Academia: Reread

Monday's Child Is Processing

I attended an interesting workshop last week focused on questions of curricular design in higher education. It turned out that the focus was more specific than that, however: we spent two days discussing reading, in the sense both of “what should students read” and “can students read what we want them to read”?

Part of the problem with teaching skills in any kind of class is that if the skill isn’t taught in relationship to an interesting question or problem, it remains abstract and undermotivating, a kind of obstacle to overcome. But if the interesting problem requires the skill, then you have to find persuade students that the hard incremental work of developing the skill is worth it in relationship to what it enables.

I’ve always felt that one way to approach that motivational problem is to also open up a debate about whether the skill is what it is cracked up to be, about whether there are arguments against privileging that skill, and if so, what the best arguments might be. Otherwise, a professor is doing one of two things: harshly commanding students with a stern drill-sergeant mentality or getting stuck in a sort of parental “trust me on this, it’s good for you”, which often is asking for trust from students who don’t yet have any reason to trust that individual professor. (E.g., you’re teaching the skill at the lowest rung of a sequence, as a stranger to students newly arrived at university.)

That’s an especially hard move in the case of reading because many faculty in higher education haven’t thought of reading as something they need to teach and because reading is so sentimentally and practically important to a very large proportion of faculty. Reading is so naturalized that faculty tend to think it was taught and mastered well before students arrive in college. The harder forms of reading both in terms of quantity and difficulty are something that most academics learn on their own in a sink-or-swim way during graduate school—you are just expected to read huge amounts of text and understand it very well and that’s that. When you make it into the professoriate, you almost by definition swam rather than sank, but you also have no active pedagogy to help you break down how exactly you managed that feat.

So as I listened at the workshop, I found myself returning to a number of skeptical concerns with the strong consensus that students these days read less, are less capable of reading, and are increasingly unapologetic about their resistance to being asked to read.

• The first is, “Why don’t we talk more often about some of the legitimate theoretical and empirical objections to privileging reading, some of them with deep pedigrees?” Maybe doing so would make us more persuasive with students. There’s a lot of philosophically rigorous concern in the Western tradition and more globally about reading and writing—you can start with Socrates and move on from there.

• The second is, “Maybe our intense privileging of reading compared to other media forms and representational practices is a self-indulgent reliance on our own childhoods and education”. It was really striking that we didn’t talk very much at this workshop about visual art, about theatrical performance, about film, about speech and recital, about music, or even about spoken texts and audiobooks. There was a bit of talk about games as a transparently awful and useless media form, and yet, if anything might falsify the idea that younger people have short attention spans, games that can require hours of immersive engagement and the learning of numerous complicated control schema to work might call that into question.

• The third is, “Maybe we should think about learning from experience, in material ways, whether we’re talking about laboratories of various kinds, athletics, or just general forms of constructivist pedagogy, just to balance things out a bit”. After all, going back to the first point, this is a really common critique, that “book learning” privileges a kind of theoretical, abstract, immaterial knowledge about the world that is frequently falsified through direct experience.

• The fourth is, “Are we really sure that students right now are less capable of reading substantial amounts of text, less inclined to read, or otherwise opposed to long-form reading?” Every single time I hear faculty start down this conventional path of complaint, I’m struck at how underinvestigated and self-confirming much of what we say really is on this point. Among the hypotheses I’d like to see tested: Is is possible that our current students are more honest or less prone to/capable of bullshitting and faking that they did the reading than previous generations? Do we have any real evidence for a lack of capability? Even more urgently, any real evidence for a lack of willingness to try?

• The fifth is, “What if we’ve been wrong all along about what we believe students should read?” Any time this discussion gets going among humanists, we bring out a range of texts we want to privilege, whether from the venerable Western tradition or from new canons, and generally start a pity-fest about how nobody wants to read them any more. When I think about some of the texts I’d wail out in my own pitious soliloquy, honesty compels me to admit that some of them are very difficult. That others are books I was only prepared emotionally and intellectually to appreciate as an older man, that I literally could not have understood or engaged the text in a serious way at the age of 19 or 20. That others are essentially just complicated forms of information provisioning, generally with a fair amount of excess verbiage.

• The sixth, which goes along with this point: “What if we try through privileging reading and textuality to force what we cannot otherwise earn, which is universal validity or relevance?” I heard a number of classic works described at this workshop as obviously universal despite the fact that the human experiences in them could plausibly be interpreted as historically or geographically provincial or as applying primarily only to one sort of human experience or situation. Maybe we’re counting on the texts themselves to do, and the reading of the texts, to do what we have to do as human beings in conversation with human beings. Maybe reading is a tertiary activity in conversation between peers, a clarifying reference rather than a final authority. (There were a couple of courses sketched out at this workshop that operating on that principle, which I think is the right way to go.) Or maybe in a simpler way, students check out on reading in our classrooms because we disallow so many contingent reactions to a particular text as unthoughtful or incorrect? Particularly if we’re trying to service “coverage” as much as discussing interpretations.

• The seventh follows from there. “What if we’re exactly the wrong people to be trying to probe at a perceived reluctance to read or a lack of skill in reading because what we perceive to be about texts is actually about us : about our curricula, about our alignment with credentialization, or about our inability to bridge the emotional and substantive gap between our own faith in and love for reading and a much wider range of orientations among our students?” I learned a long time ago that if you have doubts and your teacher has faith, you are wisest to keep your doubts to yourself. And perhaps not just for self-protection but as kindness towards your instructor.

• The eighth might be that many of us have never learned to credit reading as a skill that is also entangled in technologies of printing and form. Meaning, many of us don’t really understand modern text in terms of its histories and contingencies, and in particular naturalize the book or the article without understanding what a canny and brilliantly designed technology they actually are, but also how much time it takes to learn the use of a book or article correctly. Maybe we’re dealing with something as simple as a generational interruption of knowledge about specific technological conventions of reading.

• The ninth might be, “Why are we so sure that we have been deep readers, close readers, readers who master texts through labor and study?” I think many of us have had the unsettling experience of picking up a text that we ought to know well, inside and out, and finding on reading it that not only have we misunderstood it but that there are conventionalized interpretations of it that misunderstand it in the same way. I tend to fixate on particular impressions or passages that I can react to, and that also distorts my readings sometimes. I think that’s a habit of “adversarial reading” that many of us pick up in graduate school. Sometimes we make a text into the later interpretations and readings it inspired, and then ignore how little it actually contains of those interpretations. (And thus do not really see why students are baffled by the text, because what was made of it is far more important than what it actually says.) I think at the least we need to investigate our own histories of reading with a skeptical eye.

• The tenth point is simple: if there is any thought that a professor should be wary of—a recurrent fallacy more misleading than even ‘correlation is causation’—it would be “kids these days are less smart, talented, diligent, or capable than we were back then, and only with more discipline or compulsion can we overcome this decline”. Every generation of professors for at least the last 150 years has been tempted by this presumption, and much as everyone cannot be above average, neither can every generation have been stupider, more willful and more lazy than the last. Humility demands that we be extremely skeptical about any moment where we drift into this kind of thinking.

• Though, finally, that might point the way to another issue that should make us reserve judgment. Perhaps we’re the ones who read less well than we once did, and not because of smartphones and attention economies, but for three simple reasons: we’re older, we’re more enmeshed in the administrative and managerial work of education and thus less able to spend time on reading, and we are more overwhelmed by the flood of publication in our areas of specialized and general interest and as a result of all of that, less able to indulge the easy sentimentalities about reading that were a big part of our own youth.

When professors come up against a problem that ought to be squarely within our collective capacity to study, to discuss and explore that unsettles some aspect of our own preferences, practices and habitus, many of us are quick to settle for the easiest interpretations, the ones that flatter us and blame students. That alone ought to make us wary of coming to that conventional conclusion.

It’s entirely possible that it really is about the smartphones or the pandemic, that we’re really right to demand a return to deep and close reading of long and rewarding texts, that reading is foundational to human progress, and so on. But I’d rather be certain of those propositions, and to be certain, we have a lot of work to do that for the most part is going undone.