To the Editor:99bet
Re “I Get Why Students No Longer Read,” by Jonathan Malesic (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 10):
I just completed a 40-plus-year career teaching literature courses to university students, and I agree with Mr. Malesic that today’s college students are not serious readers of literary texts.
Like Mr. Malesic, I assigned Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” to my students enrolled in a literature and philosophy course, and many would not read it. On the end-of-semester course evaluation, these students would say something like: “Why do we have to read these texts? Why can’t the professor just identify the important points in them in a lecture, and we’ll deliver those on the exam?”
Serious reading — sitting down in a quiet place, undisturbed, for a few hours with a text like “Walden” — takes students away from their cellphones. Many students cannot go more than 10 or 15 minutes without consulting their phones. Reading gets in the way.
James TackachNarragansett, R.I.
To the Editor:
The humanities have a huge marketing problem. Studying English is just as much a practical degree as business. As a senior with a business major and an English minor, I’m tired of hearing that English is about “pleasure.”
Enjoyment is part of it, but in a world where college has become vocational training, of course the image of English students luxuriating in fiction makes it seem like a waste of time. But that’s simply inaccurate.
The humanities are about thinking. Both students and employers need to wake up. At a time when elite college students can’t read entire books, humanities students are becoming more valuable than ever.
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