Descent of Reading
Descent of reading and writing. Colleges students are telling their professors they can’t read whole books. Americans are reading fewer and fewer books each year. If we want to figure out why reading is declining, we need to look at how we teach reading and how we spend our time.
Descent of Attention Span
Our attention spans are declining, and the problem is getting worse. Why is this happening, and what can we do about it
Descent of the Mind
I would never go back to academia (as a philosophy professor). Here’s why.
Background
See How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler (an American philosopher in the Aristotelian tradition at the University of Chicago, and editor of Encyclopædia Britannica). At the start of the discipline of analytical reading are the Three Acts of the Mind: terms, propositions and arguments (part II).
Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, critiqued the decline of intellectual rigour and cultural understanding in modern education. He argued that the pursuit of openness—valued as a supreme virtue in contemporary society—ironically led to a closed mind, as students and educators increasingly dismissed the importance of enduring questions about truth, morality, and the good life. He lamented the relativism and the rejection of absolute values that eroded the foundations of liberal education, leaving students adrift without the intellectual tools to critically engage with the great works of Western thought or grapple with life’s deeper meanings.
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don’t think about.
Bloom was an atheist which diminished the force of his arguments.1 But suppose one rejects objective morality such as the Biblical teaching that man is created in the image of G-d and the Ten Commandments. What replaces that?
Because moral absolutes are rejected, the curriculum has no central reference point to revolve around, and no foundation on which to rest.2 This, Bloom contended, impoverished both individual souls and the larger culture. That was in 1987. The closing of the mind in the west has only intensified in the decades since making Bloom’s warnings prescient and urgently relevant today.
My experience
I used to teach as well. Before smartphones emerged in 2007, it was possible to start a lecture with a simple reminder, and students could focus with minimal distractions. After that, the constant pull of notifications and digital entertainment began to overwhelm the minds of most students. The reminder was a graphic: CLOSE LID. OPEN MIND.
