Laut Oxford-Professor fällt es Schülern staatlicher Schulen schwer, lange Bücher zu lesen

Is that a schooling issue or a generational issue. I was slamming though books from the library at a rate of knots already I’m primary school, but then I didn’t have a smartphone and all its apps begging for attention while doing so.

“He told the broadcaster: “I’ve been teaching in British and American universities for 40 years, and when I began in Cambridge, you could say to students ‘this week, it’s Dickens, so please read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House’.

“Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.””

Or maybe students are more likely to need jobs now so have less time to read.

> Because those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teacher’s main task is crowd control, the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there.” .. They were able students, but they simply hadn’t been exposed to large numbers of long books,” he said. “They hadn’t really developed that habit of concentrated, lengthy reading which private schools in both the UK and the US concentrate on.” .. Now, instead of three novels in a week, many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks.”

That seems like an entirely fair comment to me. An Oxford Literature professor should have high expectations, at least he’s understanding about it. Though one big factor he’s forgotten to mention – smartphones & social media. I bet reading three books in a week was a lot easier when people didn’t have that distraction burning in their pocket.

I visited my children’s academy last week.

The librarian retired last year and apparently there is no librarian now and the “library” seemed more like a common room than a library. It had very few books in it.

This might well be part of the problem.

My attention span has definitely got worse. I used to read a book a month now it’s maybe 2 a year, max. I even joined the library, but it’s not much of a library anymore. It a has a small amount of books, mostly you have to request a book which takes a while. The largest part is dedicated to separate rooms for meetings, and community events.

Every child in my family I have bought a longer (for their age) book as part of their birthday / Christmas present each year. It’s not their ‘main’ present, and often it’s a book I’ve read myself.

Often they are more excited for the book than their main present, and they love reading them, often with me or other adults in the family.

If children have access to books, they’ll enjoy them. I find books that have a film adaptation are often talked about the most. The Ghibli ones like Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbour Totoro, When Marnie was There, Howls Moving Castle, those are very well received as they can have watching the film as a treat once they’ve finished the book, and they’ll point out the differences between the film and the book.

The last book I gave had some weather damage since I took it out hiking and was hit by an unexpected storm. This, surprisingly, made the child 10 times more excited to receive it since it was proof I had read and enjoyed it myself.

My daughter is in year 2. She’s the “new gen”. She reads exceptionally for her age, she’s even in an advanced readers group. She reads daily… we also read to her daily since before she could talk

I went to private school and very few people there could read a long book. It was full of dummies who now work for their Dads.

You don’t have to be intelligent for private school, just rich!

He’s on about state school kids needing to work over being able to just sit and read which is a luxury.

Many forms of media are short form cause in a world where we always have to be busy to survive, there’s no room for long form distractions like books.

Nowadays if you think about it, you’d have to be pretty privileged to raise a kid who’s not addicted to their screen, with both parents often having to work in the average family sometimes the phone has to be the nanny and it’s been this way for the past decade now. I see a lot of people in the comments saying how they limit their kids screen time, good for you. I don’t imagine others are as committed as you and that’s just society now.

Instead of making them longer, make the pages bigger 🤷‍♂️

As a former state school student who some how now has a masters degree in philosophy, the amount of reading he seems to expect is crazy. Then again, it’s English literature and philosophy is much more difficult to read, even contemporary philosophy.

Interesting, a similar claim was made by a prof at a top American university. That students there aren’t capable of reading a full novel.

I just hope that this doesn’t lead to further dumbing down in the name of ‘equality’ and not being ‘elitist’

Hasn’t literacy improved tremendously in the UK. I know it’s something conservative proudly touted that fact.

I don’t think the issue is with only state schools and more a generation issue, when I was in school there wasn’t the internet, google, ChatGPT cliff notes etc. available to cut corners studying

I think part of the issue is that a lot of our English classes (unfortunately) do very little to induce a love of reading and literature. I remember sitting there for ages listening to people (haltingly) read their way through a book – to the point that we basically took the better part of half a term to *start* ‘My Family and Other Animals’. How can you enjoy a book if the process of reading it is so damn grating?

Still, if that’s bad, then poetry was worse. I can’t think of a quicker way to kill a poem dead except by analysing it into the dust. I quite enjoyed things like ‘Half Caste’ when we started reading them at GCSE, but by the end I wanted to beat its writer senseless with a trench shovel…which probably wasn’t the reaction he was looking for.