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Peter Frinton's avatar

Reading has declined; even email is too slow compared to instant messaging- with its own word minimalist etiquette. But even 45 years ago, teaching 4th. year pre-vet. students, I discovered a collective inability to articulate thoughts on paper in any meaningful way. So, writing went out the window as well. Not entirely true, though. My niece, half-way through a PhD in Medical Anthropology, can research, write and submit a complicated essay in a few days. I saw her little sister plow through a pretty beefy tome while sunning herself on a sailboat last summer. Perhaps because information gathering has become so easy, there is no real need to 'hoard' it, but simply call it up as needed. Similarly so with written expression; much can be said with fewer words. No more 2500 word essays containing a few meagre thoughts and a lot of padding. The world is more complex than a generation ago, and streamlining is perhaps a very good adaptation.

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Mark C.E. Peterson, PhD's avatar

Wow, beautifully said. Yep!

I’ve been at this about 35 years now (I teach philosophy and religious studies) and I guess I noticed this … problem/mess/issue/disaster in process/WTF … about the same time you did. I had been blaming no child left behind, where the students spent the previous 12 years of their educational experience, being trained not to wonder about anything. I have a suspicion the reading problem is related to the wondering problem.

Here’s the observation I keep coming back to: when students hit a word they don’t understand, they never look it up. It doesn’t occur to them to look it up even though they have the entire OED right there on their phone. I started to suspect that, not only does it not occur to them to look up words they don’t understand, but that the educational process they’ve been exposed to has actively trained them to avoid looking up things they don’t understand - has, in a nutshell, trained them not to wonder about anything.

Anyway, it’s a working hypothesis.

Great stuff, thanks for this!

Sigh.

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