“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, Part 1
How Standardized Test-Driven Curriculum Degraded America's Capacity to Tackle Our Most Pressing Issues
This is the first in a three-part series of essays riffing on the issues raised in “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” by The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch. The article talks specifically about reading “great literature,” but when I talk about “Humanities” in Living Literature, I mostly include “History” in this teaching framework. The modes of inquiry are similar, and in the end, both disciplines help us make sense of the world by understanding how human beings respond to their circumstances.
To that end, these essays will address:
How the 21st Century’s standardized testing regime has stripped the standard high school curriculum of the skills learned in the Humanities.
Why these Humanities skills are, actually, the in-demand skills that employers say they want, but complain that today’s workforce doesn’t have.
Why new theories of teaching Humanities are essential for creating a workforce that can tackle 21st Century challenges, and the kinds of citizens necessary for a thriving democracy.
Horowitch’s article has, let’s say, concepts of a plan to explain why today’s college students lack the capacity to read full books. The article is much like the elite college students it’s worried about: It knows something’s wrong, but lacks the perspective, context, and historical thinking skills to figure out why.
Now, you probably think that college students can’t read books because “everybody is always on their phones, grade inflation dumbs everything down, and kids don’t listen to anybody,” and sure, that’s a large part of it.
But below the surface, there’s a more important story about how the standardized testing regime has, collectively, degraded our ability to think about “wicked problems”: A catch-all term for the big, serious, thorny, complex, systemic issues, where every policy choice involves a series of trade-offs that require value judgments because “silver bullet” technocratic solutions don’t exist.
This is where the Humanities excel: Most complex problems cannot be data-analyzed into fix-all solutions, so real leadership requires historical thinking, cultural context, and moral reasoning. You know, the types of things that aren’t on the test.
Excelling on Standardized Tests Will Get You Into College While Diminishing Your Ability to Excel After College
Horowitz opens with Professor Nicholas Dames, teacher of Columbia’s “great-books” course, reporting that his students say “the reading load feels impossible.” Crucially, he cites a conversation with a student who says that, in high school, she had only been assigned “excerpts.” He concludes:
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.
It’s worth pausing on this point, which we’ll return to several times: Students will read, understand, and apply longform critical thinking skills–if we give them the skills and the purpose.
This isn’t a lame attempt to somehow make literature “relevant,” but to teach Humanities so that it develops the skills essential to tackling the world’s Wicked Problems. There’s a reason so-called elite schools, that were founded mostly as leadership academies for the aristocratic class, grounded their studies in the liberal arts of Humanities and History.
Back to the article, Horowitz says there is “no comprehensive data” on students’ inability to read books, so she relies on interviews with thirty-three professors from, presumably, “elite” universities for her conclusion. Fair enough, but the real question is why.
In search of an answer, Horowitz cites research saying that high schools teach fewer books, blaming the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and, later, the Common Core curriculum that ushered in the “accountability” era of high stakes testing.
Horowitch explains that NCLB and Common Core “emphasized informational texts” and “short informational passages,” which “mimic the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.” The tests do not assess your ability to comprehend long, complex narratives, nor can they easily assess whether you can apply context to your understanding of those narratives. And, in the age of accountability-based teacher evaluation, if it’s not tested, there’s “little incentive to teach it.”
So, why did the NCLB and Common Core emphasize excerpts-based reading comprehension? As Antero Garcia, a Professor of Education at Stanford and outgoing Vice President of the National Council of Teachers of English, says, the switch to “excerpts” (often called “passages” in test-speak) was “intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts.”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Standardized Testing “Passages” Train You to Walk Pre-Determined Paths
To pick up where Horowitch’s article leaves off, let’s talk about the Education Reform Movement and the 21st Century Standardized Testing Regime. Specifically, I want to explain precisely why the emphasis on “passages” is crucial to understanding why much school curriculum has, mostly, abandoned teaching longform writing–fiction, history, scientific, or otherwise.
A little personal context: I began teaching in 1998, teaching high school English in a small midwestern rural school, where I also became the Gifted Program Coordinator. I earned a Master’s degree at one of the few Centers for Gifted Education in the country, which gave me a rare background in the explicit teaching of critical thinking skills.
As such, Garcia raises one of my longstanding gripes about NCLB and the Common Core: The writers and developers of this curriculum largely do not understand, at all, basic critical thinking concepts.
I do not want to recount the entire history of corporate-influenced ideas in education. But it’s hard to overstate the extent to which NCLB and the Common Core reflect a technocratic worldview, over 50 years in the making. For a comprehensive deep-dive into the roots and rise of the Common Core and the modern standardized testing regime, Wil Greer’s 2018 article from The Journal of Educational Foundations (free to download from the U.S. Department of Education) is a great primer. Or, read about the outsized role the Gates Foundation’s money and influence played in the “Swift Common Core Revolution”, and here’s one of the best discussions of the Common Core’s failure, where even the guys who say “stay the course” have to admit that it’s done very little to improve education outcomes.
Said another way, NCLB and the Common Core reflect what corporate business leaders think critical thinking is, mostly because they believe that data analysts are the smartest people in the room. The problem is that they believe “critical thinking” and “analysis” are synonyms, but in reality, “analysis” is simply one type of critical thinking, and a lower-order one at that.
Analysis is, by definition, process-based thinking where you break a whole into parts to understand how it operates. This is algebraic thinking, the rhetorical equivalent of solving for X. Or, think of “analysis” like this: When something doesn’t work, analysis is a trouble-shooting guide. When something does work, analysis is a recipe.
To explain how that type of thinking infects the teaching of reading comprehension, let’s apply this thinking to “passages” style reading questions. SAT, ACT, and all other manner of reading comprehension tests present excerpt-based passages that ask for the author’s main idea. This is almost purely analytical thinking, the reading equivalent of solving for X. You use the tools of textual interpretation to decode the author’s meaning, which, under the rules of the test, is the only “correct” way to interpret the passage.
Now, let’s think about how the test itself is constructed:
Because the test has to be standardized to create a “correct” answer, which has already been determined by the test-writer, the questions themselves must be intentionally constructed like a road-map so the student can reach the single, unequivocable, “objective” answer!
There’s very little for the test-taker to do for themselves. In fact, “thinking for yourself” will only lead you off the path towards wrong answers! To get the right answer, designed by the test-makers themselves, you follow the already-constructed path, like Dorothy down the yellow brick road to get the answer from the Great and Powerful Oz.
Standardized Tests Have Trained The Past Two Generations Of Students to Cower Before the Great and Powerful Oz
So, what does this teach students who have had this kind of thinking pounded into them–not just by SAT or ACT test prep in high school, but on a daily basis in nearly every part of the curriculum during the entirety of their schooling?
If you’re an experienced professional in your field, you have probably encountered this from a younger hire: You give them a reading-and-interpretation task of some sort, or anything that requires independent problem solving–and it absolutely paralyzes them.
They come to you and ask “Is this right?” or “Is this what you’re looking for?” And you say, well, I don’t know, that’s why I asked you to read it and give me your insight. And they’re completely bewildered, or as University of Virginia Professor of Chinese Literature Jack Chen says in the article, they “‘shut down’ when confronted with ideas they don’t understand.”
It’s actually worse than that: It’s not that they don’t understand the ideas, they have been trained not to have their own ideas! Look at what these standardized tests drill into students: There’s a pre-determined answer that is someone else’s answer, and whatever interpretation you might conjure up is not only irrelevant, it’s wrong. You show how smart you are, you qualify and credential yourself for college and the workplace, not by having your own ideas, but by solving for somebody else’s X.
And if you come back with the wrong broomstick, a tiny man behind the curtain, pretending to be an all-powerful demigod, yells at you through a microphone and blows red smoke in your face so that you feel shame for having failed. Or, if you’re a school administrator, you have to admonish students that because you didn’t do well enough on the tests to show enough Adequate Yearly Progress, as mandated by No Child Left Behind, that we’ll have our funding cut and get tagged as a “failing school.”
Real Problem Solvers Don’t Just Need Brains: They Need Hearts, Courage, and Dog-Like Instincts Too
Advanced critical thinkers can look at things from a systems level, within cultural context and with historical perspective to try to understand why things are how they are, with a values base that can imagine a better world.
This requires higher-order critical thinking skills like, say, “synthesis,” which compares different analyses, generating a new, original-to-you interpretation that makes sense of a bigger problem or a bigger narrative. This is what scientists do when they generate “theories,” when economists develop “models,” and when artists find their unique voice.
Now you see the problem: Excerpt-based, information-driven “analysis” is a lower form of critical thinking than what we want people to do. It’s easier to test and assess, but it doesn’t require sustained concentration, following a complex narrative, or historical or cultural context that would complicate the analysis with possibilities other than the pre-determined X.
Synthesis is a higher-order critical thinking skill: It’s a meta-analysis at the systems level. Beyond analyzing data in isolation, synthesis requires qualitative analytical skills to try to find more human explanations for the data–and then you compare different analyses to try to uncover insights underneath that somehow unify the data. It’s this combination of quant and qual, used in tandem, that generates original insights.
So, how did this lower form of “analytical” thinking come to define the era of NCLB and the Common Core? In the 1990s, a movement emerged around the idea that the purpose of education is, above all else, to create the future workforce to drive the economy.
Thus, “education reform” needed to create curriculum and systems to “create the workforce of tomorrow.”
How did that manifest in education policy?
To understand the education reform vision, 1990s context is essential: This was the beginning of the internet and the “dot com” boom. The “jobs of the future” would require college degrees because we’d all be working on computers now. The blue collar manufacturing jobs are all headed to Mexico. No longer could you create a middle class life by working with your hands: The road to the middle class passed through college.
What kind of curriculum would determine “college readiness”? Well, one based on analytical thinking, assessed by rigorous standardized tests, administered by a system that held educators accountable for results.
In other words, No Child Left Behind and the Common Core. For over the last twenty years, high school curriculum has bent towards this kind of thinking. The result? Young people have been trained to read excerpts and can no longer follow full-length books. And they’re absolutely terrified of being wrong because that will disappoint you.
To be clear, I don’t think this is entirely true: I think students today are more aware and more worldly than ever, which is an undercurrent in the “culture wars” over book banning and curriculum since 2016. That said, as a teacher, you have to work really hard to build enough trust that they’ll believe you when you say, “The goal is for you to develop your own insights, based on your evidence-based analysis and a values-driven perspective that clarifies the situation for other people.”
That’s harder than solving for X. It can’t be learned through excerpts and passage-driven standardized tests. And as Professor Dames observed up front, they want to do this kind of thinking, but we have to understand what that thinking is, and also how to teach it. And that requires reading the whole book.