Why Johnny Ivy League can’t read

Sometimes, you need a good old unveiling of things as they are for the world to see. The Atlantic provided this in spades with an article aptly titled “The elite college students who can’t read books.” In the most elite academic departments throughout the land, professors find that their students—the cream of the crop—struggle with their reading assignments. It turns out many have never been assigned a book in high school. The kind of “book” we’re talking about here isn’t a graphic novel, a dumbed-down young adult fiction series, or selections from famous works. We’re talking about serious books that one reads cover to cover, particularly the Great Books of the Western canon.

It’s a damning indictment of the state of American secondary education. But it’s not just a bad look for high schools across the country. Primary and university-level education are also implicated because poor secondary education often derives from a rickety foundation and handicaps a pupil for years to come. In fact, this whole situation should spur Americans to ask some hard, uncomfortable questions.

For one thing, if the elite universities of our country are running into this problem, what about the not-so-elite institutions? If they’re having problems with books at Columbia and Georgetown, how do we think things are going at Back-up State? Probably even worse.

For another thing, what does it say about the college application system of our nation that a student who has never read a serious book in his life makes it to the best schools in the land? Surely something must be broken. Apparently, proffering a highly polished essay, a stuffed résumé, good testing scores, and an increasingly worthless GPA hides some glaring holes in an applicant’s education.

Attached to this, do “good grades” mean anything with such outrageous grade inflation? Probably not. Suggest ending the use of letter grades and scores or flunking bad students and you will find that people mistake letters and numbers on paper for an actual education or don’t have the heart—and I mean it when I say heart—to enforce meaningful standards of scholastic excellence. But we need to pull off the shiny veneer and assess the dysfunction honestly: Business as usual for private and public schools in this country is a train wreck.

Also, if things are this bad, what does a university even mean, anyway? What’s its purpose? As a culture, we’ve decided that the university is not a place to learn the truth, grow in virtue, form scholarly saints, produce civilized ladies and gentlemen, or even provide much in terms of vocational training. It has become a place of credentialing, networking, hedonistic partying, progressive conditioning, and sports franchising. The Ivy League schools in particular still produce a mystique based upon their past accomplishments and heady social connections. They are portals to power, status, and elite influence. Is this respect now merited if the academic rigor isn’t there? Or has the glory been tarnished and faded? Their incoming students can’t read books. You tell me.

And shouldn’t we worry that our media-soaked culture degrades everyone, including the elite? The way we “consume content” has shot our attention spans. Smartphones have made for dumb people—even “successful” people. Are we going to do something about that? Or are we just going to complain about it and keep our shining rectangles in our pockets, enslaving ourselves to distraction?

Finally, what’s this going to mean for classical schools and homeschooling families who are doing well in the sense of actually providing an education? What will it mean for the flow of actually educated people who are blocked out of the elite institutions because of their religious principles and moral-social outlook? And by this, I don’t just mean in the sense that the universities won’t accept them, but also in the sense that these students and their parents aren’t interested in attending classes in such a permissive academic wasteland, much less paying for them. I anticipate that the main beneficiaries of this shift will be schools that represent a genuine alternative. And the ones hit hardest will be Christian colleges that try to imitate the mores and practices of the imploding secular academy.

It’s not fun to ask these painful questions, much less answer them honestly. But let’s get real. In terms of the mainstream American education system, from expensive elite academies down to public high schools, from the state colleges on up to the Ivies, the emperor has no clothes.