2024oct25 Students Don’t Read Anymore
All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read? For that matter, how will any effort in school prepare them for careers in which, apparently, effort is not rewarded? Given all this, it’s easy to lose faith in humanistic learning. Universities themselves offer little solace. They constantly promote the idea that a degree is about earning power above all else. They embrace influencer culture and probably benefit from viral phenomena like Bama Rush. They certainly aren’t shooing away corporate recruiters. But teaching is an inherently hopeful profession, and as much as students worry me, they also give me hope. I often see my writing students push themselves past what’s easy or rational. They get excited about their research projects; sometimes they even ponder whether to use a period or a semicolon to separate two sentences. The fact is, not all students aim to sail on vibes. Some want to do work that makes more than money. Some finance majors do, too. And others, God bless them, just want to learn what they can and worry about work later. It’s up to students to decide whether they’ll resist intellectual inertia. All I can do is demonstrate that it is worth it to read, to pause, to think, to revise, to reread, to discuss, to revise again. I can, in the time students are with me, offer them chances to defy their incentives and see what happens. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/opinion/college-university-students-reading.html
Intellectual inertia is learned. But left to their own devices and generic education opportunities, initial humans with adequate opportunity safety guardrails, will employ their inherent curiosity “to read [skim], to pause [muse], to think [reason], to revise [rewrite], to reread [hyperlinked narration flow], to discuss [loner reasoning], to revise again [polish]” …
Thusly, as an 86yo, Harv’s news media curation has been, at least daily (the world at his literal fingertips via internet 24/7 connectivity) —
- SMERCONISH.com
- AP
- BBC - review 106B humans
- NPR - vanilla news
- the hill news
- NYT elite news
- WAPO generic news
- Bloomberg
- CNN now news
- WSJ expensive
- C-SPAN face-to-face news