The College Fix

OPINION: Students are losing out on creativity, innovation that ‘deep reading’ can foster

Growing up, I tended to keep tipping piles of books on my top bunkbed — much to my sister’s annoyance, she was on the bottom. But, hey, I didn’t want to limit myself to just one genre if I struggled to sleep, as I often did.

I’d stay up late, sometimes fighting back heavy eyelids until I found out what happened to the hero in distress. And I was never one to skip to the end – a type of cheating in my mind.

I can’t imagine never having experienced the excitement and anticipation of a good, thick novel. But too many kids are nowadays, to their detriment.

Recent articles at The Hechinger Report, the Associated Press, The Atlantic, and other outlets indicate young adults are struggling to read long passages of literature – including students accepted to America’s top universities.

As The Atlantic reported this week:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books. …

It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

But Douglas Fisher, an administrator at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego, pointed back even earlier in students’ education.

“We have [incoming ninth-graders] that on our benchmark knowledge assessments are scoring what is the equivalent of second grade, first grade, fourth grade,” Fisher told The Hechtinger Report.

It is worrying. And the problem isn’t just that reading has become a passé form of entertainment. Reading books teaches skills that just can’t be obtained by interactive technology.

One scientist told the Associated Press:

Deep reading is essential to strengthen circuits in the brain tied to critical thinking skills, background knowledge — and, most of all, empathy, said Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA specializing in dyslexia research.

“We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are, not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others,” Wolf said.

Another benefit is the self-discipline it takes to get through those first few chapters to get to the “good parts” – or sometimes even a whole book (“Crime and Punishment,” anyone?).

A book also provides time to pause and reflect – something society seems to do too little of these days — or look up that foreign-to-you word in the dictionary. One summer, just for fun, I decided to “translate” Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into modern English. I only got about a third of the way through, but I did learn a lot and I was only in middle school.

Finally, and this is far from an exhaustive list, “deep reading” builds imagination, a foundation for creativity and innovation, in ways that modern alternatives do not.

With video, you’re watching someone else’s interpretation of a story. With a book and a bit of imagination, that world becomes your own. What the people look like, what they might be thinking or feeling, what their future holds are partially in your hands as the reader. Characters become friends and enemies, not only because we relate to them but also because we take the time to feed part of our own experiences into theirs.

And yes, yes, that probably sounds corny and cliche, but it truly makes me sad to learn how few young adults now experience the profound joy of “deep reading.”

Technology makes things easier, but easier isn’t always better. And we’re losing a lot when we don’t teach our young people to read well. Still, it is a sign of hope that news outlets are drawing attention to the problem. It is, as always, the first step toward making things right.

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