Reading Skills--Where Have They Gone?

Yesterday I substituted for a series of high school AP English classes. These are the advanced classes for upper classmen that supposedly earn the student college credit. I can tell you from personal observation they are more difficult than regular English classes.
I was in the same classroom exactly one week previous to yesterday. What I observed, comparing both days, stunned me. The class was reading Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. It’s a short book—just over 200 pages in a small page format.
A week ago the classes were reading a chapter that ended at approximately page 40. In a week’s time, these advanced students had gotten all the way to page 95. I repeat, these were advanced students, receiving college credit for their work.
This is typical of all the AP classes I have watched over the past few years.
When I was in high school, they would have handed me a book this size on a Friday, told me to have it finished within the week—and expected I would have a three to five page report ready within the same week. Those weren’t AP classes (they didn’t exist where I was in high school); they were just standard college prep courses.
Every day I substitute I am surprised by some way in which the same courses I took in the 1950s have been “dumbed down”. Can you imagine giving a present day high school student a seven to eight hundred page book to read and report on—as just one additional assignment, on top of the chapters in the text book?
The kid would probably require the services of a defibrillator. I wrote several reports like that in high school—it just came with the territory. But today, the high school classes at the highest degree of difficulty require forty or fifty pages a week. Easy pages—“Fahrenheit 451” is not a hard book to read. It’s short and the vocabulary really should be in reach of a college bound senior.
But this isn’t the most troubling thing. In class after class, the kids finish the assignments I’ve been instructed to give them and, then, many of them tell me they have nothing else to do. So I suggest that they read a book (I always carried one when I was in school).
Some of you might be amazed at how many high school students (smart ones, suburban schools) tell me they never read. They hate reading. They never carry a book with them. I’ll catch them trying to text on their Ipods or sneak a call on their phones. Read, never?
It is a trial for them to wade through 50 whole pages in a week. A two hundred page book that is essentially an “easy read” is a violation of the “cruel and unusual” clause in the Constitution. The reading situation is not getting better; it isn’t even stabilizing. I just read a report that indicates reading ability has dropped substantially SINCE the passage of “No Child Left Behind” legislation.
Something we’re doing isn’t working—in fact it seems to be working backward. When I was a kid and we had some free time, I remember that even the poorer students grabbed a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and paged through it. Such a scene would be unimaginable today.
I snicker at the thought. A room full of teenagers peering through volumes of an encyclopedia when they have nothing else to read. Forget it!
But if you don’t read, school becomes pretty meaningless to you—no matter how large or small the budget or how good or bad the teaching skills. I stumbled on a book the other day that gave me some real insights into what has happened to reading in America.
It’s called “Readacide”. I’ll talk more about it tomorrow.