He writes short books made up of short chapters made up of short sentences. He is often accused of being a voice of the bourgeoisie, and then he’ll write a sentence like this:

Marx already said it: individual freedom is the cunning of capital. We believe that we’re free, but deep down, we just produce, we increase capital. That is, capital uses individual freedom to reproduce. That means that we — with our individual freedom — are the sexual organs of capital.

He also plays piano, loves to garden, and finds his way to a Catholic church almost daily, going in to pray as others are leaving the mass. And in this profile, he claims to be the reincarnation of Simone Weil.