The Kids Are NOT Alright: The Atlantic Reports Kids at 'Elite' Colleges Unprepared to Read

We here at Twitchy have told you about the Left classifying reading and the 'worship of the written word' as 'white supremacy' -- no, really.

That's how they think.

And government funded schools have responded by teaching not literacy and math, but gender ideology and critical race theory. That's why in places like Baltimore, few students are proficient in math and literacy. Or in Oregon, where governor Kate Brown suspended proficiency standards.

In the name of 'equity', of course.

Those choices have consequences -- and profound ones. Students who can't read also struggle in other subject areas because they rely on reading. Even math. Word problems require a level of reading comprehension.

In short, the woke Left is setting up generations of students to struggle for the rest of their lives.

Now we're seeing that at colleges:

At elite colleges like Columbia, many students are showing up unprepared to read full books. It’s not that they don’t want to, @rosehorowitch writes. Middle and high schools have stopped teaching them how: https://t.co/mC5JpaC15M
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) October 1, 2024

The Atlantic writes:

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.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: 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.

“Teaching them how”? Huh? You learn to read In grammar school, and as you age, you read lengthier books. School teaches reading comprehension and writing/grammar skills, they don’t teach you how to read books. It becomes a skill with repetition , starting in childhood.
— Brolic Brain (@TheBlakBrain) October 1, 2024

By making reading an expectation and requiring students to read.

Reading a book end to end is white patriarchal oppression.
— culturedecode (@culturedecoder) October 1, 2024

That's the mentality here.

Colleges and universities have been teaching that reading is racist, so why are they surprised?

The people who become teachers after learning that will teach students to be dumb and illiterate.
— Miguel Maruso (@miggymaru) October 1, 2024

Exactly this writer's arguement.

You have to be taught how to read whole books? https://t.co/I6qGKf0csM
— Utterly Purple (@DefiantlyFree) October 1, 2024

They have to be assigned books to read and not taught that reading is 'white supremacy.'

Incredible stuff. An illiterate generation wrapping themselves in PFLP pamphlets and Hezbollah flags. Internal American brain drain. https://t.co/CviBd0iaKa
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) October 1, 2024

By design.

Colleges are feeding into this too. Here’s a lesson plan a teacher created as part of a teacher development program at UNC

Students will do a “quick read of Othello for plot & character familiarity” and then learn about implicit bias and Islamophobia https://t.co/Z68h4PkylM pic.twitter.com/2c6Tw4hecO
— Neetu Arnold (@neetu_arnold) October 1, 2024

That's the problem right there.

Equity and DEI in action

the department of education and teachers unions steal your money and gives it to democrats instead of teaching your kids https://t.co/7v8F384TbC
— Jay Asliken 🕋☪️✈️ (@assliken) October 1, 2024

Nailed it.

Alternate: This is a complete, utter failure of our public education system, and yet, nobody in charge of that system ever pays a price for their complete failure. https://t.co/4v3BF5E8by
— Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D. (@neoavatara) October 1, 2024

They never pay a price for their failures.

I was on the board of a private Christian classical school for 17 years, and believe me, the kids who know how to read full books are out there.

If you're not finding and admitting those kids, maybe you're not an "elite college." https://t.co/CMa3HWhOcE
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 1, 2024

Maybe not.