Modern Living Books

“But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/?gift=alInWvfrt8HYWuf-YgzDAx7vJ2lLtLvE1WftahLaBwU&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2DDY2tl1xAbLKD8WtPX-NP_78a3urbEibVS6o7VjsCyAJ9uP5GpoqQdA8_aem_kxfwp0snzKbcwvrFLzzqWg

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.