The missing intangibles

In “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic’s November cover story, Rose Horowitch surveys a familiar complaint from college professors. Notice the verb: It’s not that high-achieving students refuse to read long-form literature. What troubles their teachers is that these kids can’t retain focus for 200-plus pages. Reading for pleasure is a quaint “niche” for a few, like a taste for retro fashion. The ubiquitous phone bears some responsibility, but greater blame belongs to the educational establishment itself.

Perhaps it began when the university drifted away from its original mission of expanding young minds and became instead a vehicle for material success. My generation was the first to marinate in the assumption that a college diploma ensured a higher income. We asked each other where, not if, we were going to college. Standardized testing was the key for unlocking scholarships and admissions to the Ivy League, and high scores the measure of success.

Roughly three-fifths of any standardized test is reading comprehension: short fiction or nonfiction excerpts, followed by multiple-choice questions designed to quantify how a student analyzes a particular constellation of words. Test preparation teaches reading as a utilitarian skill, not a means of human growth and wisdom. Skills replace content. “And if a skill is not easily measured,” writes Horowitch, “instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it.”

Students have learned what they were taught: short texts for short-term goals. Writing in National Review, Ian Tuttle observes that an obsessive focus on measurable gains cancels out the immeasurable gain of thoughtful, attentive reading. But “this all-consuming economy of achievement is ultimately intolerable to the soul, which exists in a different economy altogether.”

There’s the problem: Educational policy ignores the soul because policymakers no longer agree there is such a thing.

But this is not a column about reading. It’s about intangible benefits that resist quantification, whether in education, business, government, or home and family. When a society subscribes, or at least pays lip service to, a transcendent moral code, the intangibles are assumed. With the exception of glaring faults like racism, American society accepted a Biblical code until about 60 years ago. Rejecting it means that right or wrong can only be determined by measurable results—who prospers, who doesn’t, who suffers, who escapes from suffering. Résumé-building replaces soul-­cultivating. Long-term falls to short-term.

There’s no better example than the long march of abortion. As we’ve discovered since the fall of Roe v. Wade, a pro-life position is a very hard sell. Who wants to tell the bright student working toward a lucrative degree, who finds herself pregnant in spite of precautions, that she must derail her career to make room for a baby?

A young woman I knew, who found herself in that predicament, seriously considered abortion after a lifetime of believing she was against it. She was 30 years old and single, back in college to earn a second degree with expanded job and earning potential. The benefits of abortion were not just tangible but compelling: no interruption in plans, a quick and anonymous cleanup (her boyfriend would even pay for it), and no disappointed parents or church. Marriage and children could wait for a more convenient time.

Against all these measurable short-term positives stood the great mystery: the human being God had created in her body. She followed her soul’s “different economy” into an open-ended future and now, like so many problem-pregnancy moms, can’t imagine life without her child. Her first child, that is, for God eventually settled her in a home as a joyful mother of children (Psalm 113:9).

Not all choose-life stories end happily, because life itself is a value not easily quantified. Life moves by the invisible gears of intangibles. It’s impossible to measure what 50 years of legalized abortion have done to our national “soul,” but I can see how what was once sold as a sorrowful but necessary choice is now promoted as a fundamental right. I see children regarded as parental projects rather than their own persons. I see hope in the future diminished as the future population shrinks.

All intangible, like hidden roots. It’s no wonder that rootless, short-term students who miss the value of reading books are also (by and large) blind to the possibilities of choosing life. We who know better should start teaching better.