How Important Is It For Higher Education Students to Read Great Books?

Families, communities, states, and nations are stronger when citizens know how to read. The recent report card for American students showed that 70% of fourth graders and eighth graders in the United States are reading under grade level.

America has a definite education problem that is shown in the national report card. The problem extends into the colleges and universities. Dr. John J. Goyette, the vice president and dean emeritus at Thomas Aquinas College, discussed this problem in his recent article published at The Daily Signal. 

We have a national reading problem in the U.S.

The widespread lament over the further decline in children’s reading scores underscores the failure of our country’s public schools, but the predicament is not limited to primary education. It extends all the way up into America’s elite colleges and universities as well. A firestorm recently erupted in academic circles when The Atlantic published “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” – an impassioned critique bout how the world has conspired to sap Ivy Leaguers and students at other top schools of their curiosity and attention spans.

These are bright students, mind you, mind you: kids who achieved the near-perfect SAT scores and top-of-the-class grade point averages required for admission at the legacy schools. They know how to read; they just lack the will or focus to power through anything longer than a poem or an excerpt.

While the article deals with books of all kinds, it focuses on one kind in particular – “great books” – works by authors such as Tolstoy, Austen, and Homer. Not surprisingly, the longer or more difficult the text, the less willing or able these supposedly elite students are to finish it.

Goyette explained in his article that high education students would read the “great books” if the Ivy League and other  elite schools required incoming students to be readers.

For most of the last century, American higher-education, especially the Ivy League and other elite schools, has taken an increasingly disdainful approach to the Western canon, dismissing the great works as outdated at best, if not singularly responsible for every “-ism” – past, present, and yet to be identified – to besmirch the human the human condition. If you spend decades denouncing the entire edifice of Western civilization as oppressive and bigoted, don’t be surprised when your students show little interest in studying its architects.

During this same period, we have also seen American higher-education shift away from the sort of learning that the great books promote – broadening the mind, sharpening the intellect – in favor of a hyperspecialized, career-focused approach. Core curricula have shrunk down to very little, and sometimes nothing at all, while course catalogs have exploded with a proliferation of ever-narrower majors, minors, and electives. The result is that the academy no longer holds out any books, let alone those of the Western canon, as being especially worthy of its students’ attention. And the students have taken that message to heart.

This messaging begins well before students even arrive on campus. If being able to read difficult and great books were a requirement for admission into the Ivy League, you can rest assured that very few top students would lack that ability. Armies of private tutors would spring up to make sure that every upper-middle-class teenager in America could breeze through “War and Peace.” But when it comes to admissions, most elite schools place much less value on reading than on test-taking, résumé padding, or hitting some diversity target – and their applicants know it.

They also know that, thanks to the grade inflation that’s rampant throughout most elite schools, you don’t need to complete long reading assignments to get good grades….

I do not know when schools stopped requiring their students to read the “great books.” However, I am a current college student, and I am often appalled at the watered-down assignments that I have in 300- and 400-level classes.

The Founders of the United States were great readers. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were no dummies. They were able to set up a new government because they read the great books of their time. They read history books and understood the types of government that did not work.

If parents want their children to be prepared to take their place in the world today, they should insist that their children are able to read and discuss the “great books.” Parents may need to read and discuss them with their children, but in doing so they will be instrumental in strengthening their families, communities, states, and nations.