1d ago

College English majors can't read

kittenbeloved.substack.com

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Dickens feels like an odd choice to display functional illiteracy, given that while it's technically written in modern English it's also marred with the cultural baggage of Victorian England; "wonderful," for example, is meant in this passage to mean that it produces awe or astonishment, but that's not how the word is used by anyone in modern times. The dinosaur portion is part of a larger metaphor using Noah's Ark which is only really going to pop to someone with decent familiarity with Christian mythology, and worded in a way that still takes someone literate a moment to digest and understand it.
I'm not entirely sure the form of the study helps either; most of the responses seem like they threw a passage at an undergrad and immediately demanded their interpretation in a clinical (read: atypical and somewhat uncomfortable compared to normal reading) setting. How many of the readers would have re-parsed the passage given another moment or two and understood it? Furthermore, the opening passage isn't even particularly important to the plot, and it seems like the vast majority of people reading understood at the very least that "it was a shitty morning in London" is the point here. Is that functional illiteracy, or simply skimming purple prose that isn't all the relevant to the story?
This example feels only a little removed from laughing at undergrads for not understanding why Homer spent so goddamn long in the Iliad charting random Greek soldiers' entire family trees only to kill them off a breath afterwards, and calling them illiterate for not grasping cultural context from literal antiquity.
- I read the linked study, they weren't testing for immediate comprehension, but rather what tools a reader will utilize and how much effort they were willing to put in before giving up. The testees had access to the internet to look up phrases and titles that they didn't understand, and as far as I can tell there was no time limit. The "problematic" group included people who thought that there was meant to be a literal dinosaur walking around in the mud, and like half of the people in it never figured out that the setting was a court of chancery.
- I figured the dinosaur thing was meant to allude to primordial or primitive imagery, but I wouldn't have guessed it had to do with something like noah's ark
  
  "The waters" is still a common way among Christian nerds to refer to the deluge, i.e. God's most famous genocide. But only among the worst nerds.
- A third of senior and junior English majors were found to be completely helpless! That is not acceptable!
- The whole point of the test is that you're supposed to be able to parse these meanings anyway. It's supposed to be relatively challenging.
  
  At what point does the test become "do you have very specific historical knowledge that is functionally trivia for any real world use case?" though?
  
  They don't need to have the knowledge memorized. They had full access to google and a dictionary to look up anything they found confusing, and couldn't even do that. The test was of their ability to figure out a somewhat difficult text, not of their historical knowledge.
  
  I didn't clock that they had Google access when reading through it earlier, I thought they were limited purely to a dictionary/encyclopedia lookup. That does make it a little more damning.
  
  That's just what high literacy - which is expected of English majors, especially by their third and fourth year - requires.
  According to ACT, Inc., this level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension section of the ACT (Reading).
  In 2015, incoming freshmen from both universities had an average ACT Reading score of 22.4 out of a possible 36 points, above the national ACT Reading score of 21.4 for that same year.

75 comments