There’s a new (il)literacy myth

To the editor:

In “How Much Do Students Really Read?” (Sept. 25, 2024), Inside Higher Ed reporter Johanna Alonso repeats claims that are inaccurate, damaging and demeaning to students. “Students are turning to YouTube, podcasts and ChatGPT-crafted summaries rather than actually reading their assignments for classes. Professors are unsure how to adapt,” she writes.

Alonso’s article spreads what I have identified as “the il-literacy myth” that children, students and many adults, including college students, won’t—and indeed can’t —read.

By myth, I do not mean false or fictitious, but untruths that are accepted and propagated widely because they appear to agree with accepted presumptions. The age-old literacy myth doesn’t take into account factors that might lead to students’ success or failure to read, such as a lack of opportunity or social inequalities. The effect is, as in the il-literacy myth, to blame the victim. It is students’ own failing, not their instructors, institutions or lived experiences, that are at fault.

Especially important, Alonso never considers the question “What is reading?” especially across media and different texts. There is no one form of confronting or making meaning from texts that are almost infinitely varied. This, and the need for students to learn to read different texts differently, is seldom part of the curriculum and is one of the principal causes for students’ difficulties with reading. 

None of this is new in the ways that Alonso presents it. Throughout the history of higher education (and primary and secondary schooling, too), students have been condemned for their inability to read or their disinterest and difficulty in reading. Just as there is no golden age of the liberal arts, there was no golden age of reading. 

Her mention of students turning to “summaries” of texts via ChatGPT is exemplary. For decades, short, printed CliffsNotes provided easily accessible summaries. Good instructors used them to assist students. They did not denounce them. Students have also used printed and then online encyclopedias from the Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book as well as comic versions of classic texts. Wikipedia, for better and worse, preceded and continues to accompany AI.

Each of these can be used well or poorly. Students’ use or misuse of summarizing tools is neither new nor unprecedented. Knowledgeable, good professors have always known how to adapt.

Students have always read, and they continue to read, across texts and media. Of course, it is not always the texts that English professors and cultural warriors want teenagers and young adults to read. Not is it always via the medium of print or in one sitting. Increasingly, universities, instructors and competing curricula interfere with that. It’s time to meet students where they are with reading. Will professors lead?