Original: https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read
Archive: https://archive.is/qlL6u
95% or so of the tested English majors in Kansas state universities could not parse three leading paragraphs of Dickens Bleak House. First paragraph of same is below:
LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Breakdown of the readers in the study:
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58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
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38% could understand about half of the sentences
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5% could understand all seven paragraphs
Money quote:
These problematic readers, which again comprise 58% of the English majors in the study, cannot differentiate between literal and figurative speech in literature. When they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary, they sometimes leap to fantastical conclusions about the meaning of a passage, as this participant who thinks the mention of “whiskers” refers not to a bearded man but to an animal.
These are the people who presume to morally lecture you online. Never forget it.
I don't blame them. Dickens is the worst example of English literature to ever exist. All of his works put a modern purple prose writing tumblerite to shame. Tale of Two Cities is the only reading assignment I never completed within the day it was assigned. In fact, i never completed it at all. It is awful.
Just taking the excerpt from above, you have two sentence fragments before you even get to the first full sentence:
The only reason Dickens is forced on modern students is to perpetuate the communist propaganda of "industry bad, capitalism bad."
I don't hate him quite so much, but the lengths he would go to to cram tangents and similes into seemingly every sentence are ridiculous.
It does make me think his personality maybe had way too much in common with the fart sniffing kind of modern games journo. The kind who turns every game review into some soliloquy over breakfast in a mountain cabin about how he discovered his love of french toast and why this lemmings remaster reminds him of that.
He was paid by the word, so he made absolutely sure to get his money's worth with every story he wrote. Modern-day urinalists, both in gaming and elsewhere, have no such excuse.
Paid by the word would explain a lot about his style.
How positively cromulant.
I felt this way when I was much younger, but I don't think this is a good take. I'd suggest that Dickens was among last of the breed that expected the reader to read "aloud." Its a bit like reading a Shakespeare play in high school; it kind of sucks if your reading it silently, and different experience watching it performed. Dickens' writing needs to be "vocalized" either by actually vocalizing it or being adept at hearing the language in your own head.
I'd had felt that my dislike of Dickens might have been a mistake for some time; listening to a direct dramatic reading of "A Christmas Carol" of all things convinced me. My exact thought at the time was "ah, so this is like Shakespeare."
There are two Dickens. His longer works- the ones that the elites gush over- were him slowly writing the longest books he could for the most money. His shorter stuff-A Christmas Carol is one- was him writing PDQ to keep his ass out of debtor's prison. The man could decently write when his freedom was on the line.
Any reading that requires vocalization isn't reading. This is especially true since reading is hundreds of times faster than speaking. Put another way, I could read the entire LotR trilogy in the time it takes you to watch ONE of the movies.
Dickens is just shit. There are far better authors of the same time period such as Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain, or Edgar Allen Poe. Ironically, even Verne is a better English author than Dickens, and he didn't write in English.
Dickens aside, this is absolute ahistorical bullshit. Reading silently was considered a notable, if not downright odd, habit prior to middle ages. We built entire buildings dedicated to reading aloud (chapterhouses), the very word "reading" has often referred what we call lectures as well as the parts of religious liturgy intended read to an audience.
That's how I feel about Jules Verne. 20000 Leagues was one of the worst reads of my life and its entirely about the writing style holding back an otherwise pretty wonderful story. Because it needs to bog everything down with so much waxing diarrhea to paint the picture and try to sound scientifically smart that it becomes closer to a tech manual at times.
In this case it seems to be assigned for the "themes" of environmentalism and anti-racism/oppression/imperialism throughout.
Masturbatory is the adjective I would use to describe his manuscript.
A lot of literary fiction is so mind numbing that you can tell 90% of the time the critics praising it didn't even read the full book. You're just expected to praise it because it came from a praise worthy author even if it is bad.
The average iq of a bachelors student dropped an entire standard deviation (15 points) since around the late 90s to today. This is such a large deviation that the only known non-genetic factor that can cause this is… starvation. The average English college student today is of the same intellectual caliber as an emaciated and starving English student in the 90s. Or by another comparison a standard deviation is the difference between being of median IQ and the original standard for mental retardation (which they lowered to 70 because “racism”).
Are the children starving, or are they brown? Same dynamic as national average height.
Both, unfortunately. Jim from Jim's blog pulled the stats one days, and American whites really are shorter, dumber and more effeminate than their counterparts from even a few decades ago. The little brown and black people make things much worse as they are shorter and dumber as well. Throw in their own malnutrition and they have lower testosterone levels than their white counterparts.
This is the most retarded thing I’ve ever read.
This is the real kicker for me. The link between spoken language and thought is fundamental, not just to communication, but to cognition as a whole. If you can't understand nonliteral language, then you can't think figuratively either. They can't imagine, they can't hypothesize, they can't even really contemplate the potential consequences of their own actions.
In other words, ''breakfest havers''.
"I don't understand what you mean by that, I didn't have breakfast"
i firmly believe that number of human souls is limited to couple hundred millions, and those who can't imagine things or don't have inner monologue/dialogue are simply soulless
shit is flabbergasting
Off topic but reading about those old timey streets sounds an especially shitty way to live and move around.
The Victorians considered it just fine to empty their chamber-pot out onto the street, so it was indeed a very shitty way to travel.
Does this mean there’s hope for India?
(Probably not since for Indians, it seems to almost be a fetish)
No because it was still done with privacy in Victorian times hence the related term "privy". There's a literal world of difference between emptying a chamber pot or a similar container out into the street vs popping a squat and cutting out the middle man.
I always wondered why people wanted to move to the cities from the countryside in those times. Surely farming wasn’t as tough of a life as walking the average modern Indian city, right?
I dunno about farming then. Somethings I read about it, it sounds quaint and charming and other times it sounds like nothing but toil.
It's both, you get the charming part, and also have to work pretty much all day every day until you hunker down for the winter.
And then you pray you prepped enough for winter.
Farming before mechanization was essentially every man in a community constantly racing sunset and the first frost in a yearly marathon where the people who didn't cross the finish line died. Back then, it took a full spring day to plow an acre of land, if you stacked the deck in the favor of the plowman. Then in the winter you essentially took care of animals, hunted, and made more future farm hands.
The industrial revolution and its consequences...
Yes and the shitty part is literal
Victorian era England was so fucking bad they had to create an entire genre of media to retcon it from history.
How the Dickens did they pull that off?
Carlos!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UiX7so9v0f4&pp=ygUic2Nyb29nZWQgYmxsIG11cnJheSBub2JvZHkgZ2V0cyBtZdIHCQmNCQGHKiGM7w%3D%3D
I'll give them one point of credit. Reading that is so boringly unnecessary in its description that my eyes start to glaze over. It is legitimately terrible in every sense but for an English Teacher.
So given their choice of major it should be right up their alley, and only theirs, but also English majors are mostly in it just to go to college on one of the easiest programs rather than to be learned.
Had a similar feeling when reading that although it may be partly down to how much I utterly despised English in school because of a particular teacher being such a cunt. I would honestly rather watch woodlice run around a dish for hours than read more of that, and that's exactly what I did in my final year of high school when I no longer needed to take English as a class and instead went balls to the walls with hard sciences.
Irony being, I fucking loved reading as a kid up until my mid 20s. I would shotgun hundreds of pages a day out of huge novels if I was enjoying them.
But any book assigned in an English class was always so mindnumbing and terrible that it would slow to barely a chapter an hour because I'd have to just keep going back to re-read because I was not absorbing anything. I'm still fuming to this day about Desert Solitaire, and I credit Edward Abbey in that book with implanting me with a hatred of environmentalism from a young age by simply being insufferable, hypocritical, and just awful.
It almost feels like reverse psychology with how consistent they are in picking books that accomplish the opposite of whatever they want.
Somewhat ironically given recent news about the show being cancelled it was the Wheel of Time books that were the tipping point for me getting into reading properly as like yourself until then a lot of the reading infront of me had been set for a class so I had zero motivation or enjoyment for any of it. Even then I only started the Wheel of Time books originally because I was in a uni roleplaying group and in my first year someone was running a WoT skin of D&D 3.5. The GM was a fan of the book series and had the official WoT RPG books which helped things, and was understandably upset when Jordan died since the series wasn't finished. Don't think I ever got his thoughts on how Sanderson did finishing things but for me it did then mean the introduction to Sanderson and his own works so a long and winding road through reading all because of pen and paper RPG.
Yeah all of my English teachers were cunts as well.
I read "HATE" as "HAVE" and wondered if it was a TikTok excerpt or a Bluesky post.
I don't consider myself fluent in English and it wasen't that hard.
How retarded is the current crop of college students?
They're very brown.
I consider myself fluent, had to reread it once to fully get it all but it is absolutely doable. I just think people skip every couple words and then wonder what it all meant. You gotta read everything as it is written. I honestly don't like the style but it isn't incomprehensible, I have read way worse in actual books.
I already knew the majority of graduates were, since I regularly read their poorly punctuated, misnomer laden, stream of consciousness screeds online. And that's the garbage they're proud enough to post online.
But I would have dared to hope the actual English majors could. I mean they had one fucking job. Serves me right for hoping for more than absolute degeneracy and incompetence from academia I suppose.
I'd really like to see a racial breakdown of these stats.
Many of the school proficiency issues are actually a problem of putting un-teachable dindus into classes and letting them skate through. If you look at white children exclusively (let alone asians) the American education system is top notch.
The study talked about in that substack entry said they were almost all white.
Got news for ya - most college majors (in general) are functionally illiterate.
I think I was the most confused by Michaelmas because I had no idea what it was and it was presented with no context otherwise.
Honestly though, this is way too tedious to read. Similes are fun but when nearly every sentence is one it’s a little much. “Implacable November weather.”? What about it? We don’t need implied verbs.
We have more information available to us than at any other point in human history, and yet arguably some of the dumbest people to have ever lived walk among us.
Is Idiocracy doomed to become prophetic? Is the end result of high technology, automation, and fulfillment of all basic needs inevitably just stupidity? Are these effects natural (i.e., relative bell curve), or have unseen parties shaped society to become duller as it advances?
This intelligence paradox raises a lot interesting questions.
On one hand yes its alarming younger people can no longer appreciate the wit in figurative speech that gives flavour to writing but on the other hand, reading something long winded like this is honestly exhausting.
Can we divide these students by race, ethnicity, nationality, income, sex, gpa et cetera?
I took English 101 and 102 in community college, and to show all of yall how far academic standard have fallen, most of my 102 writing assignments I wrote in the 1 hour break I had between the accounting class I had before the English class started.
I could pound out a 2-3 page paper composed well enough to get Bs and As in the hour before class.
In high school and my first time trying college in the 1989-1990, I hated writing papers. In the 25 years in between, I argued on internet forums such that I learned how to write pretty well. :D
As someone who left academia decades ago - That style of writing is difficult to read.
I feel we live in idiocracy by comparison.
This was the only part I didn't understand. but it's honestly not difficult. What the hell.
Edit- apparently Michaelmas refers to the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels.
Risking exposing myself as an illiterate retard, but this sentence trips me up:
"retired from" implies to me the waters went away. Yet, considering everything else is about how this street is drowning in rainwater and mud, Dicken's clearly means the opposite.
Is this some old timey shift in meaning, or am I missing something about the construction of that sentence?
The punctuation of the first two sentences is also fucking with me tbh.
I smoked weed about 20min ago with my buddy and I understood EVERY bit of this excerpt.