I love to read.  Not everybody does.  I know some really, really smart people who read very little – at least, they read very few books, or even longform reads (what we used to call essays).  Oh, they read lots and lots and lots of e-mails, business proposals, spreadsheets…  They know how to learn.  They just don’t like to read books  At least, not in large, undisturbed chucks of time.

And when they do read books, they read them in short bursts – a chapter here, a chapter there.

Well, there is a terrific longform read up on The Chronicle of Higher Education site:  We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading by Alan Jacobs.  Here are a few paragraphs, to give some key thoughts from the article (yes, I am shortening an essay on “long reads” so that it will be short enough to get the highlights – now that’s irony!):

But whatever designations we want to use, it has to be admitted that much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of “the reading class” (emphasis added) beyond what may be its natural limits.

Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.

In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.”

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. (“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing,” Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. “Can I go back to my books now?”)

Those are my tribe, but they are few. It is more common to come across the person who has known the joys of reading but who can be distracted from them. But even those folks are a small percentage of the population.

American universities are largely populated by people who don’t fit either of these categories—often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive. For lovers of books and reading, and especially for those of us who become teachers, this fact can be painful and frustrating. We love reading, we think it’s wonderful, and we want other people to think so, too. “What we have loved,/Others will love,” wrote Wordsworth, “and we will teach them how.” A noble sentiment! Inspiring! But what if, after great labor, we discover—this often happens—that we can’t teach them how? Whose fault is that?

Perhaps it isn’t anyone’s fault.

I don’t know whether an adult who has never practiced deep attention—who has never seriously read for information or for understanding, or even for delight—can learn how. Some current college students will not have had those experiences, and it would be futile and painful to expect them to read as most of their teachers have read.

A couple of reflections:

#1 — what is critical is learning, and those who are part of the “reading class” can learn much.  But that is not the only way to learn.  And, by the way, one can read a lot and never learn.  (Back to the old “knowing-doing gap”).

The formula should be:

read + reflect + look for transferable principles/lessons + decide what to do + do!

In other words, if you stop at the “I’ve read this book” stage, you’ve learned little.

#2 – But, reading is still a great place to start that formula.

I would like to encourage you to read – books – in long stretches of time.

And, start by reading this essay.  It is a terrific read.

At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor’s degrees). 

This is confusing.  I don’t doubt that he has read that statistic.  I just doubt that statistic.  “70 percent attend a university?”  Really?  The high school graduation rate is only around 71% nationally.  That would mean that practically every single high school graduate attends college/university.

I don’t think so!