Since you've put Gwern's comment about the 1920s Richards study in the newsletter, I guess I have to copy-paste my debunking of it again:
If you actually read the linked book [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.179256 — do so; it’s short], this in fact shows how much has changed. Read the quotations from the 1920s students (and others: some subjects were laypeople) and you will immediately realise that their engagement and erudition is off the scale of the 2015 study. The most eloquent of the 2015 study’s “proficient writers” would have been at best merely average in the 1920s study.
The students disagree wildly in their emotional and aesthetic reactions and of course they miss things, as one will. Poetry is deliberately cryptic and allusive, and the students were several centuries past some writers tested, not a mere century and a half. But there is no equivalent of “[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]”, let alone of thinking that an advocate with great whiskers is a Studio Ghibli-esque anthropomorphic cat, or that dinosaurs were walking around Victorian London. Richards’ chief criticisms are that his students are sometimes overly pedantic or insufficiently imaginative, sometimes too dogmatic about their own prejudices and preconceptions, sometimes too caught up in their subjective aesthetic feelings. Never though does he charge them with such heinous inanity, and never are they so incapable of expressing themselves.
It is perhaps true that for a hundred years each generation has despaired of the inability of the next—but perhaps each was right so to do!
My grandmother went to High school before it was compulsory, her High School yearbook is amazing, with long verbose notes from almost all of her fellow students. At that time High School served the same purpose of College today, a filter for those who are willing to show up if they don’t have to. ( this was the 1920’s ). Grandmother went on to college in the Great Depression met and married my Grandfather, then later went to graduate school at Columbia together. He got a Geography degree, she got an Early Childhood Education degree.
In that time College was only for the rich and the very ambitiously talented, so it doesn’t compare similar dynamics.
Also English was pretty standard until the 60’s. Everyone literate could read the King James Bible, and Shakespeare. And all newer English writing should be compared to that difficulty.
Yes, agreed. College students then were the equivalent of Ivy League students today. Which is why the idea that the Richards study is somehow comparable to the Kansas study is laughable. Richards would have an aneurysm if he saw the calibre of the students in the Kansas study, and retract all his criticisms of his original subjects.
Yes, I really think people get dumber and less resilient with passing Generations.
Me<My Father < My grandfather and so on.
On what other case would you take documented evidence that people have been thinking in a certain way for generations, and use it to point that it *isn't* true?
Hey there higher-ed vet. I have a theory that I'd like your take on. I have a sneaking suspicion that much of the DEI talk in higher ed is downstream of universities needing ideological cover to lower their standards in search of a wider market. The actual DEI people are of course true believers, but the reason they weren't stamped out by administration is that admin cynically realized that their ideology gave them the perfect cover for academic standards-demolishing revenue maximization. Any thoughts?
My maternal grandfather was born in 1906 in a very rural, poor area in the Oregon Coast Range (the area was once known as the Appalachia of the West). His mother was somewhat disabled from an injury that never healed properly; his father died when Grandad was twelve; his oldest brother, who took over the family farm and raising Grandad, died a year later. In spite of that very rough beginning, extreme poverty, and only attending school through the eighth grade in a small (tiny) rural one-room school...Backing up for an explanation; back then, families bought their school text books; one set usually sufficed for all of the children in a family. They weren't supplied by the school and retained for the next year's students, like they usually are today. So Grandad, being the youngest child in his family, still had his family's old text books when I was growing up. In that environment, that tiny little isolated rural one-room school, he'd studied Latin and algebra and geometry before what we would call high school. His penmanship was lovely. His spelling and grammar were impeccable. He was a voracious reader, an excellent story-teller (not a bragger -- his stories often were humorously aimed at his own mistakes), a wonderful writer. He worked his whole adult life at what many would call menial labor -- farming and hunting and trapping, mostly. Yet he was better educated than many college graduates from 'upper-class' homes are now. Yes, the quality of education in this country has deteriorated. Badly.
When I read an anecdote like that, what I conclude is that you had an exceptional grandfather, not that education has declined. School didn't use to be for everyone, and that was okay. Now we insist that every kid finishes high school, and so the bar for finishing high school has been lowered accordingly.
That's a great anecdote. And I think if we're honest with ourselves we must admit it's not just the quality of education: the quality of *people* has deteriorated as well, at every level.
I would have to agree. Children are not being raised with the moral standards that we once had as a nation. I could list all of the ways that has changed, but I think most everyone reading here is well aware. The thing is, if children are not taught good moral standards, and if good moral standards are not modeled before them by the adults in their lives, where are they going to get them? Certainly not from most of our modern media and entertainment complex, and absolutely not from the public schools of today.
Until fairly recently, television was something that you would only watch occasionally. When I was young, most people I knew were always reading books.
“The people have spoken, and they speak in a single clear voice: they want to hear about how dumb college kids are.”
I usually don’t comment when such is lost in the crowd, but I received your current followup post early, so I thought I’d chime in as an “oldster retired academic”. I’ll keep comments to bullet points for the sake of brevity and at the risk of dismissal as simply “gratuitous” assertions. Those disagreeing are invited to do their research.
1) What made your original post meaningful to me was that you added some data to support your assertion. Do not vary from that formula if you want to continue to go viral. Data points/support are always welcome. They separate opinion from science.
2) Nothing in your post surprises me. I’ve said the same thing wrt college students (in most all academic areas, not just English) as currently enrolled for at least a couple of decades, but the problem is longer lived than that.
3) Your observation, unfortunately, is *not* new. When I was a graduate student, our Reading dept was promoting the inclusion of all other departments in the university to take a greater roll in improving student Reading and Writing ability through their course assignments. They recognized at that point two things: Student reading and writing ability was in decline, and “practice makes perfect”. That was 50 years ago!
4) Prior to WWII, perhaps 6% of the populace went to university. Last I read the Millennial generation was the most credentialed generational cohort in history with over 40% have some post secondary degree! I maintain that such is impossible without a decline in standards, which is what your prior commentary illustrated.
5) What is a university education for if not to take the best and brightest of us and perfect them? 40% of the populace can enroll in post secondary education and earn a degree (imagine how many in addition enroll and drop out)? Last I read, the average IQ of a university student is about 102-104! University is *not* and should not be remedial High School, but yet here we are.
“Last I read, the average IQ of a university student is about 102-104!”
What I think people miss with this stat is that they think it shows that university students are now average. They're not: what this shows is that the population IQ is now much lower than 100.
This of course is another aspect of the problem of analysis. However, the numbers of enrollees as compared to 2-3 generations ago is a huge increase. This must mean we are accepting more and more at the lower ranks of the “Bell Curve”, not the high end since, the population increase does not account for such. I accept however, there are a great many enrollees that are of general high intelligence and are as good as any we’ve ever had.
The one that hit me (stats nerd) was Kansas pub Unis aren't especially selective, which makes them good to use for a middle America average.
Good common sense reflections here.
Its not the young per se, its teachers, parents, and environment.
My own children vs my students is an example. My kids have a nearly limitless book budget and parents who model and honor reading. The result, my 1st grader broke the reading assessmemt and my 4 year old has near perfect recall of audiobooks. Some of this obviously is nature, and nuture also must matter.
My personal thesis is half the population will be functional illiterates, defined as can read words, but lack any ability to constuct the meaning in their minds. It has no relation to their value as humans, it does mean university is the wrong place for them.
Society should realize the truth and make meaningful employment for them. Working at a factory, farm, or physical trade has honor.
My thoughts on the last part (about spending on education going up, with no discernible shift in outcomes) are that university departments have become memes as Dawkins used the word: self-replicating things. Almost all of academia seems to have suffered as a result. If universities produce a lot of clearly very intelligent people, this can only be because they admit all the intelligent people (although some, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, don't even graduate). I increasingly think that people who get an education at school or university are the exceptions.
I'm reminded of a story in Claire Tomalin's biography of Dickens, where the author's eldest son, also called Charles, got into Eton on the strength of being able to write Latin hexameters (and his dad's money) and left being able to write Latin hexameters. Dickens senior sent his other sons to school in France and Switzerland.
It seems the lesson here is humility about education standards. If we are to have a G.K. Chesterton-style sympathy for "ordinary people," we need to reckon with the fact that most of these ordinary people aren't _that_ literate. Maybe it is a tragedy that Dickens is beyond a midwit college student, but these midwits are the core of human civilization. These are the ordinary people and ordinary families that a society is "for." Perhaps it's worth organizing public institutions (and by extension education policy) towards these normal people instead of holding people to standards they can't really meet.
But that puts us back to the pre-Bretton Woods (pre-Industrial?) model of higher education really being a rare, elite thing. Maybe that's fine.
Yeah, and a potential policy response is "Maybe we should encourage sensitive eighteen-year-olds to work in the Peace Corps for two years instead of letting them believe they understand literature."
I thought you were fair and your post wasn't a hatchet job. There were however three changes to the culture I feel need to be addressed.
1. The role of institutions. Institutions no longer are expected to serve the public. They are designed for the benefit of the people working in them and their masters. It is a lot easier for teachers and administrators to lower standards.
2. The rise of equity and the desire to instill confidence. Conveniently, making sure no group falls behind, no matter how little they value education, is easier for the educators and the politicians.
3. The hatred of the heritage population and desire to control them. Just like the powers that be had no concern about the death toll from opiods when they were unleashed on middle America, the mass of the heritage population is being replaced. They are easier to control if drugged out, diverted by shinny objects and devoid of critical thinking.
I am old enough to remember a time when schools taught and the government could build world class infrastructure. Go back and check out the history of the US and you'll be fascinated by how things have changed
I remember Mulroy! His students' answers are hilarious. It's a bit strange that the students had no clue how to paraphrase the sentence. These are American students. Don't they study the Declaration of Independence in school?
It occurs to me that no-one ever explicitly taught me how to paraphrase. I sort of taught it to myself as I learned various foreign languages, including English (non-native to me). When you're relatively new to a foreign language, you may need to break up even relatively simple sentences into smaller chunks. The first step is to mentally break up a complex sentence into two or more shorter ones, slightly paraphrasing if necessary. In the case of the that sentence from the Declaration of Independence, you'd get something like this: "In the course of human events, it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which connect them with another people. At this point, the first people needs to assume a separate and equal position among the powers of the earth. They are entitled to this separate and equal position by the Laws of Nature and by Nature's God. If they have decent respect for the options of mankind, then they should declare the causes that made them decide to go ahead with the separation." And if you want, you can "translate" into simple language further, until the gist eventually becomes something like this: "Sometimes one people should separate itself from another by declaring independence. If a people declares independence, it should explain its reasons for doing so." Maybe something like this should be explicitly taught in school?
I recall that Mulroy attributed the poor abilities of his students to their poor knowledge of grammar and to the fact that they've never been taught to diagram sentences. (Now, I don't know how to diagram sentences either, or at least not the way that some American schools teach it. I'm not American. But I don't think that sentence diagramming is strictly necessary, though it might be helpful to those who know how to do it.) Another commentator (Naomi Kanakia) had a different comment on the study: "Is this really how reading Dickens works though? You don't translate passages, you just let them wash over you, and after you've read enough, it becomes natural." (https://substack.com/@naomik/note/c-119527774) I think they both have a point. Strategies for simplifying complex sentences until you get something you understand are very helpful, and so is simply doing a LOT of reading. But doing a lot of reading is not something that you can really teach. Breaking up complex sentences into smaller chunks may perhaps be teachable?
BTW, I just asked ChatGPT to rewrite that sentence using three or more simpler sentences, preserving as much of the meaning as possible. Here's what it came up with:
"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political connections that have tied them to another, they must take action. They are entitled, by the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to assume a separate and equal position among the powers of the earth. Out of basic respect for the opinions of humanity, they should clearly explain the reasons that compel them to separate."
Not bad! Mulroy's students would probably have done okay if they'd been presented with this instead. I do wonder to what extent this skill (rewrite a complex sentence using several simpler ones) is teachable. I bet it is, though, at least somewhat.
I think it's pretty clear the problem was not with their paraphrasing ability but with their reading comprehension? They did not understand the clause about God and nature at all
Oh, it's quite obvious that the problem is reading comprehension. But if you're faced with a long, complex sentence that you find difficult to understand, how do you deal with that? The way that *I* deal with it is by trying to mentally rewrite it into two or more simpler sentences. What counts as "long and complex" will depend on the language in question and my level in the said language. Of course, if there are any unknown words, I might need to look them up. As I said, I figured this out pretty much by myself, as I learned various foreign languages, and I think it's a good tool. Maybe it can be taught explicitly?
I remember a few stories of rural kids being read The Iliad in school, as a treat. I can't prove it, but would venture to guess putting average IQ students through countless years of school is more likely to dull their minds than enlighten them.
I believe that one of the worst crimes against humanity in the large scale is keeping kids stuck in classrooms until they turn 18 or 22. I bet I don't remember 90% of what I was taught in K-12, and only remembered it then until the test was over.
“Michaelmas Term” and “it would not be wonderful” are culturally unfamiliar, not cognitively complex. Once resolved, the passage is vivid and clear. The failure isn’t proof of illiteracy. Rather the kind of confusion good teaching exists to correct.
I’m reading this article while sitting in the passenger seat of my truck, while my teenage son, who works for me part time, is driving. I began reading him an excerpt that included the David Mulroy assignment, and he stopped me; “Wait, I want to try. What’s the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence?”
I read it aloud. Without hesitation he replied, “So it means that they thought they owed everyone an explanation of their reasons for declaring independence.”
He is graduating high school next week and has no intention of going to college.
Do read Bleak House - I think it’s the best of Dickens’ novels.
On that last graph, showing that test scores have seemingly stayed more or less level since 1970, keep in mind that at some point (I forget what year, but I think sometime in the '70's, and possibly again later), those achievement tests have been dumbed down. So, if the students were tested using the tests from prior to the dumbing down, their scores would have actually gone down. I don't know how much they went down, would like to see research done on that.
I have found this interesting and sorry it’s been hard work, let alone that anyone should try too hard to pick apart the methodology to critique the main point. We all know academic surveys are small scale and subjective. A random survey of three students would have told us what we know, that fewer and fewer of us read texts that were taken for granted a generation ago as just a normal part of a decent education. I know from my own experience that growing up in the 80s it was just assumed that you were familiar with the main Dickens works, could read them without assistance and use the characters as references points. We are still optimists like Micawber, living in the past like Miss Havisham, devious lawyers like Tulkinghorn and social justice advocates like Mrs Jellyby.
Not all is lost when a restaurant review in the Time today starts as follows:
Arriving in Broadstairs, one begins to feel rather like a sickly lady in a Victorian novel. You know the ones — always being carted off to the seaside to convalesce after being thrown over by some terrible cad with a gambling habit and a homoerotic relationship with his best chum from school.
Between the wide promenade and the old house where Charles Dickens used to stay, I find myself expecting Josh to say he's lost everything in a dodgy investment in the San Francisco railroads and I must now — for the first time in my life — be put to work. Indeed, there is work to be done. We are not here to take in the sea air but for Fifteen Square Metres — a restaurant named for its size, or lack thereof. The nice thing about such petite dimensions is that you can make friends with the other diners. This is, I suppose, what those Victorian invalids used to do, lacking iPhones (poor things).’
Serious point though, this is probably lost on younger readers, based on the education my own children received, diverted by smartphones, computer games, shorter attention spams and everything else that meant a wet Sunday evening wasn’t spent curled up on the sofa reading Dickens. And here I am on Substack when I could be re-reading Bleak House.
I had a viral Medium story* last year that’s earned almost $30K and I survived because I have all notifications except text disabled.
Also, although I read all kinds of books from all different eras for fun, I know I’m part of a dying breed.
*It was about Dutch sex education vs American, and although I followed up with stories about the Dutch and sex education and everything else, I couldn’t replicate my results.
Since you've put Gwern's comment about the 1920s Richards study in the newsletter, I guess I have to copy-paste my debunking of it again:
If you actually read the linked book [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.179256 — do so; it’s short], this in fact shows how much has changed. Read the quotations from the 1920s students (and others: some subjects were laypeople) and you will immediately realise that their engagement and erudition is off the scale of the 2015 study. The most eloquent of the 2015 study’s “proficient writers” would have been at best merely average in the 1920s study.
The students disagree wildly in their emotional and aesthetic reactions and of course they miss things, as one will. Poetry is deliberately cryptic and allusive, and the students were several centuries past some writers tested, not a mere century and a half. But there is no equivalent of “[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]”, let alone of thinking that an advocate with great whiskers is a Studio Ghibli-esque anthropomorphic cat, or that dinosaurs were walking around Victorian London. Richards’ chief criticisms are that his students are sometimes overly pedantic or insufficiently imaginative, sometimes too dogmatic about their own prejudices and preconceptions, sometimes too caught up in their subjective aesthetic feelings. Never though does he charge them with such heinous inanity, and never are they so incapable of expressing themselves.
It is perhaps true that for a hundred years each generation has despaired of the inability of the next—but perhaps each was right so to do!
My grandmother went to High school before it was compulsory, her High School yearbook is amazing, with long verbose notes from almost all of her fellow students. At that time High School served the same purpose of College today, a filter for those who are willing to show up if they don’t have to. ( this was the 1920’s ). Grandmother went on to college in the Great Depression met and married my Grandfather, then later went to graduate school at Columbia together. He got a Geography degree, she got an Early Childhood Education degree.
In that time College was only for the rich and the very ambitiously talented, so it doesn’t compare similar dynamics.
Also English was pretty standard until the 60’s. Everyone literate could read the King James Bible, and Shakespeare. And all newer English writing should be compared to that difficulty.
Yes, agreed. College students then were the equivalent of Ivy League students today. Which is why the idea that the Richards study is somehow comparable to the Kansas study is laughable. Richards would have an aneurysm if he saw the calibre of the students in the Kansas study, and retract all his criticisms of his original subjects.
Yes, I really think people get dumber and less resilient with passing Generations.
Me<My Father < My grandfather and so on.
On what other case would you take documented evidence that people have been thinking in a certain way for generations, and use it to point that it *isn't* true?
Hey there higher-ed vet. I have a theory that I'd like your take on. I have a sneaking suspicion that much of the DEI talk in higher ed is downstream of universities needing ideological cover to lower their standards in search of a wider market. The actual DEI people are of course true believers, but the reason they weren't stamped out by administration is that admin cynically realized that their ideology gave them the perfect cover for academic standards-demolishing revenue maximization. Any thoughts?
My maternal grandfather was born in 1906 in a very rural, poor area in the Oregon Coast Range (the area was once known as the Appalachia of the West). His mother was somewhat disabled from an injury that never healed properly; his father died when Grandad was twelve; his oldest brother, who took over the family farm and raising Grandad, died a year later. In spite of that very rough beginning, extreme poverty, and only attending school through the eighth grade in a small (tiny) rural one-room school...Backing up for an explanation; back then, families bought their school text books; one set usually sufficed for all of the children in a family. They weren't supplied by the school and retained for the next year's students, like they usually are today. So Grandad, being the youngest child in his family, still had his family's old text books when I was growing up. In that environment, that tiny little isolated rural one-room school, he'd studied Latin and algebra and geometry before what we would call high school. His penmanship was lovely. His spelling and grammar were impeccable. He was a voracious reader, an excellent story-teller (not a bragger -- his stories often were humorously aimed at his own mistakes), a wonderful writer. He worked his whole adult life at what many would call menial labor -- farming and hunting and trapping, mostly. Yet he was better educated than many college graduates from 'upper-class' homes are now. Yes, the quality of education in this country has deteriorated. Badly.
When I read an anecdote like that, what I conclude is that you had an exceptional grandfather, not that education has declined. School didn't use to be for everyone, and that was okay. Now we insist that every kid finishes high school, and so the bar for finishing high school has been lowered accordingly.
That's a great anecdote. And I think if we're honest with ourselves we must admit it's not just the quality of education: the quality of *people* has deteriorated as well, at every level.
I would have to agree. Children are not being raised with the moral standards that we once had as a nation. I could list all of the ways that has changed, but I think most everyone reading here is well aware. The thing is, if children are not taught good moral standards, and if good moral standards are not modeled before them by the adults in their lives, where are they going to get them? Certainly not from most of our modern media and entertainment complex, and absolutely not from the public schools of today.
One of the great cultural developments since the 1920s has been television. I'm just going to leave that there.
The first man in my grandpa’s childhood village to get a tv, threw it away because it was rotting brains…
Until fairly recently, television was something that you would only watch occasionally. When I was young, most people I knew were always reading books.
Radio came first, and had barely gotten started in the 1920s. The first soap operas were on radio, for instance.
“The people have spoken, and they speak in a single clear voice: they want to hear about how dumb college kids are.”
I usually don’t comment when such is lost in the crowd, but I received your current followup post early, so I thought I’d chime in as an “oldster retired academic”. I’ll keep comments to bullet points for the sake of brevity and at the risk of dismissal as simply “gratuitous” assertions. Those disagreeing are invited to do their research.
1) What made your original post meaningful to me was that you added some data to support your assertion. Do not vary from that formula if you want to continue to go viral. Data points/support are always welcome. They separate opinion from science.
2) Nothing in your post surprises me. I’ve said the same thing wrt college students (in most all academic areas, not just English) as currently enrolled for at least a couple of decades, but the problem is longer lived than that.
3) Your observation, unfortunately, is *not* new. When I was a graduate student, our Reading dept was promoting the inclusion of all other departments in the university to take a greater roll in improving student Reading and Writing ability through their course assignments. They recognized at that point two things: Student reading and writing ability was in decline, and “practice makes perfect”. That was 50 years ago!
4) Prior to WWII, perhaps 6% of the populace went to university. Last I read the Millennial generation was the most credentialed generational cohort in history with over 40% have some post secondary degree! I maintain that such is impossible without a decline in standards, which is what your prior commentary illustrated.
5) What is a university education for if not to take the best and brightest of us and perfect them? 40% of the populace can enroll in post secondary education and earn a degree (imagine how many in addition enroll and drop out)? Last I read, the average IQ of a university student is about 102-104! University is *not* and should not be remedial High School, but yet here we are.
“Last I read, the average IQ of a university student is about 102-104!”
What I think people miss with this stat is that they think it shows that university students are now average. They're not: what this shows is that the population IQ is now much lower than 100.
This of course is another aspect of the problem of analysis. However, the numbers of enrollees as compared to 2-3 generations ago is a huge increase. This must mean we are accepting more and more at the lower ranks of the “Bell Curve”, not the high end since, the population increase does not account for such. I accept however, there are a great many enrollees that are of general high intelligence and are as good as any we’ve ever had.
The one that hit me (stats nerd) was Kansas pub Unis aren't especially selective, which makes them good to use for a middle America average.
Good common sense reflections here.
Its not the young per se, its teachers, parents, and environment.
My own children vs my students is an example. My kids have a nearly limitless book budget and parents who model and honor reading. The result, my 1st grader broke the reading assessmemt and my 4 year old has near perfect recall of audiobooks. Some of this obviously is nature, and nuture also must matter.
My personal thesis is half the population will be functional illiterates, defined as can read words, but lack any ability to constuct the meaning in their minds. It has no relation to their value as humans, it does mean university is the wrong place for them.
Society should realize the truth and make meaningful employment for them. Working at a factory, farm, or physical trade has honor.
My thoughts on the last part (about spending on education going up, with no discernible shift in outcomes) are that university departments have become memes as Dawkins used the word: self-replicating things. Almost all of academia seems to have suffered as a result. If universities produce a lot of clearly very intelligent people, this can only be because they admit all the intelligent people (although some, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, don't even graduate). I increasingly think that people who get an education at school or university are the exceptions.
I'm reminded of a story in Claire Tomalin's biography of Dickens, where the author's eldest son, also called Charles, got into Eton on the strength of being able to write Latin hexameters (and his dad's money) and left being able to write Latin hexameters. Dickens senior sent his other sons to school in France and Switzerland.
“But what are you going to do, not get high all day on the attention of strangers?” lmao
My People are destroyed for lack of KNOWLEDGE- God
It seems the lesson here is humility about education standards. If we are to have a G.K. Chesterton-style sympathy for "ordinary people," we need to reckon with the fact that most of these ordinary people aren't _that_ literate. Maybe it is a tragedy that Dickens is beyond a midwit college student, but these midwits are the core of human civilization. These are the ordinary people and ordinary families that a society is "for." Perhaps it's worth organizing public institutions (and by extension education policy) towards these normal people instead of holding people to standards they can't really meet.
But that puts us back to the pre-Bretton Woods (pre-Industrial?) model of higher education really being a rare, elite thing. Maybe that's fine.
They are *English* majors, though.
Yeah, and a potential policy response is "Maybe we should encourage sensitive eighteen-year-olds to work in the Peace Corps for two years instead of letting them believe they understand literature."
Maybe a peace corps for the US.
I thought you were fair and your post wasn't a hatchet job. There were however three changes to the culture I feel need to be addressed.
1. The role of institutions. Institutions no longer are expected to serve the public. They are designed for the benefit of the people working in them and their masters. It is a lot easier for teachers and administrators to lower standards.
2. The rise of equity and the desire to instill confidence. Conveniently, making sure no group falls behind, no matter how little they value education, is easier for the educators and the politicians.
3. The hatred of the heritage population and desire to control them. Just like the powers that be had no concern about the death toll from opiods when they were unleashed on middle America, the mass of the heritage population is being replaced. They are easier to control if drugged out, diverted by shinny objects and devoid of critical thinking.
"Institutions no longer are expected to serve the public. They are designed for the benefit of the people working in them and their masters."
This is not new at all. In fact, there's a really good book about this very topic. It's called Bleak House, by Charles Dickens.
Little Dorrit, too. Don’t forget the Circumlocution Office!
I am old enough to remember a time when schools taught and the government could build world class infrastructure. Go back and check out the history of the US and you'll be fascinated by how things have changed
Cute, but institutions go through cycles. Its' at the end where leadership thinks they can get away with just screwing over the populace forever.
Turbosperg has not been officially added to the English lexicon (Merriam-Webster, of course), but I *do* have an ugly head.
But I am not a monster, as I do hope "dead to rights" is also not literal.
When they do add it, they will cite this essay as its origin
Ha!
But incorrect!
The UrbanDictionary had an entry...or "entry," iykwim.
I remember Mulroy! His students' answers are hilarious. It's a bit strange that the students had no clue how to paraphrase the sentence. These are American students. Don't they study the Declaration of Independence in school?
It occurs to me that no-one ever explicitly taught me how to paraphrase. I sort of taught it to myself as I learned various foreign languages, including English (non-native to me). When you're relatively new to a foreign language, you may need to break up even relatively simple sentences into smaller chunks. The first step is to mentally break up a complex sentence into two or more shorter ones, slightly paraphrasing if necessary. In the case of the that sentence from the Declaration of Independence, you'd get something like this: "In the course of human events, it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which connect them with another people. At this point, the first people needs to assume a separate and equal position among the powers of the earth. They are entitled to this separate and equal position by the Laws of Nature and by Nature's God. If they have decent respect for the options of mankind, then they should declare the causes that made them decide to go ahead with the separation." And if you want, you can "translate" into simple language further, until the gist eventually becomes something like this: "Sometimes one people should separate itself from another by declaring independence. If a people declares independence, it should explain its reasons for doing so." Maybe something like this should be explicitly taught in school?
I recall that Mulroy attributed the poor abilities of his students to their poor knowledge of grammar and to the fact that they've never been taught to diagram sentences. (Now, I don't know how to diagram sentences either, or at least not the way that some American schools teach it. I'm not American. But I don't think that sentence diagramming is strictly necessary, though it might be helpful to those who know how to do it.) Another commentator (Naomi Kanakia) had a different comment on the study: "Is this really how reading Dickens works though? You don't translate passages, you just let them wash over you, and after you've read enough, it becomes natural." (https://substack.com/@naomik/note/c-119527774) I think they both have a point. Strategies for simplifying complex sentences until you get something you understand are very helpful, and so is simply doing a LOT of reading. But doing a lot of reading is not something that you can really teach. Breaking up complex sentences into smaller chunks may perhaps be teachable?
BTW, I just asked ChatGPT to rewrite that sentence using three or more simpler sentences, preserving as much of the meaning as possible. Here's what it came up with:
"When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political connections that have tied them to another, they must take action. They are entitled, by the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to assume a separate and equal position among the powers of the earth. Out of basic respect for the opinions of humanity, they should clearly explain the reasons that compel them to separate."
Not bad! Mulroy's students would probably have done okay if they'd been presented with this instead. I do wonder to what extent this skill (rewrite a complex sentence using several simpler ones) is teachable. I bet it is, though, at least somewhat.
I think it's pretty clear the problem was not with their paraphrasing ability but with their reading comprehension? They did not understand the clause about God and nature at all
Oh, it's quite obvious that the problem is reading comprehension. But if you're faced with a long, complex sentence that you find difficult to understand, how do you deal with that? The way that *I* deal with it is by trying to mentally rewrite it into two or more simpler sentences. What counts as "long and complex" will depend on the language in question and my level in the said language. Of course, if there are any unknown words, I might need to look them up. As I said, I figured this out pretty much by myself, as I learned various foreign languages, and I think it's a good tool. Maybe it can be taught explicitly?
I remember a few stories of rural kids being read The Iliad in school, as a treat. I can't prove it, but would venture to guess putting average IQ students through countless years of school is more likely to dull their minds than enlighten them.
I believe that one of the worst crimes against humanity in the large scale is keeping kids stuck in classrooms until they turn 18 or 22. I bet I don't remember 90% of what I was taught in K-12, and only remembered it then until the test was over.
“Michaelmas Term” and “it would not be wonderful” are culturally unfamiliar, not cognitively complex. Once resolved, the passage is vivid and clear. The failure isn’t proof of illiteracy. Rather the kind of confusion good teaching exists to correct.
I’m reading this article while sitting in the passenger seat of my truck, while my teenage son, who works for me part time, is driving. I began reading him an excerpt that included the David Mulroy assignment, and he stopped me; “Wait, I want to try. What’s the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence?”
I read it aloud. Without hesitation he replied, “So it means that they thought they owed everyone an explanation of their reasons for declaring independence.”
He is graduating high school next week and has no intention of going to college.
Do read Bleak House - I think it’s the best of Dickens’ novels.
On that last graph, showing that test scores have seemingly stayed more or less level since 1970, keep in mind that at some point (I forget what year, but I think sometime in the '70's, and possibly again later), those achievement tests have been dumbed down. So, if the students were tested using the tests from prior to the dumbing down, their scores would have actually gone down. I don't know how much they went down, would like to see research done on that.
I have found this interesting and sorry it’s been hard work, let alone that anyone should try too hard to pick apart the methodology to critique the main point. We all know academic surveys are small scale and subjective. A random survey of three students would have told us what we know, that fewer and fewer of us read texts that were taken for granted a generation ago as just a normal part of a decent education. I know from my own experience that growing up in the 80s it was just assumed that you were familiar with the main Dickens works, could read them without assistance and use the characters as references points. We are still optimists like Micawber, living in the past like Miss Havisham, devious lawyers like Tulkinghorn and social justice advocates like Mrs Jellyby.
Not all is lost when a restaurant review in the Time today starts as follows:
Arriving in Broadstairs, one begins to feel rather like a sickly lady in a Victorian novel. You know the ones — always being carted off to the seaside to convalesce after being thrown over by some terrible cad with a gambling habit and a homoerotic relationship with his best chum from school.
Between the wide promenade and the old house where Charles Dickens used to stay, I find myself expecting Josh to say he's lost everything in a dodgy investment in the San Francisco railroads and I must now — for the first time in my life — be put to work. Indeed, there is work to be done. We are not here to take in the sea air but for Fifteen Square Metres — a restaurant named for its size, or lack thereof. The nice thing about such petite dimensions is that you can make friends with the other diners. This is, I suppose, what those Victorian invalids used to do, lacking iPhones (poor things).’
Serious point though, this is probably lost on younger readers, based on the education my own children received, diverted by smartphones, computer games, shorter attention spams and everything else that meant a wet Sunday evening wasn’t spent curled up on the sofa reading Dickens. And here I am on Substack when I could be re-reading Bleak House.
I had a viral Medium story* last year that’s earned almost $30K and I survived because I have all notifications except text disabled.
Also, although I read all kinds of books from all different eras for fun, I know I’m part of a dying breed.
*It was about Dutch sex education vs American, and although I followed up with stories about the Dutch and sex education and everything else, I couldn’t replicate my results.
I didn't know people made money on medium
We do, but not as much as we used to. They’ve fucked it up. Most of the top writers have turned up here now.